All of our guests on Salary Talk are winners. But this group of Carnegie Mellon University graduate students truly fits the bill, as they were named one of the grand prize winners of Challenge.gov's Equal Pay App Challenge.David Guarino and Rachel Koch are part of a team of developers who created www.closethewagegap.com, in response to the U.S. Department of Labor's call to action in January. The challenge was developed in conjunction with President Obama's Equal Pay Task Force, with the purpose of highlighting the discrepancy in pay between men and women. Although the Department of Labor has ... view article details

Thrill Builder! Slowly the car inches up the improbable incline, defying gravity, and propelled by unseen forces. As the roller coaster car gets to the crest of the hill and peers over the top at the twisted tracks and loop-the-loops that lie just ahead, you try to convince yourself that the person who designed this cruel contraption knows what he is doing. Relax. He does. Kent Seko originally wanted to be an architect. He rode roller coasters as a kid, but never thought about designing them until years later, when a friend who worked at Arrow Dynamics, Inc., a roller coaster design firm, talk... view article details

Apple is Swimming in Cash Late last month, Apple announced it has a mind-boggling $110 billion in cash reserves. Over at The Atlantic, a blogger decided to make sense of this information by translating the abstract sum into a concrete visual.Apple's cash reserves, it turns out, could fill 50 Olympic-sized swimming pools with $1 bills. I decided to take this logic a step further and look at how much space other sums of money would occupy. How much space would the average American household need to store its annual income? How many briefcases full of bills are needed to pay for a colleg... view article details

“Please don’t take this offer” reads the first line of Amazon’s “Pay to Quit” proposition. The rest of the page explains how current Amazon warehouse employees can pocket cold, hard cash if they walk away from their posts and never look back. “Never looking back” is really part of the deal – employees that accept “The Offer” can never work at any Amazon facility or subsidiary again in their lifetime. We’ve all heard of companies offering bonuses to their employees to incentivize certain behaviors (referring employees, staying at the company for amount of years, meeting sales goals, etc.), but... view article details

The gender wage gap is an issue we at Salary.com have covered extensively over the years, because we believe in equal pay for equal work regardless of who you are. So when the topic arose during the nationally televised Miss USA beauty pageant in Las Vegas earlier this week, our ears perked up immediately.Miss Utah (whose real name is Marissa Powell) was asked 'A recent report shows that in 40 percent of American families with children, women are the primary earners, yet they continue to earn less than men. What does this say about society?' Then she started talking and -- well, see for yourse... view article details