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October 13, 2006

Techcrunch » Blog Archive » How Much Money Do You Make?:

requests users to disclose detailed salary information about themselves, and in return they get information on what others are making. It seemed like a great way to get good user generated information at no cost.

This is a useful service that gives significant value back to the user for spending time adding content to their database.

In the past, I have searched for resources like this one: I tried the service right away.

The research process starts with a detailed questionnaire about your status: job title, country, compensation, benefits, and so on. All of these info is categorized already (at least to some extent) and almost all data you input is confirmed by asking you to match your original answer e.g. software engineer for your job title with one item in a predefined list. Only at the very end, before delivering the research results, you are asked for your email and password to register into the system.
The process is smooth and makes sure they get all the information needed for a meaningful comparision of your situation with the rest of the market you are in.

So far so good.

Point is, after all the work adding my profile to their database, I was rewarded with a short message telling we are sorry, but we don’t have enough data to provide you with a comparison for your particular job. Not very nice.
I guess it is because I live and work in Japan at the moment, which is not among the countries you can select from the Research Center.

I would suggest them to improve the profile creation process by checking as early as possible if they can provide any data back to you e.g. country selection is at the very beginning of the input process, and give you the choice to continue or not with the profile generation.
Also, it would be nice if they could log people that have contributed to their database without getting anything back (like it was for me at this moment in time) and automatically notify them as soon as their database will be good enough to provide some information of value.

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