Indeed.com’s Salary Search just got dugg because Walt Mossberg mentioned it.
I didn’t learn anything that I didn’t know back in April. But that’s because this feature has been available through SimplyHired for a while now (and I suspect SimplyHired’s may be a bit more accurate).
Some thoughts on Web UI and marketing
Note that I had to link to a blog entry explaining how the SimplyHired’s research salary system works. That’s because the action is cluttered in the interface of the job site. Also look at the page it spits out: it’s very confusing, even if it is more informative. (Which it is, it gives you the median instead of the virtually worthless mean. BTW, the value it spits out is more accurate for this area.)
Finally, notice that the end of the article, written last year, mentions that Indeed.com needs this feature. Well it looks like they’ve done it.
One is better in terms of information delivered and has been out for almost a year now; the other is worse and gets a mention in the Wall Street Journal.
This just goes to show you that if you make the interface simpler, more obvious, and focus on a niche, it’s going to have a lot more traction with people, even if it is a worse product with spurious results.
There’s a good lesson here.
PHP Jobs
I got this in via e-mail today: Title: Talented Software Developers for Internet Incubator Job #: INCV-DEVEL. The unfortunate thing is I know nothing about this company, but if you are interested, you can just fill my info in as a refferal and apply yourself. 🙂
There really needs to be a simpler way to do this for the PHP community. This seems too disjointed. We should be doing a better job of connecting companies to qualified engineers via referral.
The salaries they generate for my area at least seem extremely high (like 30% more than the averages that local salary surveys return).
“They” means both or the just Indeed.com? Because for my area, Indeed’s is way off mark and about 30% higher than PayScale’s (SimplyHired). Also, from the SimplyHired data, you can see that in most jobs, the mean is higher than the median.
BTW, you get more accurate results by being specific. For instance, if I listed “Web Developer” instead of “Software Engineer” (my job title), then the pay is significantly less. Also outliers and engineering managers skew the mean a lot.
For instance, I know this result is about $15k below the going median for this job here, which is much higher than your area.
I find it funny that it still attempts to give a figure for places for which it clearly has no idea such as this:
http://www.indeed.com/salary?q1=web+developer&l1=Coober+Pedy&tm=1
I would find it very surprising to find ANY web developer job in Coober Pedy, never mind one that is paying $US61 000!
Cooper Pedy, for those not already aware, is a particularly hot and remote town in Australia known more for it’s opal mining than it’s IT industry:
http://wikitravel.org/en/Coober_Pedy
Referrals are indeed a good way to fill job openings. Check out http://www.yorz.com . The idea they have is that employers can post an opening and advertise a bounty for it. Then anybody can refer somebody for the job, and if it works out, get paid the bounty. An employer can offer a pretty nice bounty and still spend a lot less than they would with a headhunter. Also, here’s a good bit by Joel Spolsky on finding good engineers: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/06.html .
I was recently HR Director at Plaxo.
While I think the topic of “what’s my [current] salary” is certainly interesting, I’m also interested in the trends of these salaries.
During the period 2003-2005 the difference in base salary between junior engineers at large, public versus small, private, pre-IPO Internet/eCommerce companies, was not much. The difference between senior engineers at the same types of companies could amount to +25-35% and in some cases, much more. Again, I’m only talking base salary and not including bonuses, commissions or stock options.
Today, what I’m seeing (again, in base salary only) is that the junior engineers are getting much higher offers from the small, private Internet/eCommerce companies than from the large, publics. And, the senior engineers at small, privates, have seriously narrowed the gap, and are getting base salary offers much more closely aligned with the large, publics.
I don’t know if you can gain access, but here’s a URL which mostly talks about senior and exec salaries, but there’s a reference to this “software engineer gap closing effect” that I’ve seen: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115438802957922793.html.
Thoughts about the salary in the different fields was explained in a great way. Thanks for sharing.