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Comment by z92 | Hacker News Reader

Bad options. The choices should increase by a fixed percent over previous one, instead of a constant fixed amount.

Who cares if someone gets 280k instead of 290k?

I see this is getting downvoted, but the poll choices are in fact surprising. 2/3rds of the options are devoted to salaries between $150k - $300k.

> but the poll choices are in fact surprising. 2/3rds of the options are devoted to salaries between $150k - $300k.

You've discovered my secret plot! I even included words to that effect in the description. The other polls literally top out at 150k. I didn't want that.

You may improve the results if you started at $30k and went in increments of $10K. I doubt anyone is making $30k, but it is possible that people at the lowest level listed may not even click the arrow. If they feel like there are people coming in below where they are, they may be more likely to.

If nothing else, it makes the distribution seem to make more sense.

Oh crap, you're right. I like your idea much more than the lame increments I picked. Next time I'll use a logarithm or something.

No, I like these options. You can extract the logarithm from these, but you can't go the other way around.

To someone making 125k, it's more useful to know the distribution of the 25k above than to see them all in a single bucket.

Don't use a logarithm. Most salaries are going to be the same order of magnitude.

Log base 10 would be a good compromise with the ridiculously vague "N figure salary" descriptions.

Makes for much more accurate boasting: "they were offering me a 6.3 figure salary, but in the industry I'm in, it's no big deal"

constant delta would be useful when building a histogram, for instance.

I agree with the log scale. If someone was building a histogram, they may not want to use data from an online poll.

You can build a log historgramme, too.

I do. Maybe one slot for something outrageous like 500k+ would be interesting, but I like that it's so granular personally.

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