It's so sad that some trolling assholes will try to poison cool projects like this by entering extremely high or low numbers. $33million? $123? $0 ... sheesh.
Salary is what your employer pays you, not what you don't spend out of that.
But people, this was not meant entirely seriously.
You're not acting in your own best interest.
If you accept that the site's trying to give you ammunition in the form of more accurate information. Then you hurt yourself (and everyone else) by putting in an absurdly high or low number you skew the results away from the actual market value.
If it skews high, you're going to miss out on opportunities by holding out for an unrealistically high compensation.
If it skews low, you accept less money.
I'm not really expecting that anyone is seriously going to try to use the average salary of HN users for negotiation purposes. But even assuming they were, it appears there are at least a few others who are in my boat. That's relevant information, yes?
This is somewhat akin to placing "yes, please" under the "sex" column of a questionaire.
Again, this is an informal salary pool for HN users. I'm an HN user, and my yearly income, taking into consideration my no stock options, no bonuses, no salary, and no other non-salary compensation, is $0.
In general, do you really think the existence of unemployed hackers who earn $0 yearly is completely irrelevant to anyone who would have an interest in how much hackers are making?
The idea isn't to see how much other hackers are making in general. The idea is to see how much companies are paying them, so that people who are being paid much less or more than they're worth can figure that out.
Granted, it's a pretty statistically silly way to go about that given the breadth of HN readership. The posts further down the thread ("PHP Programmers in Baltimore") make more sense.
Not your fault, though. UI guys like to beat up users when they screw up. Don't listen to 'em. You are giving them valuable, valuable information.
No, he misunderstood the goal of the exercise. I'd argue it's not entirely his fault, either. "What's your salary" -- asked as a general question, without further context, justifiably might not be taken that literally. (And there is no further context unless you've read the previous thread. The post here, and salaryshare.me, don't say anything that indicates this isn't a simple income poll.)
This is not a stupid or malicious user. This is a UI failure.