I like services which fulfill people’s curiosities and make information more widely accessible in the world, and that’s exactly what Glassdoor.com is — for salaries. Ever been curious about what people at Google, Microsoft or Apple make, or what Jerry Yang, Steve Ballmer, Eric Schmidt’s approval rating is? Your curiousity has now been fullfilled.
The philosophy of Glassdoor is simply to share a little, get a lot. The idea is to have people share their salary information, ratings, and reviews at their specific company, and in return, provide them to be able to access all the information that is available on the site — i.e. salary, review, ratings data for all the companies listed on the site. The process repeats itself, and the data on Glassdoor and gets richer and richer.
The service has so far had a great start and a lot of useful data has already been accumulated. For example, as part of the preview, you can already see substantial salary data for companies like Microsoft and Google. Case-in-point: a product manager at Google makes $30K more than a product manager at Microsoft.
For the first time, what has always been very sensitive, private data — personal salaries — is now public, and I think a lot of potential and current employees of the companies involved are going to be impacted. As the service gets richer, it’ll be interesting to check back six months later and get more accurate salary averages. Overall though, it does, indeed, fulfill your salariosity.
