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Stack Overflow Launches Salary Calculator For Developers (stackoverflow.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Stack Overflow today launched Salary Calculator, a tool that lets developers check out typical salaries across the industry. The calculated results are based on five factors: location, education, years of professional coding experience, developer type, and technologies used professionally. Stack Overflow is releasing the tool because it believes developers should be empowered with more information around job searches, careers, and salary. The company noticed ads on Stack Overflow Jobs that include salary information get 75 percent more clicks than ads without salary information. Even in cases when the salary range is below average, the ads still get 60 percent more clicks.
Not as useful as I was hoping, since you can only select from about 7 (high-salary) specific regions. Still, looks like I'm underpaid (yet again...)
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
It's not just less useful than I was hoping, it is essentially a useless tool. The number of roles are limited, the number of locations are limited, it only uses years of experience as a proxy for job responsibility, and it thinks a list of technologies is a good way to determine pay. I'm not even sure why they would spend time to create this tool.
Too many sites care too much about languages and frameworks when calculating salary. There are a few niches which command very high salaries relative to responsibility / years of experience, but they are rare. And they are usually very specific. Level of responsibility is a much better criteria than technologies known, and it isn't even included in this calculator.
Salary.com does a much better job because they look at what is important. First off the job titles are given ranks such as Software Engineer I through Software Engineer V. This is much better because each of those match up with increasing levels of responsibility, which is what mostly drives salary. Then it adds in criteria such as number of direct reports, size of company, who you report to, etc.
Honestly if your tool cannot beat the usefulness of a general tool such as Salary.com's salary report then it doesn't need to exist.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
To be fair, self employed means you don't have a salary. It should be obvious freelancers with 100% billable hours make more than regular employees.
Not really comparable though. Freelancing you have to pay for your own pension, holiday time, sick days, no redundancy money, accountancy overheads...
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC