Show HN: Crowdsourced salary prediction

Showing some peoples' profiles anonymously is not very anonymous at all. If you're the owner of a one man company then not showing your name is meaningless. You need to anonymize the actual companies too.

Don't get me wrong the site looks nice and you have done good work. But I want out, and you should offer a way out on day one.

Also: After seeing it, it's not going to work very well for HMF-level people since most people don't know what an HMF looks like.

It might be better to randomly swap extracted features them around with other people so that you can tell how you're measuring each feature. You might find some features deserve drastically higher weights to correct for people's subjective "feelings" about how much someone should make.

I like that it tells me how other people guess (after I submit my own guess), but it only tells me the mean (and it says average). When it had collected guesses for my salary, I watched for a few guesses to pile in and it seems to be taking the mean of them. I don't think this is a good idea, for example someone guessing very low repeatedly will drag down everyone's score.

It might be useful to collect "what do I think this person makes" separately from "what do I think this person could be making".

Someone with a statistics background might have a better idea, but I'm thinking might help to allow users to, in their profile (and have it be optional), enter their salary.

That way, you'll not only be able to show people what other people think they should be making, but you might be able to (once a certain threshold is met) show what people with similar experiences in a certain region are making. And you'd be able to see how close the guesses are to the real thing and maybe figure out a margin of error.

It might also be nice to allow people to put in descriptions of what they did at their workplaces. Someone doing embedded development might get a significantly higher salary than someone doing .NET, even if they have a similar # of years of experience.

So much depends on their location -- do I assume they'll be staying where they are and try to estimate what salaries there should be like, or estimate based on my own location? -- and the sort of places they might like to work. If you're currently in a university or a small business you might be paid less than at a bank for the same work, but you might be choosing to work there for other reasons, so it's not that useful to point out that another employer would pay more.

I found my estimates were generally much lower than the averages from other users, perhaps because I currently work in a university myself.

Edit: and indeed, it turns out that the estimates I'm seeing for my own profile are about double my actual pay. Which isn't surprising, because that's about what I might expect in the private sector in the same location.

You need a LOT of people to make this work... so far it seems like a nice idea but not sure it can work relying only 100% on "crowd-smarts"

How do you account for the fact that many of your users may not be familiar with the salary ranges in a specific area?

I understand the goal is to get a large amount of estimates for each user, to compensate for that, but my guess is that locations where larger amounts of users are located would have far better estimates. I just saw a couple of Vancouver (where I live) people, in positions I have trained and hired people in, but the estimated salary seems to be quite off considering that Vancouver salaries are noticeably lower than San Fran in reality.

Edit: It seems most of the profiles for me are Vancouver/Toronto/Ottawa, so I'm guessing that's their way of getting locals to estimate salaries.

I was bouncing around a few ideas that involved using the Linkedin API a few months ago. I have a few questions about Salary Fairy that may help me with my research...

Does Salary Fairy download a user's profile to the database? If so, I thought Linkedin required the user to grant permission to store the data in addition to just obtaining access when logging in. Is this still the case?

What technology stack are you using?

What type of hosting?

It's unclear whether I should be answering what salary does this person's skills merit? Or what salary do I think they are earning today?

I also wish I could refresh and/or edit my profile on salaryfairy.

I don't really like recruiters, in my experience they tell you you're aiming too high, but don't know anything about the technologies.

So my feedback is to try and aim to get recruiters and employers to use this to find new candidates.

This would also give more value to people from outside of the U.S. (there is only one other person from Singapore registered, so as it is I won't get many predictions).

Maybe also keep the scroller for when you absolutely have to have a higher resolution...

Goes to show how underpaid people can be.