How much money do you make?

April 30, 2019 3:42 AM

Ask a Manager asks for salary data

Thousands of people have responded to the 2019 Ask a Manager salary survey. The raw data is in a google spreadsheet.

According to a Quartz article,

Green’s spreadsheet offers some interesting tidbits about jobs and pay. In St. Louis, Missouri, there’s a “zoo curator” who makes $70,000 annually. In Portland, Oregon, there’s a respondent with 8 to 10 years of experience who earns $68,000 a year importing coffee, and an elementary-school teacher with 21 to 30 years of experience who takes home just $30,000.

The raw data has typos, misspellings, and some trolling. Readers have offered to take the data and clean it up for analysis.

posted by rainydayfilms (19 comments total)

I think this can be such a helpful thing. Knowing how much money people make in industries that are similar to yours, in positions that are similar to yours, with education and experience similar to yours, can be a powerful thing. I think more and more transparency about what people are actually making these days can be a real tool to not just knowing how to negotiate your own compensation, but seeing what disparities there are across different cross-sections.
posted by xingcat at 5:02 AM on April 30, 2019 [6 favorites]

I was going to fill this out and stopped when I realized that giving my location essentially de-anonymizes it, even if I abstract the location to a region, someone who knew me even in passing would know everything I'm sharing.
posted by kokaku at 5:10 AM on April 30, 2019 [3 favorites]

Isn't this what GlassDoor is for? I mean, it's useful to have anonymized data, but making everything free-form text and lumping it into a huge spreadsheet is not a great way to help someone answer "what does a person with my job title and my experience make in my part of the world?"
posted by Mayor West at 5:15 AM on April 30, 2019 [3 favorites]

Especially since the last spreadsheet she shared was really clunky and basically unsearchable.
posted by all about eevee at 5:28 AM on April 30, 2019

I can't sort it, and none of the suggestions for getting rid of the htmlview mode help :(
posted by I-Write-Essays at 5:49 AM on April 30, 2019

The summary results highlight one of the stupidest and most frustrating things about Google forms: the form - not YOU - decides how to visualize each category, and you have zero control over it. For example the salary table, this would be FAR better to show as a min-max curve, raw dollar amount on X axis and number of responses on Y. Instead it’s a table, one line per amount. I don’t have any idea what is happening over there, but Google makes some of the absolute dumbest decisions when it comes to their sheets/docs/forms. It’s partly brilliant and partly maddeningly idiotic.

(And don’t get me started on their intentional crippling of the web interface on mobile - there is exactly zero reason why I should need an app installed to access all features of their entirely web-based document editor!!!)
posted by caution live frogs at 5:56 AM on April 30, 2019 [5 favorites]

I copied the data into my own spreadsheet and sorted it by annual salary, and the top payed person in the world is earning "Zz 100000" doing sales for a website they're using this form to promote. The next page of responses are also suffering from people writing sentences instead of providing strictly numerical data. It seems that even basic data validation wasn't a concern here.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 6:01 AM on April 30, 2019 [1 favorite]

Especially since the last spreadsheet she shared was really clunky and basically unsearchable.

Because a manager created it.
posted by M-x shell at 6:23 AM on April 30, 2019 [41 favorites]

The next page of responses are also suffering from people writing sentences instead of providing strictly numerical data.

I worked on a thing where people were to input, among other things, minimum and maximum figures for a salary range......so of course they wrote essays there
posted by thelonius at 7:54 AM on April 30, 2019

That worthless to me. I Can't sort it, no matter what I try.
But I've never had great success with googledocs.
posted by james33 at 8:10 AM on April 30, 2019 [1 favorite]

Can't it just be downloaded to Excel? I am not going to try on my work computer but that's usually what I do with google spreadsheets.
posted by JenMarie at 10:26 AM on April 30, 2019 [1 favorite]

This is why I ask AskMe before I do anything.
posted by bleep at 10:27 AM on April 30, 2019 [3 favorites]

Q: AskMe, my guts feel full, and I think I might need to poop. Should I poop?

A: DTMFA
posted by biogeo at 11:07 AM on April 30, 2019 [6 favorites]

Crackpot idea with many likely problems: what if all US employers had to assign a specific Standard Occupational Classification code for each job? With a standardized pay grade system? It'd be great to have better authority control for employment data.

I can't be the only one who's reluctant to enter data here or on Glassdoor or similar, because my job title is annoyingly specific. Having something more standardized to use for statistical purposes would be useful.
posted by asperity at 11:10 AM on April 30, 2019 [3 favorites]

I worked on a thing where people were to input, among other things, minimum and maximum figures for a salary range......so of course they wrote essays there

If this was on a job application form, then I’m frankly not surprised. I hate the game of “guess which salary number I’m thinking of, and if you guess wrong by even $1, your application will be deleted unread.”
posted by snowmentality at 12:07 PM on April 30, 2019 [3 favorites]

> so of course they wrote essays there

That's why you should always have client-side data type validation. If a numerical field isn't a number, you reject the form.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 12:43 PM on April 30, 2019

Isn't this what GlassDoor is for?

Or the American Community Survey, or even just BLS data for occupational outlooks.
posted by pwnguin at 5:05 PM on April 30, 2019

For some industries, Redford Provides the standardization and salary data collection mentioned above. Of course you have to pay for their data but that’s how many companies set salary bands.
posted by pombe at 8:21 PM on April 30, 2019

Slate article by Alison Green following up on the results of this survey.

And some good news: Colorado's got a new equal pay law! (More about it here and here.) No more salary history questions! Salary ranges on all job postings! All job openings have to be posted internally! Plus updated methods for seeking redress in cases of discriminatory wage disparity. The bad news is that none of this is going into effect for another year and a half, which is extremely disappointing. Yes, the new regulatory framework will take a while to set up, but all job postings could include pay ranges tomorrow.
posted by asperity at 11:54 AM on May 29, 2019