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Re:The underground economy of Glassdoor reviews by michaelteter on Friday July 07, 2023 @01:54PM (#36635613)
I believe that Glassdoor exists almost purely because salary information is not public. While company reputation and reviews are of interest, the salary information is likely much more a driver of traffic.

And based on my attempted use of the site, Glassdoor is unreliable and (intentionally) misleading.

Even at the most basic level, their UI flatly lies about what data they possess. If you search a company, in the salary column it will show a number which is designed to suggest a number of salary data elements available. Honestly I cannot say what that number actually means as it seems to have no value at all. Specifically, it will say 5 or 8 or some other small but non-zero number... and yet there are zero visible salary records for the company (even if you are a contributor of information and thus deemed to be allowed to view other information on the site).

I expect Glassdoor is like the many dating sites on the internet - full of fluff and false/artificial information so the site appears to be valuable and worth visits.

If we ever reach a point where company position salaries are public on a broad scale, Glassdoor will fade into obscurity.

Re:The underground economy of Glassdoor reviews by sahila on Friday July 07, 2023 @02:12PM (#36635952)
https://www.levels.fyi/ is a grest site for actual salary information on tech related jobs. The data reported very much matched my last round of interviews and the data granularity is good, being able to see levels, location, pay breakdowns, and even dates when the salary was posted.
Re:The underground economy of Glassdoor reviews by Der_Einzige on Friday July 07, 2023 @02:45PM (#36636551)
Why are people downvoting this? Glassdoor numbers are BS and levels.fyi is extremely accurate.
Re:The underground economy of Glassdoor reviews by ryandrake on Friday July 07, 2023 @05:18PM (#36638434)
Aren't all these sites limited by (and biased by) the selection of offer data they collect? Unless they are working directly with payroll companies to obtain a uniformly random sampling of offers, they're not going to be accurate. What incentivizes employees who get below-average offers and companies who give below-average offers to share that data with these salary sites?

Example: Everyone who even knows someone who makes $500K at Facebook seems to love posting about it here, but nobody who makes $100K there seems to feel the need to boast about it.

Re:The underground economy of Glassdoor reviews by yamazakiwi on Friday July 07, 2023 @06:42PM (#36639240)
That's a reasonable distinction but just look at the data itself.

There are tons of low level employees posting their salaries. If you work in those roles, that data could be more valuable to a candidate than Glassdoor's amorphous projections.

I think the user behavior that facilitates this is the same behavior you see represented on Blind.

Re:The underground economy of Glassdoor reviews by CSMastermind on Friday July 07, 2023 @07:15PM (#36639504)
Levels allows HR departments to post their actual salary bands, which they're normally more than happy to do. So you're not just relying on user reported data. They're also incentivized to do it because they want compensation benchmarking information (big companies want to know how much their competitors are paying so they can calibrate their own bands to market rate).

https://www.levels.fyi/offerings/

They also have users upload W2s, offer letters, and supporting documents in addition to proof of identity.

https://www.levels.fyi/verified/

They have their own job advertisement business and they partner with third party recruiting companies to get anonymous data about offers candidates receive.

They also just take having accurate compensation information seriously so they do things like outlier and forgery detection as well as seeming to have a much better algorithm for processing the information they receive.

Re:The underground economy of Glassdoor reviews by willis936 on Friday July 07, 2023 @04:35PM (#36637975)
This seems like a very nice tool if you are a capital case SWE. There is no similar analog for more general engineering positions.
Re:The underground economy of Glassdoor reviews by NoZebra120vClip on Friday July 07, 2023 @05:14PM (#36638384)
I have found that the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics is a comprehensive and unparalleled treasure trove of current, accurate salary information, and much much more. (US jobs only, natch.)

https://www.bls.gov/

Re:The underground economy of Glassdoor reviews by c_elegant on Saturday July 08, 2023 @11:40AM (#36645426)
BLS is a tremendous resource but how are you using information at the NAICS-level to inform jobseeking or job hiring? It seems fascinating from an aggregate point of view but less useful for pricing employment positions.
Re:The underground economy of Glassdoor reviews by JohnFen on Friday July 07, 2023 @04:10PM (#36637645)
> I believe that Glassdoor exists almost purely because salary information is not public.

It's possible, but I know that salary information isn't at all what I'm interested in learning from such sites.

Re:The underground economy of Glassdoor reviews by willis936 on Friday July 07, 2023 @04:37PM (#36637988)
I saw a glassdoor salary range for a job at my company. I know that the internal range is 50-100% higher than what glassdoor suggests. And then I wonder why no one's applying. Companies should just publicly advertise compensation.
Re:The underground economy of Glassdoor reviews by milkytron on Friday July 07, 2023 @05:12PM (#36638363)
Some states are requiring salary ranges for job postings, hopefully this becomes more prevalent.
Re:The underground economy of Glassdoor reviews by sizzle on Saturday July 08, 2023 @03:49AM (#36642287)
This really changed the game in offer negotiations for me to see what the employer thinks I’m worth. Knowledge is power.
Re:The underground economy of Glassdoor reviews by Fire-Dragon-DoL on Saturday July 08, 2023 @12:13PM (#36645772)
When I search a job, I'd like to know both work environment and the salary, in the end both are really important