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Comment by im3w1l | Hacker News Reader

Everyone writes their salary on a piece of paper and puts it into a hat. Then you can get a the full distribution.

Or use modified randomized response technique [1]

Roll a die and multiply (salary - 100k) by the spots on the die. Share that value publicly. Sum all such values and average them then divide by 21/6 and add 100k. Choose the 100k value to be closest to but not greater then your guess at the lowest salary.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randomized_response

If the salaries are still too easily identifiable here's how it can be anonymized.

Allow breaking down the salary into a sum of numbers, and putting them as separate slips into the hat.

How would you get the distribution from the sum of numbers individually?

You don't count the slips of paper in the hat. Instead you count the number of people who put in slips of paper.

That will give an average, but it won't give the distribution (min/max/etc)

I believe the parent meant breaking it down as "if you earn $100k, add 10 slips that each have $10k on them". The number of slips will be more than the number of people in the room, but that's fine. It's less practical than the "seed + pass round" method that someone else recommended imo (due to handwriting notability), but still works in a more technical sense.

You're right, you can't, I was looking at the problem posed by grandparent comment of getting only the average.

If you know who is senior, who is junior etc you can identify their values

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