I have always felt certain anxiety when thinking about my salary and only guessing what my colleagues might be earning. This issue is especially problematic in cultures and countries in which talking about wage numbers is an unspoken taboo among the employees.
Quite often, the questions like “Should I ask for a raise?, or am I already earning maximum that my employer can handle?” “Am I earning too much for the work that I do?, or am I underpaid?” “Who should I look up to and learn what they are doing to get a higher salary?” have plagued my mind.
# Existing solutions:
Of course, there are services where you can look at salary levels or statistical distributions of wages. The problem with them is that they don’t give you specific (albeit anonymized) numbers of what individuals earn, and they don’t satisfy nagging feelings of fear and anxiety that I have mentioned above. Also, it’s hard to tell whether the numbers are up-to-date or not.
# The solution:
I designed this product to be privacy-first so that many more users feel comfortable sharing their wage information and keeping it up-to-date. It allows users to see all salary entries in their current company, search for other companies in preparation for negotiations. Here is the full list of features:
- I verify the data with LinkedIn profiles
- I nudge users to update their info twice a year
- I keep information quality high
- You keep your data anonymous
- You can see your and other companies data
- You can subscribe for updates for particular job titles/companies
# Plans for the next version:
I plan to allow users to share their non-anonymized information in an encrypted peer-to-peer fashion with each other if they want to. This answers the question like, “Oh, somebody earns twice as much as me… And has the same job title… Who is that?”
Tell me what you think about it! Is there something missing from your perspective?