I’ve always been conflicted about pay transparency—that is, having everyone in the workforce know what everyone else is getting paid.

As a manager, I’ve found that this caused more problems than it was worth. I’ve counseled many an employee that chattering about pay was a losing proposition because, for the most part, knowing what others make rarely came to any good. Invariably, pay systems and salary scales are never 100 percent fair and equitable, and generally, workers knowing what their peers make seems to just irritate everyone. In other words, it creates all sorts of management issues, few of them positive.

However, as an employee (or prospective employee), I always wanted to know as much about the pay system, salary scales and individual wages as I could find out. Knowledge is power, and knowing what everyone is getting paid gives me more power to negotiate the best deal for myself.

The Internet has done a lot to give workers more information about salary levels, including such well-known sites as Salary.com and PayScale.com. Another one debuted this week: Glassdoor.com.

“It’s like a Zillow for jobs,” says a blog post on Good Morning Silicon Valley. “People who derive pleasure from finding out how much their neighbor paid for his house might be just as interested to know, for free, how much that neighbor makes, although the site doesn’t disclose names. Still, if you know he’s a software engineer for Google—and isn’t ‘So, what do you do?’ one of the first things you ask someone— you can get a pretty good idea by going to the site.”

So what makes Glassdoor different from other salary sites? “What’s different is that Glassdoor gathers content by asking users to submit their information in order to access other information,” says Good Morning Silicon Valley, “something the company’s press release calls the ‘give to get’ model. The site, which for now is starting with companies in the San Francisco Bay Area, may come in handy for job seekers and career hoppers. Besides finding out salary ranges, you can also look for reviews and ratings. It might temper your lust to work for Google, for example, because, as TechCrunch notes, ‘even at Google, it’s not all happy faces.’”

I don’t think much of Zillow’s ability to accurately measure real estate values, and it is very possible that Glassdoor will have the same issues with self-reported salary information—that it gets wildly inflated. I’d love to get Ann Bares over at the Compensation Force blog to give her read on Glassdoor versus Salary.com or any of the other sites out there, but I’m with TechCrunch when it notes, “If Glassdoor can get people to fess up about their salaries and the inner workings of their companies, the Internet’s culture of transparency will claim another stronghold.”