Comparing Salaries Bot

Inspiration

Our ultimate goal was to use a combination of public databases to help the public make informed decisions about their future in the current economy.

What it does

Our salary bot asks the user questions about their current salary, location and lifestyle and calculates their excess salary after cost of living in their chosen field and location. Based on this figure, the bot suggests whether or not a user should accept a job offer.

Design Process - Test Driven Development

Had plan for how we wanted the bot to look from a user’s point of view and built code with an end product and desired functionalities. We had a clear idea of how we wanted the end result to look before starting to write code, which helped make the design process more straightforward.

How we built it

We built this program using a combination of C++, JavaScript, the discord.js and git. First, we edited our databases to be more compatible; deleting irrelevant fields and altering formatting as needed before converting them to csv files. Internally, we read the data line by line, storing each "major" job description and its corresponding "sub" specific job titles and salaries per state. Each state held its own version of these job titles and salaries, and we were able to parse through this data and make calculations based on it in our main file. To create the bot, we....

Challenges we ran into

At first, we had trouble deciding how best to store and parse the databases. The files were comma separated, but the yearly salary figures had commas within them, and some job titles had internal commas as well. This was when we realized we could reformat the files itself to better fit our purposes, and replace spaces with dashes (-), and internal commas with colons (:).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are most proud of our teamwork and delegation during this project. We were able to use git efficiently to work on the same files concurrently, and never had a moment where we were forced to wait for one team member to finish their part before we could proceed.

What we learned

We learned how to use the discord API, as well as how to efficiently store data in usable formats.

What's next for Comparing Salaries Bot

In the future, we could add other, more complex factors to our collected data to make our suggestions accurate and specific to the user and their location. For example, we could specify the cost of living and average salaries down to the city. We could also incorporate more databases into our project; perhaps we could include housing prices and years of experience when calculating salary and living costs.