Show HN: Quick and anonymous salary "surveys" at lunch | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Quick and anonymous salary "surveys" at lunch

salarysecret.com

36 pointsnarcissus44 comments

Hi all,

I made this site for the situation where you and your colleagues are all at lunch and the discussion of salary comes up. While a lot of people don't feel comfortable discussing specific numbers, they're all still curious :) So this site lets someone start a 'secret' with just a few clicks (no registration etc.). That 'secret' has a code that other people can enter on the site, too, and then by telling the site your salary it will show everyone on that secret the minimum, maximum and average salaries.

As per the 'privacy' page, I'm not storing any personal information... it is anonymous.

It was also a good chance for me to learn Silex (the PHP "micro-framework") and Twitter Bootstrap (though not so well), practice 'progressive enhancements' with Javascript and play with PaaS via Openshift.

Anyway, thanks for any feedback, flames or criticisms...

Neat! By the way, "its" is the possessive form of "it". "It's" is a contraction for "it is" or "it has". You have such a grammar error in the front page text.

Good luck!

Thanks. I can feel my English teacher's stares from here. It'll be fixed in the next push :) Now I just have to wait to see what the grammatical error in this post is...

Are you familiar with the Millionaires' problem? [1]

There's an easy solution when you're looking for an average salary (and everyone doesn't mind doing a little bit of calculation). The first person thinks of a random number, adds his salary to it and tells it to the person on his/her right (so noone else hears!). The next one adds his salary and tells it to the next person and so on. When it re-reaches the first person, he then subtracts the original random number. The result is the sum of their salaries, which can then be divided to yield an average. All done in a way that no one person learns what the salary of any other person was.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaos_Millionaires_Problem (link sadly broken by HN url parsing?)

I have actually heard of this process before. In fact, it was this 'problem' that originally made me think of the site, but then I realised that if I'm doing in online, I may as well automate it a bit and came to this 'solution'.

That is to say, I'm all for people doing it that way if they like. If, however, they'd rather use an 'app' or whatever, then they're more than welcome to use this.

tl;dr salt the sum

Working link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yao%27s_Millionaires%27_Problem

Say I wanted to know your salary. I could start a secret and enter the minimum minus one before I send you the link.

Is there a way to prevent this sort of scenario while letting the service remain anonymous?

Maybe show the data after some minimum number of persons participate?

That's a good point and not something I had thought about to be honest. I guess the whole "bad actor" thing didn't play into how I expected the site to be used. Which is a terrible response, I know!

Out of curiosity, are there ways I wonder to actually try and stop this? I mean there are obviously ways to deter it, but is there a way to stop it outright I wonder? I'd have to guess no, but then again, I am definitely not the right person to think about this.

You can display the # of items already entered and the timestamps they were entered at (but not the values). It's not perfect, but it would help eliminate the "pre-loading" attack. However, that still leaves the "post-loading" attack, where you send someone a blank link, and then afterwards, fill in the other entries with known values.

That's cool. I can definitely do that and then maybe put a message about options for if you don't completely trust the person that sent you the link... Thanks!

This (and the other suggestion by zerr) still leave the potential for someone to create multiple false 'minimum' datapoints, then target one of their coworkers to find out their salary.

Yeah, it's not at all foolproof or even great. I don't think there's really a good solution that still provides true anonymity, since the only way to prevent box-stuffing is to actually restrict people to one entry per real person (and that generally requires a more involved real-world authentication process).

You could mention that kind of misuse on the page where users enter their code, and suggest they don't enter their salary information unless they are aware that the code was displayed somewhere publicly (yet anonymously) in the company (like a company bulletin board or sent out to a list of company emails from a dummy address, where you can vet that the other addresses it was sent to were your coworkers). That way, no one has any way of knowing which datapoints match to which of their coworkers.

If the size of the group is known, just generate one-time use codes equal to the number of people in the group and have the survey creator distribute them. If any code is attempted twice (such as if the survey creator uses your code before you can), trash the whole survey. Then, only display the results when all codes are used.

This doesn't prevent several people from colluding, but it does seem to prevent anyone from acting alone to mess with the results of the survey.

Assuming you don't get too many 'bad actors' showing the mean and the median would help.

I started a "secret" here (for up to 25 of us) to give this thing a test drive:

http://www.salarysecret.com/continue/36-teputo13

and another since this is full http://www.salarysecret.com/continue/67-jelowo83

http://www.salarysecret.com/continue/135-jenala48

http://www.salarysecret.com/continue/214-petatu96

http://www.salarysecret.com/continue/358-ratoru54

Great idea. Why not make the code easier? Start with three letter dictionary words, then four, so on till about eight. Then restart with non-dictionary.

Now regarding knowing friend's salaries; From personal experience I can now say that it is not a good thing. I come from a culture where salary is not well kept secret and you usually know your friend's. This leads to a constant state of discontent unless a] You are on the top b] you are the type of person that can factor in intangibles well (hint: most people are not).

