I welcome the opportunity to talk with you directly about the work that we are doing, and forthcoming features which will make it even easier for people to get this important data.

How does anecdotal salary information whose source and quality are unconfirmed constitute valid “salary data”?

It doesn’t matter how you review it, process it, vet it, or handle it if its validity is entirely questionable from the start. You can’t run statistical analyses on questionable data and claim useful conclusions.

If you were gathering salary “at the company level”, that would be an entirely different story. But you’re not.

I agree with Mike B. that your intentions are probably good, but I also agree with him that “cleaning up” such data is suspect at best.

A focus on salary data by an employer or a candidate results in negotiations that drive a job offer toward the mean salary, not the right salary.

What is different about glassdoor.com is that you can see salary data at the *company* level, unlike ComputerWorld – or any other salary source that we could find out there – which aggregates to regional levels at best.

I think you summed it up best yourself – you don’t believe that ANY salary data is useful. I happen to disagree. I fundamentally believe that people have very poor information right now, and giving them access to this salary data helps them in negotiating.

I’ve personally spent a lot of time talking with company CEOs, HR reps, and both in-house and external recruiters as part of Glassdoor’s development process and would love to set aside some time to connect with you to share a bit more about our process here and future plans. I think your feedback would be extremely valuable. You have my email address, we should talk.

I agree that we should presume a company wants to provide a product that has intrinsic value. But I think glassdoor is trying too hard to put a spin on a simple idea. Credible trade publications (E.g., Computerworld) regularly conduct salary surveys. This makes glassdoor superfluous – except that it also provides a forum for dissatisified people to trash their employers. And that’s what suggests our presumption is not justified in this case.

People can get better data from better sources than glassdoor. Please note that I don’t believe ANY salary data is truly useful; it’s more distracting.

I got to read this and wanted to share with you.

Even CEOs think CEOs are overpaid?

BOSTON (Reuters) – With many U.S. chief executives taking home millions of dollars in pay, it is no shock that average workers regards them as overpaid. But that attitude extends to the corner office as well.

Sixty-four percent of top executives view CEO compensation as excessive, according to survey released on Tuesday.

The poll of 1,572 readers of BNET.com, a business Web site, found that, overall, 77 percent of employees regarded CEOs as overpaid. The survey, of readers of the Web site, was conducted June 11 through 18. About 90 percent of respondents were from the United States.

Fifty percent of CEOs surveyed said their leadership style was effective, but only 38 percent of employees agreed. BNET.com is a unit of U.S. media technology company CNET Networks Inc.

(Reporting by Scott Malone, editing by Gerald E. McCormick)

Regards
Amit

I don’t doubt that glassdoor has good intentions, because most companies prefer to sell a product of intrinsic value if given the choice. But you can’t clean up self-reported, sensitive, confidential data and make them meaningful…and the very act of cleaning them up makes the enterprise even more of a shot in the dark.

Job hunters are better off guessing the applicable salary ranges themselves.

Here is a digest of tech blogs about Glassdoor…
http://blogs.computerworld.com/salaries_through_the_looking_glassdoor_com

I’d really like to read your take on the article linked below. Perhaps in a future post?

Why women quit technology careers
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=319212