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Ask HN: Why is Pave legal?
341–350 of 523 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is Pave legal?
#342Competitors making similar price adjustments or salary adjustments based on seeing each other's public announcements or sharing data is legal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_collusion That's why it's "legal tacit collusion" when one leading law firm announces salary increases and other law firms immediately match it : https://www.reuters.com/legal/legalindustry/large-law-firms-... That type of salary matching ha…
Huh, this tacit collusion being legal thing is mind boggling. The law firm example seems imperfect though. Publicly announcing that you’re raising salaries isn’t really the same as internally sharing that data and choosing to set the same salary based on that.
Information is either internally confidential or it's not. If the latter then it's very reasonable to expect other firms to take actions based on that information.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Pave legal?
#343As described, it is a fair ways away from what RealPage is doing. Specifically: * RealPage sells raising rents, not just market info. * RealPage pressures clients into taking their higher rents. * RealPage also pressure clients to refuse to rent at lower rates for their own narrow economic interest - in other words, they actively seek to circumvent competitive pressure to keep rents high. (edit: to clarify, I mean th…
RealPage pressures clients
To be clear, they're not "pressuring" them, they simply drop clients as a rule who don't use their suggested rent prices at least 80% of the time.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Pave legal?
#344Companies like Radford have been doing this for decades and are used by pretty much everyone, Pave is just a more efficient version of the same game.
Beyond salary, there is a whole industry of data brokers who get transactional data from individual participants in an industry vertical (CPG, Health Insurance, Salary, etc), aggregate it with their competitors and present it back to those participants as benchmarks. Management Consulting likewise is a way to launder getting strategic insight into your competitors from a third-party.
There's a long long history--especially when a lot of information was more opaque than today--when companies quietly shared a bunch of information with middlemen because they needed that information from other companies to function and the middlemen skimmed some of the the take.
Even price sheets that we would consider very rudimentary today were part of that.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Pave legal?
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32216332
The singular of anecdote is not data. Getting hit by lightning is also unlikely, but it happens to thousands of people every year. That doesn't mean I'll be flying a kite in a thunderstorm, but it also doesn't mean that you should lock yourself in a bunker the moment the sky turns grey. Most of the taboo around this is cultural, not retributive.
Firing people at will includes firing them because you got the feeling they may be behaving in any way in any situation perhaps in conflict to any request you made. Odds are someone won't get fired for stealing office supplies and in at will place they may be more often fired for misunderstandings related to a misperception where they don't come clean on something they never did.
That there was no way to sue the company in that example is a demonstration that the employee lacked any right to break any taboo.
As such there are teeth anywhere that is at will for any request whether it is reasonable or not and whether it relates to a taboo the employee may be expected to have or not.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Pave legal?
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
You make an excellent argument here for tight regulation of the industry.
… and the usage? Most highly-paid people have no idea how much privilege this affords them. You wonder why so many businesses are nice to you? It’s because they’ve already looked you up and know you’ve got a high income and are a millionaire. Write a personal check for your next automobile? Sure thing, you can drive it off the lot a few minutes later. They won’t even bother cashing the check for a week or two. Try do…
If you get your personal data report, you'll see that it tells you who looked you up. It is not every business you've worked with. It is not even every background check that has been done on you.
I'm not saying that rich people do not have privilege - they do. But it isn't because your local car dealer looked up your earnings data.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Pave legal?
#347I have never heard of Pave before, but this just sounds like yet another copy of Equifax's "The Work Number" [1]. Basically, HR at many companies gives your salary and employment history data to Equifax, who then sells access to the information to certain parties with supposed need to access it, including potential and current employers and creditors. This report is likely one of the most invasive consumer files out…
I just signed up to see what they have on me.
I love that they have ALL my personal info, but I can't create an account with a password longer than 16 characters.. Why the heck are they not storing the hash?
Great security.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Pave legal?
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
… and the usage? Most highly-paid people have no idea how much privilege this affords them. You wonder why so many businesses are nice to you? It’s because they’ve already looked you up and know you’ve got a high income and are a millionaire. Write a personal check for your next automobile? Sure thing, you can drive it off the lot a few minutes later. They won’t even bother cashing the check for a week or two. Try do…
> Write a personal check for your next automobile? Personal check? What year is this?!? :-)
It's USA and the context is banking, so the current year is still somewhere in the 1970s.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Pave legal?
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
They can request it, but can't stop you if you do. You can also request them to do likewise, with similar recourse. A request is nothing without teeth behind it.
Teeth like employment at-will?
Basically the only advantage an employee can have in this sort of negotiation is not needing to be employed by that company.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Pave legal?
#350They provide benchmarks, before them was Radford. They’re just taking a tech-first approach of an age old product.