FRED · as of Aug 14
The Bag™
The Bag™ — Know your value. Get the bag.

Our definition

The bag is not the money. The bag is what you are actually owed for what you can actually do.

Most people are underpaid for a boring reason: the market cannot see what they have done, and neither can they. Work gets described in the language of the job you had rather than the capability you built, and a capability nobody can name is a capability nobody pays for.

Getting the bag is not luck and it is not hustle. It is knowing what you carry, knowing what it is worth, and being able to prove both to somebody who has never met you. That is the whole job of this application.

So it refuses to be a job board. A job board shows you what is posted. This shows you what is reachable — from the work you have already done, in the places you can actually be, at the money you actually need — and then shows its working, so you can disagree with it.

Built by its first user

This was built by somebody in the middle of a career move, for that career move. The first record in the database is his own, and every hard part of it was found by being on the wrong end of it.

Which is also the limit. A tool shaped around one career is a tool shaped around one kind of career — and the third person to use it was offended that it offered him work outside what he is licensed in. He was right. The whole engine assumed your next job is adjacent to your last one, which is true of open occupations and actively wrong for licensed ones, where the credential is a legal gate rather than a preference.

It knew when a role required something you lack. It had no way to say a role does not use something you hold. So every suggestion outside his licence arrived unlabelled, indistinguishable from one inside it — and being shown work that quietly discards four years and forty thousand dollars reads exactly the way it sounds.

Three users was enough to surface that. It surfaced as offence rather than silence, which was lucky — most people would have just stopped opening it.

None of that is fixed yet. It is written down, it is scoped, and it is named here rather than in a changelog nobody reads, because a tool that only tells you what it is good at is the thing this one exists not to be.

What it will not do

  • Make a claim it cannot trace

    Every sentence about you is built from a fact you supplied, and each one carries the id of that fact. A claim that cannot be attributed is rejected before it reaches a page — not softened, rejected.

  • Treat not knowing as bad news

    When the app has no evidence on something, it prints an em dash and drops that component from the blend, redistributing its weight. An unknown salary is not a low salary, and a 50 meaning "no idea" must never look like a 50 meaning "mediocre".

  • Project income it cannot evidence

    No "you could be earning" figures. A number the system cannot stand behind is exactly the number somebody quits a job over.

  • Flatter you

    It will tell you a route is a stretch, that a lane pays less than the one you are in, and that a plan does not clear the floor of what you already earn. A tool that only ever encourages is a brochure.

The reasoning behind every number is written out on how the numbers work.

The house

TASK Enterprises — Strategy, Execution, Excellence

The Bag™ is a TASK Enterprises product. Strategy, Execution, Excellence — in that order, because a strategy nobody executes is a document, and execution without excellence is effort you cannot point at. Get all three right and you have motion — and motion is the whole point. That is what this app is built to hand you.

Reach us

There is a person on the other end of this. Pick whichever fits and the subject line will be filled in for you.

Or plainly: tobianiekansmith@gmail.com

Know somebody who is worth more than they are being paid? Send them an invitation.