www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/10/at-glassdoor-find-out-how-much-people-really-make-at-google-microsoft-yahoo-and-everywhere-else -> www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/10/at-glassdoor-find-out-how-much-people-really-make-at-google-microsoft-yahoo-and-everywhere-else/
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 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."
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.
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.
png 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.
png 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 42 out of 5 Microsoft's satisfaction rating is exactly the same, whereas Yahoo's is not surprisingly lower at 38 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. 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. just because you struck it rich with AdWords does not mean whatever you create will be tech gold. 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. 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? 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.
June 10th, 2008 at 11:38 pm 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.
June 10th, 2008 at 11:54 pm The service certainly has potential. 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.
June 11th, 2008 at 12:08 am 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.
June 11th, 2008 at 12:16 am @Joseph, Have you tried payscale? 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.
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)."
June 11th, 2008 at 12:30 am 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.
June 11th, 2008 at 12:32 am 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 17.
June 11th, 2008 at 12:53 am 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.
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.
June 11th, 2008 at 2:01 am 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?
June 11th, 2008 at 2:20 am 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.
June 11th, 2008 at 2:42 am 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. uk tool, we look at millions of data points so that we can provide granularity and actionable data.
June 11th, 2008 at 4:49 am @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.
June 11th, 2008 at 5:56 am Haha well it's clearly aimed squarely at the US market currently: "Whoa! 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.
June 11th, 2008 at 6:16 am "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" any...
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