Dorikka comments on Salary charts & Projection tool - Less Wrong

7 Post author: Nanashi 01 June 2015 04:37PM

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Comment author: Dorikka 05 June 2015 07:36:38PM 1 point [-]

Nanashi, this actually looks really cool. I initially thought that the entire functionality of the tool was contained within the "Job Categories" table and didn't click on the blue links until I had written the below because I expected them to be from Wikipedia or something similarly useless. My top bit of feedback is to make the functionality of the links clear (so at least people know to click on one!) I'm preserving my original thoughts for reference below the dashed line. Current thoughts:

  • Quartiles are good; I would be curious about deciles as well.
  • When I mouseover a line on the salary vs. age graph, the numbers are shown with the lowest salary on top. This is visually disconcerting as the lowest salary line is the bottom-most one on the graph.
  • My point about how many years the data is drawn from (see more detail below) is still relevant.
  • It's a bit confusing that the y-axis on the salary vs. age graph rescales to the occupation, especially since the lines are shown "rising up" from the x-axis. If I see the lines go up, it unintuitively does not mean that the salary is higher.
  • There seem to be lots of duplicate categories at the "Individual Job" level, so less unique rows fit on a screen. Might be an easy way to filter these out.
  • I'm confused whether "entry level" means "no degree" and "post-grad" means "bachelors", or whether entry level is bachelors and post-grad is if one has a graduate or doctorate. (I have seen many jobs that require a bachelors referred to as "entry level".
  • It would be nice to have a link on the "Individual Jobs" level to the definition of each job category used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (For example, I don't see why Chief Executives get paid lots more than Top Executives, and a description may resolve my confusion.)

Overall, great work and thanks.

Thanks for doing this; some thoughts:

  • How many years are you taking this from? Larger n makes things more robust but makes the data less relevant to the current job market. Larger n also necessitates inflation adjustment. May want to say if you've done this or not. Fine either way, but good to know so someone doesn't double-adjust or fail to adjust.
  • I'd like to know the salaries of the top and bottom deciles for each job. Yes, data is harder to get, but would be nice to be able to convert competence-delta (relative to others in similar jobs) into an income delta. Perhaps especially useful for people with spiky competence profiles.
  • I don't really know why i would care about the Category ID. It seems to be an unnecessary column. It is also confusing that it starts at 11 (not 1) when I sort in descending order.
  • I initially misinterpreted the "Entry Level Jobs" and "Post-Grad Jobs" as salaries (for long enough that i wondered whether something had gone screwy with your tool.) I don't know if the failure mode of not reading header text is common or not; if so, may want to display units or something in the table for clarity.
Comment author: Nanashi 08 June 2015 03:31:55PM 2 points [-]

Thanks for the feedback! Some specific notes:

Quartiles are good; I would be curious about deciles as well. Unfortunately my primary data source, the US Bureau of Labor & Statistics, only reports 10th percentile, 25th percentile, median, 75th percentile and 90th percentile. I'm working on creating two different views: the "simple" view which just has a few relevant numbers, and the "full" view which has all the relevant data.

When I mouseover a line on the salary vs. age graph, the numbers are shown with the lowest salary on top. This is visually disconcerting as the lowest salary line is the bottom-most one on the graph.

I've gotten a few pieces of feedback on this. This is the default for how the chart generator API I'm using creates the legend. I'll have to go in and update the code on that to reverse them.

It's a bit confusing that the y-axis on the salary vs. age graph rescales to the occupation, especially since the lines are shown "rising up" from the x-axis. If I see the lines go up, it unintuitively does not mean that the salary is higher.

Do you mean like when you are looking at Job A, and then move over to look at Job B? If so, would it be more useful if the graph just consistently showed, say, $20,000 a year as the minimum and, say, $200,000 a year as the maximum, regardless of occupation? (Or any other arbitrary min/max)

There seem to be lots of duplicate categories at the "Individual Job" level, so less unique rows fit on a screen. Might be an easy way to filter these out.

This is an annoying quirk of how the BLS quantifies different positions (i.e. many positions have two separate ID codes but the same underlying data.) Version 2 will purge any redundancies like this.

I'm confused whether "entry level" means "no degree" and "post-grad" means "bachelors"

I could be more clear on this. "Entry level" means "no degree or bachelor" and "post-grad" means "masters or doctorate or equivalent".

It would be nice to have a link on the "Individual Jobs" level to the definition of each job category used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

This has been updated. See below for further explanation:

How many years are you taking this from? Larger n makes things more robust but makes the data less relevant to the current job market.

This currently pulls from 2014 data. Version two will have the option to pull from several years and also will include a timeline to show whether salaries for a job are trending up or down.

I'd like to know the salaries of the top and bottom deciles for each job.

The "High Salary" and "Low Salary" from the individual job breakdown is actually the 90th decile and 10th decile, respectively. I just didn't scale those according to age in the chart itself.

I don't really know why i would care about the Category ID. It seems to be an unnecessary column. It is also confusing that it starts at 11 (not 1) when I sort in descending order.

Good point. At one point I had intended to use the category ID to link to the BLS's definition of the job. But then I forgot! I have updated this. I should probably have the field itself be something more useful than the ID though.

I initially misinterpreted the "Entry Level Jobs" and "Post-Grad Jobs" as salaries

I've updated that to be more clear

Comment author: Dorikka 09 June 2015 03:27:33AM 0 points [-]

Cool, glad to hear of the improvements.

Do you mean like when you are looking at Job A, and then move over to look at Job B? If so, would it be more useful if the graph just consistently showed, say, $20,000 a year as the minimum and, say, $200,000 a year as the maximum, regardless of occupation? (Or any other arbitrary min/max)

Yes, and I think that would work.

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