Print

[MoneyTech] Through the looking Glass(Door)

So, how much do you make? And what’s it really like working for (insert-name-here)?

Don’t worry, there’s no need to tell us, because now we can satisfy our voyeuristic urges do the research over at Glassdoor.com, a brand spanking new “career and workplace community where anyone can find and anonymously share real-time reviews, ratings and salary details about specific jobs for specific employers — for free.”

There’s a bit of “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours” involved, since would-be voyeurs need to provide details of their own earnings before getting full access to the site, which has around 2,000 salary reports and reviews covering around 250 companies. The site, which was founded by two ex-Expedia types, has raised $3m from Benchmark Capital, the VC firm that funded eBay, among others.

For the sake of science, FT Alphaville offered up the contents of our salary slips and discovered:

- the average salary of an analyst at JP Morgan is $62,500 (vs $60,000 at Merrill Lynch and $90,000 for an investment banking analyst at Goldman)

- Bank of America employs at least two “Change Consultants” at $60,000 a pop and one “Senior Change Analyst” ($62,000)

- Yahoo employees are generally unimpressed with CEO Jerry Yang (53 per cent approval rating, compared with 65 per cent for Microsoft’s chief executive Steve Ballmer)

- “in the computer hardware sector there is clearly a correlation between overall company rating, CEO approval rating and the price/earnings” ratio of the stock,” according to Glassdoor co-founder Robert Hohman (via Giga Om)CEOPERATING, Glassdoor data

Of course, as “DG Lewis” commented over at the Giga Om post,

the correlation coefficient for Company Rating and P/E is 0.19, which doesn’t sound like a very strong correlation to me. For CEO rating and P/E it’s 0.58, which is better, but still not (especially with a sample size of 8) all that compelling.

The site is still light on data for non-technology companies – neither Deutsche Bank nor Citigroup have been reviewed, for instance – but the potential for data mining (and schadenfreude) will increase as more employees contribute.

Given that both Wall Street and the City are grappling with a wave of high-profile layoffs, the salary and bonus information listed on the site will be a useful tool for all those Bear Stearns analysts and Lehman COOs in the market for a new job.

Print