I believe LinkedIn may have already reached its maximum potential and is on a downward trend.

Of course I'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's expense.

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't already present as groups admins, happily lurking while candidates posture and parade.

But I'm not about to close my account (if that is even possible). I'm very fond of the growing number of endorsements I've received for Sarcasm and Bubbles.

Hopefully LinkedIn won't ask me for my salary in the future. Cause I definitely don't trust them with my salary info. They'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.

E.g. I hold the title of "Senior Software Engineer" despite only have 2 years/4 mo. of experience and very little of that experience is project management or non-code things.

When talking to recruiters in my area for a new position and giving a base salary of $90k, they routinely come back with "You won't get that offer with your level of experience".

In practice, I routinely cut the Senior from my title to avoid expectations I can't meet.

Dice.com has a much better idea behind this, which is tying skills and years of skill to estimated salary. The backend for LinkedIn'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'd be doing something different, but they don'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

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.

I played around a bit and didn't find it too useful. The folks at step.com (previously posted on HN) produce something that is much more useful for me: https://blog.step.com/2016/06/16/more-salaries-twitter-linke...

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 & UK cities, and the data is based on small user numbers so far. Would say you get so far a better overview on https://teleport.org 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.

I don't really see this as a fundamental shift in anything, just an attempt to tack on a competitor's featureset.

While this is sort of cool for some people, I think the sad thing about a tool like this is that it's only going to encourage the wrong behaviors for a lot of people. It puts more focus on people's job titles than what they actually do. It encourages people to chase the corporate ladder, not find meaningful jobs... I'm sure it adds a lot of value to some, but some small part of me can'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 "Greater Boston Area" 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) https://recap.work

It'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'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.

https://candidate.ai

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've rather anyone but linkedin be successful here. Other than extremely tiny sample sets, no one has actually succeeded in this space/featureset. I can barely see peoples profiles without getting signups shoved down my throat.

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 "I think we are not paying enough, looking at this average". It will be "We are paying far too much, lets bring ourselves inline".

> 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.

This seems pretty flawed. You can still put in a random number in some band, skewing the data (probably) upwards.

> "Data Scientist" -- Title not found. Please select a valid title.

I thought Patil invented that term for LinkedIn (along with Hammerbacher at Facebook).

And as always, doesn'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'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..

But that's the whole point and you can turn it to your advantage. Report the salary you want, possibly higher than the one you have and all the recruiters and potential employers will know not to contact you if they cannot pay that much.

That's why you should lie even to forms when asked for your salary.

This. If they give this salary to recruiters or do anything to hint at what a candidate's range might be, they will lose whatever trust they might still have.

In fact, I'd love to know what they can offer in the way of assurances against this.

I'd suggest you to read https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2016/10/bringing-salar..., the section about privacy.

  One of the interesting dichotomies with compensation data 
  is that many users want this information, but don’t want to 
  have their individual data exposed or connected back to them.  
  Salary information is personal to each of our members. With 
  this in mind, and consistent with our Members First organizational 
  philosophy, one of the first goals we established when we set out 
  to embark on this project was to provide powerful salary insights 
  in aggregate without risking an individual’s private information. 
  In the end, we built a salary collection system to provide the 
  strongest protections for the anonymity of all of our members—no 
  easy task. Parts of our approach are detailed later in this article.

  Because we proactively separate a member’s submission data from their 
  Member ID when compensation data is submitted, it enables us to 
  secure the system in such a way that we cannot even support the 
  ability for a member to update their previously submitted salary 
  information - they have to resubmit. Furthermore, our system provides 
  protection not just from hackers out in the wild, but also provides 
  access control against unauthorized use by internal users.
  

What do you mean you don't trust them? The need the salary information only to sell to recruiters and companies. Any other value proposition they might come up with is purely bogus.

The Federal Statistical Office of Switzerland sends compulsory salary surveys to the enterprises itself. The collected data is then published in the Salarium [1]. It is based on more than 750'000 salaries from the private sector and runs since 1994. You can read more about the methodology in the PDF [2]

I worked as a Software Developer for a company that used the data as base for their salary negotiations and it worked quite well.

[1] https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/work-income/...

[2] https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfsstatic/dam/assets/6937/master

IT Jobs Watch surveys recruiters for permanent roles data and contractors quotes for rates.

http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/

For tech work, you can use H1B salary data (from somewhere like http://h1bdata.info/) as a minimum level for a position. Scale up by some percentage (10-20% in my experience) to get the median for what US citizens are likely making in the same position.

What incentive do people have to lie about their salary (assuming it's anonymous)?

I don't know how widely it's used, but it seems like LinkedIn could some how use Work Number [1] to allow people to verify their salary.

[1] https://www.theworknumber.com/

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.

  * 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.

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.

One counterpoint. We (hiring managers and team leads) complained up the chain for a while that we couldn't hire or retain skilled developers. The state Dept. of Personnel did an industry salary survey, using tools like this, and concluded that developers working for our state were significantly underpaid and recommended a salary increase, which apparently is now being debated by Governor and Office of Financial Management.

So these kinds of reports are useful for supporting our answers to questions like "Why do you say none of the applicants for this developer position are qualified" when we answer "because you'll only offer $50k/year".

Now as for whether that will actually play out and result in salary increases remains to be seen.

I'm not the biggest fan of Linkedin, but this strikes me as quite cynical. I've been recruiting internally for a number of good startups and I've used salary transparency to advocate for better offers for prospective candidates. There will be a few bad actors as there already exist, but I do think this is a step in the right direction towards at least giving prospective employees a better understanding of their own worth.

I would assume that there is otherwise generally information asymmetry in the labour market, in the sense that employers usually have more knowledge of salaries than employees. Making good information openly available to both parties should benefit the party with less information more: the employee.

I'd have to disagree. Large companies spend a lot of money on their approach to compensation. They hire outside consultants to benchmark their pay relative to competitors. I've worked at jobs where pay has gone up due to such engagements. Having this data on LinkedIn isn't going to change that process.

Could be beneficial on both sides. Image a woman getting an offer, she can see the average pay and compare hers to that, so she can request equal pay.

I find most companies are generally in the know on how well they're paying their employees (employee retention, counter-offers, etc), it's the employees that lack this information.

I'd say the exact opposite. No company pays above market average by accident.

At the same time, if they are paying less than the average, won't that prompt them to at least move up to that?