<prompt> Human: Seeing all of these front page questions about salary negotiation got me thinking. The first step of anyones advice is figure out the going rate for your industryexperiencelocale. Ok, sounds good, let me do that...wait. In this American society, money, and especially salary, is an inappropriate conversation piece except in close relationships. Googling XXX City YYY position salary will only get you sites like Glassdoor, where people tend to have a bit of an ego and everyone seems overpaid--not to mention it only seems to list the entire industry average, whether youre just starting out or have been working for 40 years. So, my dumb question to you all--how do you find an estimate of your local industry average for your level of experience that is worth a damn? Thank you!  <response>: Find a compensation analyst! We research salary info and have access to large databases which tell us market rates for certain jobs. Heres how it works: we submit the salary info of our employees we do not include names or IDs or anything like that to survey houses. We match the employees to a specific job and experience level and give it to the survey house. Other companies do the same. In turn, our company gets the averages for tons of positions and experience levels. If you can find someone with access to these databases, it is very useful. Otherwise, I would use the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as they are quite accurate and are not using self-reported data, so the salaries are not likely to be inflated. 