The idea behind Glassdoor is simple: You tell me your salary, and I’ll tell you mine. The stealth startup, which raised $3 million from Benchmark Capital last March, just went live. The site collects company reviews and real salaries from employees of large companies and displays them anonymously for all members to see. (The startup plans to make money from ads targeted at job seekers, premium services, and aggregated compensation data it wants to sell to HR professionals).
The idea is to collect as much detailed salary information and feedback for every job title at a company so that job seekers can know how to evaluate an offer, and current employees can see how they are doing relative to their peers. “When the annual compensation review comes,” says CEO Robert Hohman, “you need to know what your market value is.” Or you can just live vicariously through others.
So how much does a Google software engineer really make? The average, based on ten submissions, is $97,840. And the range is between $80,000 and $150,000, with annual cash bonuses coming in anywhere from $20,000 to $45,000. Adding salary and bonus together, the Google engineers that have entered information on Glassdoor average $112,573 in take-home pay. (And then there are stock options on top of that). Yahoo and Microsoft engineers get about the same salaries, but smaller bonuses, leaving their take-home pay at an average of $105,642 and $105,375, respectively. Apple software engineers make only about $89,000, on average, but they get to create some of the most loved products on Earth.
As a teaser, anyone can see the full details for four companies (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Cisco), but beyond that it is a give-to-get model. You need to post your own review to see the other reviews. Same with salaries. (Using a variety of techniques it won’t discuss, the company does its best to sniff out false posts). And each company and CEO gets a rating. Here’s a chart comparing Jerry Yang’s and Steve Ballmer’s approval ratings from their own employees over time (Yang’s is currently 59 percent, Ballmer’s is 69 percent):
Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s approval rating, incidentally, is 89 percent. While the overall satisfaction rating for Google as a company to work at is 4.2 out of 5. Microsoft’s satisfaction rating is exactly the same, whereas Yahoo’s is not surprisingly lower at 3.8. These ratings are by no means scientific. They are based on 124 responses for Microsoft, 50 for Yahoo, and 37 for Google, all collected during the company’s private beta. The more honest responses the site collects from any given company, the more accurate the results will be.
Beyond the ratings and salary information, what is really revealing are some of the in-depth reviews. Even at Google, it’s not all happy faces. “The free food is starting to wear off,” says Hohman. One review is titled: “Awesome culture, bad management.” Another one: “Fun at first, frustrating in the long run.” And the most devastating: “Google:An Elitist’s Playground.” Here’s an excerpt:
If you enjoy your individuality and time alone, Google is not the place for you (keep in mind I’m not an engineer). Google pushes a highly “googley” atmosphere, which is something akin to what the Brady Bunch would be like if they lived in communist Russia. . . . People are encouraged to have googley attitudes, wear plastic smiles, and not to question the infallible nature of the executive management group. . . . If you like feeling awkward during forced group activity, Google is your haven. It isn’t exactly “forced” (no guns), but if you don’t participate you become labeled as “ungoogley.” Once deemed “ungoogley”, you’re practically viewed as a rotten apple that threatens to spoil the bunch.
Advice to Senior Management:
“Stop acting as those you’re King Midas…just because you struck it rich with AdWords does not mean whatever you create will be tech gold. For a company that prides itself on innovation, I can’t think of any product Google has released since AdWords that has been truly innovative…unless you are calling Google’s mergers and acquisitions innovative (just because Google owns YouTube does not mean you can take credit for the innovation).
Someone is obviously bitter, but it doesn’t make what this person says any less true. (Assuming it truly is a Google employee—there is no way to know for sure). Most of the reviews for Google are positive. Reading through all of them gives a nice cross section of attitudes at the company. Who knew that the heated toilet seats at Google were such a big draw? Or that Netflix has a don’t ask, don’t tell vacation policy? (You take one whenever you can).
If Glassdoor can get people to fess up about their salaries and the inner workings of their companies, the Internet’s culture of transparency will claim another stronghold.
I know a lot of people at MSFT and their wages are always surprisingly low to me. But they do live in a relative-to-silicon-valley cheaper area to live and buy houses.
Erick do you know how Glassdoor plan to make money?
The service certainly has potential. Will be especially usefull to job switchers.
