Last week I motivated the need for The Negotiator, a tool to ease the uncomfortable process of salary negotiations. The idea is that up-to-date information along with targeted experience-based salary predictions empowers those of us who feel a little bit less than excited about the prospect of negotiating one’s own salary.
The following details the project goals in terms of application input and output and also how I envision implementing that in the project code.
Project Goal:
- Input: The user provides occupation, location and number of years of experience.
- Output: The Negotiator returns a targeted salary along with a fair salary range.
Project Implementation:
- Access the Bureau of Labor Statistics [API](http://www.bls.gov/developers/).
- Access salary data for requested information (occupation and location).
- Return to the recommender engine input the mean and min/max values for salary (or median, standard deviation, etc.)
- Report values and visualize information to user.
- Calculate a targeted salary for user by incorporating number of years of experience. (This can be done by simply assuming the salaries are normally distributed and have a one-to-one mapping for years of experience and salary.)
- Create a normal distribution with mean or median equal to the salary mean and spread equal to the range or standard deviation of reported salaries.
- This range is mapped as the min equals to zero years of experience and the max equals 20 years of experience.
- (Optional)
- Widgets
- Application
- Is 20 years fair?
