LinkedIn launches Salary to chart what we earn

I believe LinkedIn may have already reached its maximum potential and is on a downward trend.<p>Of course I&#x27;m speaking only from personal experience, but as both candidate and hiring manager LinkedIn holds next to no value for me. I see it as a commons that has been largely ruined by recruiting agents who are incentivised by their employers to maximise candidate throughput at everyone else&#x27;s expense.<p>There is some residual value in LinkedIn groups, where peers can network for mutual benefit, but these pools of genuine interaction inevitably attract recruiting agents - if indeed they aren&#x27;t already present as groups admins, happily lurking while candidates posture and parade.<p>But I&#x27;m not about to close my account (if that is even possible). I&#x27;m very fond of the growing number of endorsements I&#x27;ve received for Sarcasm and Bubbles.

Hopefully LinkedIn won&#x27;t ask me for my salary in the future. Cause I definitely don&#x27;t trust them with my salary info. They&#x27;ll sell it to everyone - recruiters, other companies...

This is never going to be accurate. Titles alone are a poor indicator of ability in software.<p>E.g. I hold the title of &quot;Senior Software Engineer&quot; despite only have 2 years&#x2F;4 mo. of experience and very little of that experience is project management or non-code things.<p>When talking to recruiters in my area for a new position and giving a base salary of $90k, they routinely come back with &quot;You won&#x27;t get that offer with your level of experience&quot;.<p>In practice, I routinely cut the Senior from my title to avoid expectations I can&#x27;t meet.<p>Dice.com has a much better idea behind this, which is tying skills and years of skill to estimated salary. The backend for LinkedIn&#x27;s site honestly does not look more complex than a few straight-forward SQL queries.

Self reported salaries are just never going to be a good data source. I was hoping since this was LinkedIn and they have tons of resources they&#x27;d be doing something different, but they don&#x27;t seem to have made any progress on the many attempts people make each year to do salary analysis in this way. Anyone have any good ideas for actually gathering accurate salary data?

Awhile back I reserved the domain developersalarybenchmarks.com<p>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.<p>I haven&#x27;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?<p>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.

I played around a bit and didn&#x27;t find it too useful. The folks at step.com (previously posted on HN) produce something that is much more useful for me: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.step.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;06&#x2F;16&#x2F;more-salaries-twitter-linkedin&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.step.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;06&#x2F;16&#x2F;more-salaries-twitter-linke...</a>

So when will LinkedIn release a plugin that hacks into your HR system to fetch (and upload to them) the salaries of you and all your peers?

Not really convincing (yet). Mainly US &amp; UK cities, and the data is based on small user numbers so far. Would say you get so far a better overview on <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;teleport.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;teleport.org</a> or www.glassdoor.com...

Surprised no one has yet mentioned that this is probably an attempt to neuter Glassdoor. LinkedIn makes money by monopolizing recruiter time, taking money for job posts, etc. Glassdoor is a threat to that, and the single unique benefit Glassdoor offers is a salary estimate.<p>I don&#x27;t really see this as a fundamental shift in anything, just an attempt to tack on a competitor&#x27;s featureset.

While this is sort of cool for some people, I think the sad thing about a tool like this is that it&#x27;s only going to encourage the wrong behaviors for a lot of people. It puts more focus on people&#x27;s job titles than what they actually do. It encourages people to chase the corporate ladder, not find meaningful jobs... I&#x27;m sure it adds a lot of value to some, but some small part of me can&#x27;t help but think there are thousands of people searching for their job titles today and running up to their manager asking for the next title...

Are they going to access our email without our permission to get this information too?

It seems like the areas are really limited. Best I could find for my central Mass location was &quot;Greater Boston Area&quot; which really skews the numbers up (obviously cost of living in Boston is higher)

I built a (free) chrome extension that will estimate salaries of LinkedIn profiles you view (along with other data) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;recap.work" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;recap.work</a><p>It&#x27;s not perfect, but it is helpful when trying to get an idea of what someone is making. The upgraded version has salary conversion support for different currencies for other countries.

This seems like a game everybody is wanting to get in on these days. That alone is making me wonder: why? and why now?

I still don&#x27;t understand what people are using LinkedIn for.

Try out this Chrome extension that works as a LinkedIn recruiting assistant, it provides salary range estimates based on company, job title, and region. As well as the likelihood of changing job along with many other data points.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;candidate.ai" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;candidate.ai</a>

This is data a lot of people have wanted for a lot of good reasons. While this could flatten the labor market and even out a corps advantage from asymmetrical info dist-- I would&#x27;ve rather anyone but linkedin be successful here. Other than extremely tiny sample sets, no one has actually succeeded in this space&#x2F;featureset. I can barely see peoples profiles without getting signups shoved down my throat.<p>Fuck linkedin. It is a closed service which disproportionately provides value in a way that makes it nearly useless, while simultaneosly selling data to recruiters and companies. So this wont help anyone as much as linkedin and I am skeptical this data will be open.

Completely unproven, but all I see this doing, is driving down wages. No one will say &quot;I think we are not paying enough, looking at this average&quot;. It will be &quot;We are paying far too much, lets bring ourselves inline&quot;.

&gt; Lest you think you can get away with putting in a random number if you want to visit the Salary pages but don’t want to give up your information (or pay up for Premium membership), think again. Shapero said that there are machine learning tools in place to detect when you’ve put in an “off” figure.<p>This seems pretty flawed. You can still put in a random number in some band, skewing the data (probably) upwards.

&gt; &quot;Data Scientist&quot; -- Title not found. Please select a valid title.<p>I thought Patil invented that term for LinkedIn (along with Hammerbacher at Facebook).

And as always, doesn&#x27;t work in Europe.

Its amusing to me that linkedin recruiters are the ones consistently sending me requests for completely unrelated jobs. The rest of the crowd seem to be at least related but linkedin recruiters just don&#x27;t seem to care. Not sure why.

Can only view Melbourne, Florida Area. No Melbourne, Australia yet.

well, comparab.ly better step up fast.

Dear Microsoft, we have a small trust issue between you and my personal information..

Numbers are way off for the bay area for those with hot skills much like Zillow&#x27;s house prices are off for desirable houses in OK neighorhoods. Hard to see how they&#x27;d distinguish between that and malicious outliers.<p>Or to oversimplify it: never stop learning and you&#x27;ll never stop earning.