How to figure out what you're worth

Getty ImagesEver wonder how much you'd earn if you changed jobs or careers? Curious about what your colleagues make, what your boss makes or what other people doing jobs like yours earn? Now there's a way to find out. Or at least a way to get awfully close.

A new site, Glassdoor.com, has taken a lot of the mystery out of who makes what. Hop onto the site and plug in the name of a company and a position and then see what comes up. If the employer is one for which Glassdoor.com doesn't yet have data, then you'll have to be satisfied with looking at a company where you think the pay is comparable. You can also put an occupation title into the search bar and get some answers about what that job function commands at a variety of different companies in different cities.

Knowledge is worth a lot in all kinds of negotiations -- from deciding on a job offer to figuring out if you're being offered a proper annual review -- and with information like this, you can be armed before you go into those conversations. Glassdoor.com also posts employee reviews on different employers, which can be juicy reading.

Some companies have been moving towards making salary information more transparent, but until more get on the bandwagon, tools like Glassdoor.com are the best way to gauge your worth. And most employers are still pretty far away from baring the details on who makes what. (Penelope Trunk provides some excellent insights on why employers might want to keep salary information under wraps.)

According to CEO Robert Hohman, about 210,000 users have contributed salary and employer reviews to Glassdoor.com so far, representing 23,000 companies in 100 different countries. That said, your satisfaction with the site will vary based on the field you're researching. The site is flush with jobs in accounting, finance, technology, and consulting. So if you're a software engineer in Silicon Valley, you'll find a wealth of information. On the other hand, when I plugged in "journalist" and "New York," nothing came up. The same was true for "blogger." When I tried again with "journalist" and no city, I got eight listings. "Writer" brought up 254 listings, so it seems like you need to play around a bit. Hohman says that company is working hard to gather more users from underrepresented fields.

Which brings us to the issue of the reliability of the data. The information on the site is contributed voluntarily by users, who gain access to the site's data by reporting in data about one of their own jobs. But what about those who aren't honest? Or worse, those who are deliberately trying to provide incorrect information about a given job or company. Hohman says that Glassdoor.com has procedures in place to monitor bogus entries and that the site rejects about 15% of all contributions.

Glassdoor.com isn't the first to organize data like this. PayScale and Salary.com, also handy sites, do something similar. Those sites don't give you identifiable company names so you miss out on the insider details you get on Glassdoor.com. If you're in negotiating mode, I'd recommend using all the sites to try to get as much information as possible.

One word of caution: once you visit Glassdoor.com, you might have a hard time leaving as it's fairly addictive. After all, don't we all really want to know what everyone is making?