Are you being paid enough?

What’s this all about?

Let’s face it, salary negotiations are difficult, and in most cases extremely uncomfortable. SalaryScout can help reduce some of that stress by giving you enough confidence to ask for what you are really worth.

We are an anonymous community of professionals seeking fairness in compensation. Why let someone else tell you how much you should be paid? Why trust aggregate data from suverys that were taken years ago? SalaryScout puts the power to make informed life decisions in your hands.

Is the grass truely green on the other side? That answer may now be in reach. I wish I had a lengthy sob-story to tell you about how I was unknowingly underpaid, and then one magical day the truth was revealed and I demanded a 50% increase in salary. That’s simply not the case. In fact, I’m quite happy in my current position as an IS Auditor/Information Security Consultant for a public company in the health care industry. Although I (and everyone else) would like to be paid more, I feel that my compensation is fair. You’re probably asking, then why the heck did you create SalaryScout?

Why was it started?

REASON 1: I’m a big believer in transparency. Corporate politics, experience, and age should not be important factors in determining compensation. In an ideal world, employers should base pay on market value and/or the value the individual delivers to the company. In ‘the real world’ this doesn’t necessarily happen because accurate salary data is difficult to find, and individuals do not have the confidence and leverage to successfully negotate salary to a person’s true market value. Without getting too idealogical, I think a person’s compensation should be commensurate to the value provided to the employer, no more, no less. In most cases this is difficult to quantify and a more effective approach is to rely on a skills market. I wanted to build a site and community that could facilitate this process.

REASON 2: Next, I find this topic extremely interesting. At some point I realized that I am a sucker for articles, blogs, podcasts, or anything else, you name it, related to salary data. If I see an an article, “Highest paid IT positions for 2006″ you better believe that I’m going to click it. I don’t think it is an obsession, I just have a desire to keep up with the industry and make the most of my career. I know many of you are the same way. How’s that? Almost on a weekly basis I hear friends and acquaintenaces complain that they are being underpaid. I hear, “I’m not making much, but I’m getting good experience.” Or there are those “fresh out of college types” with false hopes of how much they will be paid. SalaryScout will help eliminate some of that disappointment.

REASON 3: The third and final reason for building SalaryScout is that I like to keep a foot in the technical side of IT. As an auditor who focuses on Sarbanes-Oxley and corporate governance it’s difficult to keep up my programming chops. Although I have interest in both, I don’t consider myself a designer, and I don’t even come close to considering myself a coder. Believe me, I’m not worthy. With that in mind, I wanted to see what I could accomplish in nights and weekends over 30 days. Although I have been thinking about this project for quite some time, I wanted to see if I could go from nothing, to a fully working prototype in a month. Additional time was used for refinement, testing, and peer code review. It’s been a ride. What have I learned from all of this? It can most easily expressed as an equation:

COFFEE + TECHNO + FOCUS = Web Application

Who’s behind this?

Before you think I’m some lunatic who has gone off the deep end, I’m just a regular guy with a lot of ideas. Ideas are the easy part, the difficulty lies in execution. Although I have many other projects brewing, SalaryScout is something that I thought I could accomplish in a short period of time. In other words, I just went for it.

I’m left handed INTJ 27 year old from Louisville, Kentucky. That’s right, middle America, home of the Kentucky Derby, KFC, the Louisville Slugger, and the University of Louisville (Go Cards!). It’s a long way from Silicon Valley, but that shouldn’t stop innovation. We now live in a connected world.

In an effort to bring life to Louisville’s sleepy tech-scene, I also started Louisville Geek Dinner. If you’re in da’Ville you should really attend, its great! Other projects I’ve been heavily involved with is LinuxSecurity.com and EnGarde Secure Linux. I also thought I should take a minute to thank my wife Erica for her support, I couldn’t have done it without her.

If you would like to contact me, the best way is through LinkedIn. To close out, I would like to thank my friends Nick (London), Jason (Kentucky), and Alex (Texas) for many hours of free consultation and support.