But, it would be interesting to see if it really can filter out false feedback as it claims to. Because, the beta period is like the honeymoon period, once it opens up and gets popular people are definitely gonna try to abuse it.
http://www.glas...aries-E1090.htm
Thats not Shantanu Narayen
Hey Erick, how much are you making? – I guess I can find out on glassdoor.com
http://www.payscale.com already does a pretty good job at this.
thats pretty low, I wonder if thats because the guys on the big money aren’t looking for jobs. I’d be interested to see what the contractors for these companies were on.
this seems to be a reminder of how i have no money. how can i share what i don’t make..
I guess we’ll have a post soon like msft fires 180 stuff after glassdoor hack )
@Joseph, Have you tried payscale? They don’t do a very good job at all. I tried to get a report and bailed on like the 5 page of filling out information. Glassdoor if nothing else makes it easy for me to put in my information and view other’s.
@2, ads.
See first graph:
“(The startup plans to make money from ads targeted at job seekers, premium services, and aggregated compensation data it wants to sell to HR professionals).”
Before even looking at the graph i was sure that Goolge must be ahead here too. this company has proved itself in every ground…
Erick,
FWIW, Merc had a good article on NetFlix’s unusual vacation program a year ago. In archives now, but a ton of coverage about it: http://tech.yah...logs/null/23802
that’s a good idea, cool site, easy navigation.
I submitted a review and have spent about 30 minutes on Glassdoor. Very useful — I could see job seekers, employees, managers and HR pros using it.
As the content and data is so useful and specific, I’m relatively more skeptical of an ad model. This feels counter-intuitive to write, but it’ll be interesting to watch. When I use Glassdoor, if I’m measuring my salary versus others’, I’m going to be pretty focused, not in much of a mood to be sold to or to click on advertising. Counter that with something like LinkedIn, where one may well be less focused, and the opportunity for advertising seemlingly go up.
Social media is struggling with the advertising thing, and it’ll be very interesting to watch how Glassdoor takes this super useful information and monetizes. Good luck to them on what is a great and useful service.
Erick Schonfeld, thanks for the last couple of posts and rescuing techcrunch!
I’ve been an avid reader since techcrunch birth and enjoyed Mike entries, but lately it has become more about catching Friendfeed/Google/Facebook than anything else.
Mike, keep hiring good people and make sure you stick to what you started: keeping the rest of us informed of the latest online innovations
I submitted a review and have spent about 30 minutes on Glassdoor. Very useful — I could see job seekers, employees, managers and HR pros using it.
This is hot.
@JM
I tried payscale. It was a bit form intensive but the resulting data was very useful and took into account location as well as company and job title. Glassdoor seems a bit more focused on / limited to top tier companies.
very interesting stuff.
Always wanted to know that
It’s tough to second guess this management team due to their homerun at Expedia. But, for all entrepreneurs this is a good lesson to take note of; when a “concept” can raise $3M without having a solid business model. If John Doe off the street went to Benchmark with this idea he/she would get no further than the front desk and laughed out of the building. Is there a need in the marketplace for something like this? Maybe. But, this could simply end up becoming spam central.
Brilliant idea for interest and high profile traffic, but I think it’ll be hard to monetize because most traffic will not be all that relevant to job search.
The use of self-reported survey data is an established protocol for putting together survey reports. But it’s used in part to ease the process of collecting information so that enough data can be collected to have something statistically meaningful. When salary data is self-reported from a single company and the data sets per title are small, it’s fun anecdotal info but hardly actionable. With our salarytrack.co.uk tool, we look at millions of data points so that we can provide granularity and actionable data.
Cheers,
Bill
workhound.co.uk
thanks
@6 No, that company sucks at doing this, it costs you an arm and a leg to find out what type of money you should be making, payscale seems to be aimed at big companies.
@23 Outside those people trying to find out how much people AT their company make, the people going to these types of sites are generally somewhat eager to find a new job especially if one appears appealing to them.
wow.
43 employees surveyed.
those some amazing statistics you got goin there friend!
But it’s only based on 11 employee salary inputs, that’s a far cry from accuracy.
Doesn’t salary also depend on how many years of working experience one has? Then, what kind of salaries are listed here?
Haha well it’s clearly aimed squarely at the US market currently:
“Whoa! Do you really get 5 weeks of vacation?”
I sure do.
