[mswen]

Awhile back I reserved the domain developersalarybenchmarks.com

HR departments can purchase salary benchmarks from companies like Mercer. Everyone on the developers side would like better benchmarks that are free or nearly free to even the odds when negotiating job offers or raises from current employers.

I haven't created a site yet in part because of the self-reporting problems. Will developers trust an unknown start-up with their real salary data plus the education, skills, experience and location data needed to make this targeted and really valuable? Can we have a process that is sufficiently rigorous and accurate that HR departments would acknowledge it in negotiations? How can we prevent developers from inflating their current salaries and other compensation? How can we prevent companies from coming on the site and using bogus accounts to drive down salaries?

As someone else mentioned the guys at step.com - seem to have an interesting idea of having developers post the background and skills and then have people anonymously value that background. I suspect that this approach will also face issues of acceptance in negotiations.

[ones_and_zeros]

I've thought about this as well. Ultimately you need access to some pretty private data. One thought I've had is to use the mint/intuit APIs to get a list of a persons transactions in their bank account and find the ones that occur every 2 weeks, etc.

Or possibly have users upload paystubs, though you'd have to have someway to verify. I'm sure that's possible.

[pixeloution]

Even if users were willing, this would be woefully inaccurate information. Mint shows take-home pay. But you have to keep in mind ...

  * People contribute between 0 to X% to a 401k. 
    This couldn't be deduced from take-home.
  * Many companies have a Employee Stock Purchase Program, 
    which is deducted from payroll.
  * Some (Many?) programmers get a large chunk of 
    compensation in options or RSUs.

I think self-reported is likely the only way to get numbers without some extremely invasive requests.

[notyourwork]

Its an interesting approach but I see trouble convincing a user to give their mint credentials to a site for salary information. Imagine if Glassdoor or LinkedIn asked for this.

[ones_and_zeros]

You wouldn't need to give your mint credentials. They have an API so that you can create an app that gets read only access based on an OAuth token for a particular user. Similar to fb oauth, google, etc.

[duaneb]

This would cause weird effects, like my canceling my 401k contribution if I want to change jobs to boost my apparent income.

[coredog64]

Why not just go to ADP?

[morgante]

In practice, I think the problem is that everyone is fundamentally a market of 1. I have never seen a salary site (including Glassdoor, LinkedIn, or step) come even remotely close to what I actually make.

Years of experience, education, and title are never enough to gauge performance or pay.

[mswen]

Clearly location and fairly granular skill profiles would help. Other factors that might help include the type and size of the company.

Can you think of other factors that would help?