How We Get Our DataThe rate and salary reports that make up our surveys come from visitors to our page who fill in the form at http://www.realrates.com/rate_sur.htm and http://www.realrates.com/sal_sur.htm These visitors come from many sources. A large number (several thousand a week) are referred to our site by "Salary Information" links on popular job hunting sites including Monster.com, JobOptions.com, and Computerjobstore.com. Another huge group comes from index searches. Realrates.com is currently in the top five results returned by the Google search engine (used by Yahoo) for the search "salary survey." We are also in the top ten for Yahoo search results for "rate survey" and number one for a Lycos search on "Consulting rate survey." Our site is also gets a lot of visitors from an IT salary link on About.com. But these referrals are only half the story. Realrates.com is linked by a whopping 384 unique sites, each of which sends us a small but steady flow of visitors. In addition, hardly a week goes by that our site isn't suggested to a questioner in a consulting or computer-related newsgroup. The diversity of sources that send us our traffic means that no one source dominates our data and that the rate and salary information we receive is truly representative of the conditions of a large number of working computer professionals. How We Quality Control Our DataOur data does not appear on the Real Rate Survey or Real Salary Survey until it has been eyeballed by real human beings. Before posting contributions to the databases we routinely do the following:
Other than the above, we do not modify the data we receive in any way. Why Should You Trust Worker-Submitted Data?We are repeatedly asked this question by HR professionals who tell us that they worry that computer professionals report falsely high rates and salaries in an attempt to manipulate the salaries and rates offered to them. In reply to this we can only ask, "How can you trust HR contributed salary and rate information, when HR departments have an equally strong motivation to downplay salaries?" In addition, HR often has salary or rate guidelines that it gives to the press but which it violates when workers cannot be found to work at these low end wages. We believe our data is accurate. Our overall medians match the statistics that are provided by the Census Bureau. More importantly, we allow you to see not only the medians and averages, but the ENTIRE database, so that you can see the spread of rates and salaries that are contributed. Our Charts, in addition, break out the standard deviations for each category reported, which again, lets you see the spread of rates and salaries, not just a single summary number. Ironically, we get as many complaints from visitors that our rates are too low as we do that our rates are too high. This suggests to us that they are probably a good reflection of actual rates and salaries in the working world. Why is Realrates.com's Data Better Than That of Competing Sites?We are often asked how our data compares to Salary.com. The answer is, our data is real data. Salary.com is a misleading guess. Salary.com takes a "national average" computed from other salary surveys and census bureau data and mulitplies it by a percentage that "adjusts" it for a given market. I have tested this site repeatedly and found that it often generates salaries $20,000 higher than what actual workers in a given market report earning. Computerworld provides another well known salary survey. The current survey available on Computerworld's web site does not explain where the data comes from. However, in the past the magazine claimed that the data came from corporate HR departments. Unfortunately, this survey reports only "average" salaries which we feel are far less useful than median salaries. Even worse, the categories for which salaries are given are so broad as to be almost useless. One set of Computerworld data gives salaries broken down by job title, industry and company size. Another table shows salaries broken down by Job Title and region. If you find useful an average salary figure which mashes together data for programmer/analysts using Java in Silicon Valley with those of Cobol programmers in San Diego, this is the survey for you! We believe that this kind of summary information is useless, which is why we show you all the details of our data, not just summary data. Another competing survey is provided by Computerjobs.com who some years ago copied our survey format. (This is not paranoia, I have correspondence from the site's owner admitting that they copied our format.) Computerjobs.com has more data than we do, however their survey is fatally flawed because they attract contributors through a contest where rate contributors qualify to win an expensive computer monitor. By making rate contributions the only way to enter their lottery, they have guaranteed that large numbers of visitors will make up entries simply to enter the contest. That they do get phony entries is easily verified by scanning their data, which is full of rates and salaries that are so outside the range of real salaries and rates that they are obviously guesses by people who are not professionals in the field. Here at Realrates.com the only incentive visitors have to give us data is a desire to keep this highly useful survey going. We believe that actual job reports while not 100% perfect are a whole lot closer than statistically generated guestimates and that our data, with it's complex detail and freeform entry fields continues to be the most accurate available. Home ...  |