Anonymously Post/Compare Startup Salary & Equity Offers
ackwire.com
ackwire.com
Sorry to rain on the parade but this is not a good idea.
If you do decide to go through with it use a proxy and a throwaway email address.
downmodders: you're clueless.
There is (some) justification in not identifying salary data within a specific company, to avoid jealousy and unproductive behaviors. At this level, it's not much more detailed than "how much do you make" on a loan application.
I don't think an employer has much right to try to pay the same people differential salaries based on their negotiating skill (at least for engineering/non-sales positions). There is a good argument for being 100% open with salaries and equity internally, at least in terms of ranges for given positions with given levels of experience. Joel on Software, http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090401/how-hard-could-it-be-em... I'm seriously considering doing "opt in to having your salary/equity public within the company", and Strongly Encouraging any senior person to do this; I think seeing a CEO making ~$60k and early engineers making $80k or so would help avoid runaway $140k for junior developers salary inflation, and I'd value my equity a lot more highly at a company where I saw the founders were still mainly motivated by equity upside vs. cash compensation.
Even at the granularity of per-employer salary stats (which Glassdoor type sites do), there is a net benefit to everyone in knowing that e.g. Netflix pays a 30-50% cash salary premium over Facebook, and that Twitter is particularly stingy with equity (relative to valuation) compared to other tech companies. If I were trying to hire people at Twitter, I'd be annoyed to be wasting my time with candidates who wanted >0.1% equity for anything but super-senior engineering positions, and I'd be sad if I were hiring at Netflix and people didn't know about the great cash component in deciding to apply.
If your first interaction with a company is them trying to mislead and/or fuck you through inaccurate perceptions and lack of information, this does not bode well.
You're not nearly as anonymous as you think you are and this is very juicy data.
On the whole transparency is a good thing but this is probably not the best way to go about achieving it.
Post from home, use a throwaway email address or at least a gmail-type address vs. @palantir.net work address, is probably enough. The most personally detrimental leak would probably be "I work for Yahoo and am currently interviewing with Google and Facebook" vs. that Google and Facebook extended specific offers, and in that case, you're already trusting the HR departments, recruiters, etc.
Any salary data that is not supplied anonymously will be an incomplete data set for privacy reasons, and will have title and salary inflation.
Any salary data that is supplied anonymously wil be full of both title and salary inflation, and will still be an incomplete data set.
The end result either way is that the datasets can be seriously flawed.
what would be the consequences of disclosing your salary data? I've always been pretty open about what I've made personally, and while being open with the wrong people or the wrong situation can make you look pretty crass, what are the real consequences? Are people often fired for disclosing what they make? are they sued?
I mean, I have a hard time imagining a large company taking the time to sue some $100K/year lackey over bragging about his salary, or even firing the guy.
I guess I can imagine a small company firing over something like that, but again, anything more? seems unlikely.
I mean, the quotes I get for co-location or bandwidth all claim they are 'proprietary data' and not to be disclosed, but people still pass numbers around, and nothing comes of it besides an annoyed salesperson.
If life has taught me nothing else it's that people lie about their incomes even anonymously. Plus you have a selection bias to deal with anyway.
Oh and email validation is pretty meaningless.
This data could be blinded at the level of industry or role (and thus not commercially sensitive to any employer), and then published to prospective students; knowing that Bentley College majors in Communications are offered $20-40k while Stanford CS graduates are offered $70-140k would be exceptionally useful to everyone, much more so than the 5-year graduation rates which I think universities taking certain federal financial aid programs are required to disclose.
What's to stop you from making use of that data?
I'm not attacking your character or suggesting you will make use of the data, but it's a pretty tempting pool of data to sneak a look into. "Oh, so-and-so at Twitter earns that much, interesting. Holy crap, I met this guy last week, I had no idea he got screwed so badly by his current startup. Huh, looks like startup X has a fair bit of money."
A lot of this is actionable data. If the startup has IPOed, you might even fall under insider trading regulations and need to make sure you don't trade on it. On a purely ethical level, you might want to consider what sort of level of access you should have to the data.
Finally, there is, of course, the possible issue that someone might offer you a tidy sum of money to buy that data off you, once there's enough of it.
I would not advise anyone to put their data in there as this stands.
The vision of Ackwire is to make startup compensation data transparent to prospective employees and employers.
Email addresses are encrypted and stored in a different database. It's true that they aren't hard to manually access, but this presents a reasonable barrier.
The same argument applies to any web service that stores personal information. I'm sure there are administrators at Facebook, Gmail, etc. who could read all your private messages, view your photos, etc. But we assume they don't, and most of us use these services anyway.
