11 comments

  • Aaron SagrayAaron Sagray, over 8 years ago (edited over 8 years ago )

    Daniel is right on the mark with both his research and insights. Other things that attract great designers:

    1. Great front-end engineers. The end result of your design is only as good as the engineering team that delivers.

    2. Responsibilities in product management and customer insights. While designers may not lead the charge in these areas, I've noticed the best want to be actively involved in the process.

    3. Leadership that demonstrably puts design first. Design is ALWAYS a top-down initiative. "Design First" is cheap talk unless the design team is allowed to shift priorities in favor of good design/user testing/iteration etc.

    19 points
    • Dan LeboDan Lebo, over 8 years ago (edited over 8 years ago )

      yes, yes, and yes.

      +1

      0 points
    • Jonathan ShariatJonathan Shariat, over 8 years ago (edited over 8 years ago )

      Agreed, one of things I wrote about here, that I learned this year was that you really can't fix the UX without being able to fix everything. That translates to having a seat at the table when talking about features and allocating dev resources.

      5 points
  • Cagri Aksay, over 8 years ago (edited over 8 years ago )

    Great insight on the problem. There are a lot of factors that contribute to a fair salary and when you group people under job titles or companies, you lose so much information. My own startup tries to tackle this same problem and give personalized salary predictions. We publish aggregated salary data as well, but it's not as accurate as personalized predictions.

    2 points
    • Aaron SagrayAaron Sagray, over 8 years ago

      I found your tool to be fairly inaccurate – about 20% off. Why do you think that crowdsourced opinions would be more accurate?

      1 point
      • Joel CalifaJoel Califa, over 8 years ago (edited over 8 years ago )

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds

        0 points
      • Cagri Aksay, over 8 years ago

        I'm sorry to hear that your prediction was inaccurate. Are you a high performer? I suspect that we sometimes under-predict at the top of the scale.

        We are constantly looking for ways to improve our predictions. Very recently, we started using machine learning algorithms to bring up more relevant profiles to predict.

        Wisdom of the crowds is proven to work on complex prediction problems and we believe it's a great fit for salary predictions. Consider several people who has similar job titles, similar experience levels and have worked at similar companies in the same city. If you ask only one of them to predict your salary, you might not get a good result. But if you ask enough people, their aggregate prediction will be very accurate. Neil deGrasse Tyson explains it much better.

        If your prediction result wasn't recent, please consider giving us another try.

        2 points
      • Jonathan ShariatJonathan Shariat, over 8 years ago

        If it makes you feel better, they got mine almost dead on. ~2k

        That could be people were bad at guess but if enough people have sized you up there are only 2 things to say about it:

        1. You got a great deal with your current position
        2. You need to do a better job marketing yourself
        1 point
      • Travis VocinoTravis Vocino, over 8 years ago

        I found similarly off results. During my evaluation of others, I found I was missing the mark a bit so perhaps many others are as well.

        2 points
        • Christine RødeChristine Røde, over 8 years ago

          Yeah, the crowd sourced salaries seemed really exaggerated to me.

          I got way more points once I just started rating everyone at $100k than when I was trying to accurately predict their salary based on position, experience and the company.

          2 points
  • Thomas PritchardThomas Pritchard, over 8 years ago

    I must say, some of those perks look mighty enticing. Relatively cheap ways to make your company really interesting, and help build design culture where the same value in cash just can't.

    0 points