Cool site though and if expanded would have huge implications/benefits. I hope it doesn’t stay as primarily a Silicon Valley focused site. Though, I love that it found my employer even though it’s UK based.
“Apple software engineers make only about $89,000, on average, but they get to create some of the most loved products on Earth”.
Dude, I would choose the extra cash over the “loved products” anytime.
I think a lot of Americans get ‘google’ eyed (excuse the pun) that the wages.
I am in the UK where 1 dollar = 0.5 pounds.
The average wage for a c++ programmer with 5 years experience is £45k. Thats $90,000 USD.
Don’t know what all the fuss is about….
Wow, I wanna work at Google. Sounds like a lot of fun plus good money!
JT
http://www.FireMe.To/udi
A cost of living index is important (missing) context. 120k in a mid-sized flyover city is equivalent to 140-150k on a coast.
Most decent companies are probably within 10% difference in salaries and therefore am not sure if this site would offer anything spectacularly revealing. Check out an app called OfficeBook on Facebook (http://apps.fac...com/office-book) that helps you understand ‘cultures within companies’ and how to find a company that values for who you are and what you truly believe in. If you are not on Facebook, check out http://www.beabl.com.
isn’t this a competitor to The Vault? That’s where I get my company reviews.
Nice, they even have salaries and reviews of themselves
http://www.glas...ews-E100431.htm
I think a lot of people fail to realize two very important things. First, salary isn’t necessarily the sole income of a person, bonuses and allowances play a large part. Secondly, the big money is in management.
@28 web design; @27
Tim A from Glassdoor.com here. Glad you checked out the site! You raise a valid point about nos. For many companies – we now have 40,000 — loaded in our database but many have *no* data. That’s because we’ve just launched our public beta. We need contributions from everyone… any job and any company can be rated here. Some other sites being referenced only offer information on a job “type” in a market. You won’t find actual salary, bonus and equity on a per title, per company basis. We think that’s an important layer of transparency.
@ 29 K – you couldn’t be more right about years of experience. Because our numbers are relatively low now, we’ve turned off the ability to spin by years of experience and location because it could compromise the anonymity of our users. Once the numbers get bigger, you’ll get that detail.
Keep the feedback coming!
I would wonder about the data and how accurate it is. Seems it would be pretty easy for someone to enter false data. After the beta period will be the test. I can see people with company bias upping the salary or low-balling it to move the numbers some. If that can be filtered, the service looks useful and well developed.
Revenue could come from job seekers.
So, how much does a Techcrunch editor besides Mike make on average Erick
I wouldn’t/won’t trust numbers based on anonymous submissions to the database, due to the obvious gaming of the system element that can happen to make you own company look better / make competitors look worse.
If any company would get these figures from the companies’ HR departments, that would be REALLY helpful in comparison to the anonymous employee submissions.
@10 That is not true, i have used payscale both for myself and my wife (accountant) and we have found the numbers to be very reliable..How is glassdoor different from payscale?
Good to know that the job google headhunted me for – and ended up not taking me after the last on-site interview – was actually paid peanuts.
Unlike what their HR department tries to put out in their recruiting process, not all google engineering jobs are created equal.
Man, don’t waste your time filling in a review….
30 mins and got this!
“Bummer. I guess this Glassdoor is broken for now.”
um, ever heard of draft saving guys!!! even vista can do that!
Wow…these salaries are piddly compared to Wall Street. They’re comparible to what a janitor would make there.
JobeeHive – http://www.jobeehive.com – has done a good job in collecting great info on companies. Those guys are still in ALPHA, but when i got an invite i saw over 200 companies reviewed. Most companies are from India and US. They capture detailed info on work culture, salaries, interview patterns and questions and business overview. They have displayed the latest reviews at: http://jobeehiv.../survey/explore
What i liked is that Jobeehive is adding a professional network below the ratings and reviews thingy. They plan to introduce features to talk to/interact with real people along with just written reviews to help you out.
hmm looks like someone looked at the bitchfest comments that happen on mini-microsoft and said “Hey! What if we had a site that enabled employees from other companies to air their dirty laundry?”
TimA, glad to see your site cares about your users’ anonymity. Cheers for a great site!
@16, could not agree with you more. i am putting eric on my favorite list. there is hope still for TC.