"A lot of this is actionable data. If the startup has IPOed, you might even fall under insider trading regulations and need to make sure you don't trade on it."
I'm not a securities lawyer, but this doesn't seem to pass the material non-public test. Significant shareholders in a public company already have to disclose their holdings, publicly.
"Finally, there is, of course, the possible issue that someone might offer you a tidy sum of money to buy that data off you, once there's enough of it."
I think this is jumping the gun a bit, but any buyer would have to keep the current user agreement intact (posts are confidential and anonymous) or explicitly ask users to opt into the new terms.
I wouldn't trust a random person with this data, but I'd trust a member of a somewhat-meritocratic community like hackernews or quora, university alumni association, etc. It's fairly clear why this data is being collected, what is being done with it, and my potential downside risk is fairly capped. At some point, being overly paranoid is too much of a cost.
Yes, a technical solution to this class of problem would be preferable to social trust. (and is one of the things I'm working on, actually...)
The questions you need to ask yourself is:
1) is there any potential downside whatsoever to submitting my data here? If this data is on the front page of the new york times tomorrow, and everyone I know knows it, do I stand to lose anything because of it?
2) is there any real upside to submitting my data here? (seeing other people's data has obvious upsides)
Unless 2 is clearly bigger than 1, submitting your salary info here is an irrational decision.
This could
been using it for years..
Second that.
If email addresses are stored 'encrypted' how can they be kept 'confidential', you store them for a reason or you don't need to store them at all, hashed or not.
What gain do you have from storing the hashed address?
The best credential would be something like "is a member of FB or LinkedIn with a sufficiently filled in profile" but nothing personally identifying.
For the traditional version of this (alumni association stats), you have a trusted third party (the association), or restricting access to people on 18.0.0.0/8 or who have kerberos credentials, although logging anything personally identifying.
Anyway, it's the easiest thing in the world to create a throwaway email account, so the data still can't be trusted.
I'll wait for more data, but this is a great help for me !
At least that's what I found from the highest paying jobs I got.
When your compensation is above a certain threshold other factors begin to weigh more. The only difference between people is where that threshold starts. This should be obvious, and thus renders these posts completely moot.
I'm only ranting here because any honest discussion about salary always gets short-circuited by the "it's not about the money" folks. It's frustrating, and at this point it adds nothing to the discussion.
$122k + 3.5% for a mid level product manager who joined Q1, 2011 at (presumably) Groupon?
$320k + 1.5% for a C-level bizdev who joined Q1, 2011 at Groupon?
5% of equity to late entry employees at a company where, presumably, first employees have been diluted into sub .5% ranges seems not just ridiculous, but impossible. I mean, they just closed a series G for crying out loud -- they don't have 5% to throw at new employees.
Unless of course there are other group buying startups in Chicago with a valuation greater than $10bn that I haven't heard of.
I usually use 1.3x for "direct loaded cost" and maybe 1.5x for facilities and loaded cost. In a "below market compensation" environment, like a startup, the loaded costs are usually higher (if you pay yourself $30k at a startup, you still probably want the same quality health insurance as if you pay yourself $60 or $100k, unless you're young and single and get an HSA/catastrophic coverage).
What are these other salary charges?
Sometimes the engineering lead is sort of a mentor to junior members of the team, too, and it can be training for becoming a manager. It would be unusual for an engineering lead to be responsible for HR-type management of Senior Engineers, at least at every place I've worked.
I really prefer hiring people as individual contributors and then promoting them, with "employee #5" or something being enough "status" to get a Director or VP at a larger company (who is still a great individual contributor himself) to accept the position.
Plus, a lot of more tech-heavy companies have somewhat parallel technical vs. management tracks, with Senior going to maybe Lead (who doesn't necessarily have reports, and may just be a tech leader, supported by a product manager), going up to maybe a Fellow or CTO or Chief Scientist; this is parallel to pure-administrative managers (PM) or hybrid Director of Engineering/Engineering Group types who then become VP Engineering.
Honestly I find few things more pathetic than a startup with 5-10 people and a CTO, VP Engineering, CIO, CEO, COO, ...; probably the best at a 1-10 person company is to skip the title entirely (except for CEO) and just specify job role, like "Engineering" "Product" "Server Operations"; let the individual contributor vs. manager roles follow in time.
Figuring out some way to title-ify "employee #5, first full-time back end engineer" would be cool; "Founding Engineer" as one-step down from Founder might work. There should be some way to compensate employees 1-n (n=5-15) at a startup with title in addition to equity in a way which still allows people with management experience or specific domain expertise to maybe come in above in the hierarchy later.
I'd say Groupon pays pretty darn well, huh?