You might be working on a really good project, but the next day you arrive at work you will sit there sipping coffee and thinking how come my buddy is earning double working on a iFart app?

That's probably a good thing, no? You probably feel discontent because your mind is telling you that you should do something about the situation. Either correct the injustice if it is an injustice or invest in yourself more to put yourself in a situation where you can be earning more. If you are a company where the workforce is in high demand and you are not paying your employees enough to stop them from thinking about these situations then you are going to start slowly but surely swapping out top talent for mediocre talent.

My take is that everyone should be always aware of their market value (the reasons for which you have stated). Friend's salary (especially in different domains), I'm not so sure.

One of the main issues I see with this is that people lie.

They lie so much, that almost everyone in HR completely discounts employee based salary data. Instead, if they need to understand what a market rate is for a salary, they ask employers what they are paying, since to them it is just another expense.

Talk to anyone worth anything in HR and they will echo exactly what I said. You may as well guess what your buddy is being paid, because whatever they tell you is never going to be accurate enough to provide you with an informed opinion.

Yeah, so I guess the site doesn't make its "raison d'etre" very clear. If I'm at lunch with my mates, and we are discussing salaries, and there's a way for us to anonymously give each other an idea of how much we're all making, well, I trust them enough not to lie. That's also partly why I'm shooting for "really simple to set up and add to".

Any other use of the site is going to be gamed. I agree.

give each other an idea of how much we're all making, well, I trust them enough not to lie

You shouldn't, because they will. Pride is a horrible thing.

"sometimes when we go out for team drinks my boss picks the tab... so I added $35K to the base salary to account for that"

This is a neat idea. I like that you didn't choose to implement another todo list in order to experiment with a new framework.

I think the wording of "continue a secret" is a little confusing. I appreciate the brevity but maybe "participate in a secret" would be more accurate. "Share a secret" sounds nice -- because that's what we do with secrets :-) But, it might get confused with the sharing of that particular secret code instead.

On a UI note, having to click on the help icon to dismiss the pop-up was a little annoying.

Thanks for the feedback. I agree that the wording of that middle part is a bit dodgy... I think it's time I pulled out me thesaurus :)

Thanks for the reminder about the popup. I did that part right at the start and kept telling myself I needed to go back to it. I can work on that tonight. Thanks!

Cool idea. I'm wondering if there's a way to implement this system without having to rely on trusting the server with your data. Homomorphic encryption seems like it could be useful in this context, since the data is small.

Homomorphic encryption is unfortunately still very far from being fast enough to be used in this context.

If all you care about is the mean, I think it was Applied Cryptography that suggested:

1. First person picks a random number and adds it to their salary. Writes it down ands hands it to the next person. 2. Next person adds their salary to that number and writes it down on a new note, hands to the next person. 3. When the first person gets the note, subtract the original number and divide by number of people.

It was definitely mentioned there, and that was what I was expecting.

That method requires that there's no collaboration to remain secure.

Hey! This looks eerily familiar to http://salaryshare.me. :)

Definitely the same concept. I had no doubt that this idea wasn't already done, but it was just one of those random itches I wanted to scratch :)

If you have any interest in working with Python (Django, or any other reasonably modern framework), I would be totally okay with open sourcing my code and developing this further. You should take a look at my original announcement [1] thread: there are some good ideas in there.

In the end, I didn't work more on it because I was really busy at the time with my real startup, and I saw no real interesting way to compete with Glassdoor. Plus, I got sort of pissed that all the publicity (articles on TC, MSN Money and ABC news) we got was co-opted by the Glassdoor PR people.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2441888

That sucks that your publicity was co-opted. On the other hand, you got publicity I guess :) Reading more of that thread I definitely think you had a deeper drive (if that's even a good phrase to use) for salaryshare.me. I definitely have no desire to do anything with it, really, other than learning those random bits of technology. And maybe giving my mates an easier way to discuss their income.

On the flip side, congratulations on actually going up against those guys. When I mentioned this site to my wife she asked "so, kinda like salary.com?" I laughed and just said "God, I hope not". I don't have the time nor inclination right now for something so heavy :)

Hey man—just wanted to let you know about a typo on salaryshare.me. It says "No punctuaction." when entering a salary.

Thank you. Should be fixed now.

good idea to help people gauge how well (or not) they're doing salary wise.

is there a control to prevent too few minimum participants, which would make it more obvious whose numbers are whose?

the interface could be more graphical, less text heavy.

Thanks artax77. At the moment it does require at least 3 people to participate and/or to reveal the end values. I think mathematically that's the minimum, though it probably should be pushed up to 4 or 5, you're right.

I agree that the UI could be more graphical... unfortunately I totally suck at the UI side of things. That, I think, I'm going to just have to let slide for now :(

Thanks!

i do too, just learning little by little. cool project though, interesting points raised by other commenters.

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