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I thought this was a joke comment but I went back after reading the comments and it’s now on the second page already.
It was at #3 for me and then suddenly demoted to the second page. It's pretty common for these touchy-YC threads.
I believe wage-fixing would require companies to agree to…fix wages. Having knowledge of average compensation is not inherently problematic. Firms are still able to decide to pay more or less than the prevailing wage.
RealPage also gave recommendations. Giving a salary range seems like the same thing.
I got access to Pave through one of my investors. Seeing the data made us set salaries and contractor rates higher, not lower. It’s like salary banding at big companies. It’s a framework for how much other people are paid at the same level, not a contract. HR will make it seem like a rule, but if you do spectacular work - you can always negotiate. Collusion requires an agreement between rivals that negatively disrupt…
I'm sure you practice what you preach and tell all your employees what their coworkers earn?
I am not a lawyer, but I believe the fundamental issue with RealPage is that by entering into a service agreement with them, you agree not to violate their price “recommendation” and so you are centralizing actual pricing power into a single entity.
I believe RealPage has some way to negotiate out of this standard deal but it’s not common.
Companies likely insist on staying within certain pay bands for a whole host of legal and HR reasons but they aren’t getting a specific salary from Pave that they are contractually obligated to use in their offer.
Well, I wouldn't mind getting my wage fixed, if that works both ways, down _and up_, because then I would be guaranteed to never earn less than average for my skill and experience. Assuming, that those things of course factor into the averaging. Person X with experience Y in position Z. However, something tells me, that there is a tendency towards the downwards direction and none towards wage increase. (Background: I…
Genuine question: What makes you believe that an employer would decide to pay you more when they notice that they're paying you less than other companies would? Why wouldn't they just think "Oh, neat, we got such a bargain!"
2) VCs are often the vector by which this all happens. They ask their portfolio companies to pull together the info for their employees, presumably submit it into the companies aggregating everything, and then the startup gets a copy of the recent data.
3) Even done the old way (Excel), the data was incredibly detailed. You can slice and dice by startup stage (series A vs series B vs seed), employee count, region, sector, etc to determine if you're paying market rates or not. This is particularly useful for growing startups, where the founders have no idea what to pay, say, a VP Marketing at their pre-revenue mobile gaming startup in Helsinki.
4) Obviously whether or not this is bad for employees themselves is debatable, but I think people are missing the point that these surveys are ALWAYS skewed UPWARDS due to the much higher volume of data from the large tech companies (because they have far more employees and tend to be offering significantly higher comp). So in practice, the impact is likely to RAISE wages at earlier stage startups who are competing for the same talent as later stage tech.
The fundamental difference between something like Pave or Radford is that, AFAIK, they are simply providing companies with information. I am not a lawyer, but I believe the fundamental issue with RealPage is that by entering into a service agreement with them, you agree not to violate their price “recommendation” and so you are centralizing actual pricing power into a single entity. I believe RealPage has some way to…
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unless you collude with other companies, doesn't seem like it is.
unless disclosed to employees and applicants this seems like de facto colluding. I always ask myself, as to the legality or ethics, would this survive review by a jury of my peers...
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Stochastic wage fixing is still wage fixing
unless you collude with other companies, doesn't seem like it is.
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If they’re all shooting for the 95th percentile and have up-to-date data then you certainly won’t have fixing; rather you’ll get insanely rapid wage inflation!
Yeah, it seems more like they'd all shoot for 45th percentile and say "We pay competitive wages" instead, slowly driving the wages down.