[patcheudor]

There are massive incentives to lie about how much you make. It's not hard to imagine this tool will be used by HR compensation experts to determine wage parity. With that in mind, the higher the average, the better positioned you will be to negotiate a higher salary, therefore everyone who reports how much they make is ultimately incentivized to state more than they make in hopes of driving up the wage index for their field.

[chrisdbaldwin]

And who is to stop a software company from doing the opposite? If they want lower wages, they could spam a region with fake workers with lower wages.

[patcheudor]

Thus to the original point: self reported data is questionable.

[mfoy_]

It would be neat if the IRS / CRA / national tax body would publish summaries based on people's actual tax returns. Although you don't specify things like industry, and other career specific quirks on your tax returns. (i.e. Ruby on Rails developer vs Dynamics CRM developer)

[twokul]

one of the engineers from Salary team. we talk about privacy and accuracy at length in this blog post https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2016/10/bringing-salar.... TL;DR; we do outlier detection.

[nsxwolf]

What's an outlier? I bet a lot of people feel they're shortchanged by about $10k, and will report that much higher to set a baseline. Outlier sounds more like "AngularJS developer making $250,000 in Cleveland"

[twokul]

it means more accurate baseline calculation as well as median salary which will rule out things like "AngularJS developer making $250,000 in Cleveland"

[jonathankoren]

This is the first salary listing I've seen that actually looks somewhat accurate (at least for some titles) I am confused why you guys aren't using the title standardization. You're surfacing and getting different results for "Senior Software Development Engineer" and "Senior Software Engineer" (whatever those mean). You should talk to someone in SNA about this. I think Qi is the guy now.

Also you're having sampling bias that's effecting levels. There's no way the median salary for a staff engineer is higher than a senior staff's. Again talk to Qi.

Stay cool.

[ones_and_zeros]

Why didn't you buy industry standard employer wage reported surveys like any employer of size does? They are readily available and the cost would be a drop in a bucket for LNKD.

[notahacker]

Because they'd rather make and sell their own, obviously