Having hopped jobs every 1-2 years for the last decade, I don't think I've ever been honest when asked my current salary. Never bit me. It would be quite shocking (would it be legal?) if an offer was rescinded based on this data.
Tell HN: Salary data is for sale
111–120 of 805 posts
Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale
#112How much does it cost to get a list of everyone's salary at my company?
They asked for almost no information to get this data. If you just go find the data leak where everyone's name + SSN is - and then tie it to someone's current address then that's all you'll need.
Only things I noticed you needed to request info was: first + Last, SSN, DOB, current address
Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale
#113How is this even legal? How do we make this no longer possible? It seems like we need a new law to stop this unapproved sharing.
Did we ever agree to this?
Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale
#114if this is really that - this is clearly evidence of collusion amongst employers with indirect pressure on them to keep salalries at a certain level
Exactly this. There's a reason using past salary history in employment is illegal in California.
Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale
#115NOTE: It is possible to freeze access to your employment data here: https://employees.theworknumber.com/employee-data-freeze That being said, it doesn't stop employers from continuing to hand Equifax your data on a gold platter, and therefore does nothing to protect you from the inevitable data breach that will result in Equifax being required to give everyone affected $0.36 or one year of free credit monitoring.
Wow placing a freeze requires filling out a PDF form, attaching a scan of your ID, and then sending it in over email, mail, or fax. The PDF lacks built in form fields you can type in. The extra friction is probably a feature: https://assets.equifax.com/wfs/theworknumber/assets/twn_Empl... (the exif data on that PDF shows the name of the employee that created it and that they used Word 2010...) The Equifax CCPA reques…
When I submit the myprivacy.equifax.com validation it hangs at "Processing..." indefinitely. #AbolishCreditAgencies
Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale
#116Yes, it's concerning, but let's be realistic about this. I'm surprised HN readers are so surprised by this! On a scale of Room 641A ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A ) to carriers divulging location when you enter somebody's phone number ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17081684 ), I'd say this is 2/10 bad. This really has nothing to do with employers colluding and trying to keep salaries low. Instead,…
While salary data is available on h1bdata.info - I never found it showing RSUs or any equity of the like. Whereas this clearly shows how much I am getting from RSUs. It didn't show any equity stake but - holy crap - it was disturbing that my RSUs showed up so obviously. Very easy to figure out how much I was awarded.
Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ask HR how you should verify your employment and salary for a mortgage application. I know my company intentionally shares since they ask you to use the work number to send a verification to the lender.
The whole "verify your salary with employer" process is BS. Lenders can verify income by requesting your tax returns, and N recent pay stubs (source: I own my employer and have verified income this way, since obviously they are not going to call myself up and ask me to verify my own income). This is only about reducing their verification costs. If there needs to be a giant database of everyone's income, the governmen…
If you verify with tax returns, it would be easy to borrow money from a friend and count it as income every year just for loan qualification. And then borrow more money from a bank, wait 6 months for seasoning, and use it as down payment to buy real estate.
And if the loan gets sold to the government, it needs to meet government underwriting criteria and the lender has no free will. Especially for residential mortgages: No private business cares about 3% interest on a loan, they sell those to the government and make money on the origination fees.
If you get a hard money loan, they'll only ask for tax stubs but you'll also pay 10-12% interest. If the buy is really good sometimes they don't even care about taxes or ability to repay - they get your equity if you default so who cares if you make a dumb decision? It's mainly the government loans where they really try to avoid defaults.
Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale
#118"To log in, enter your SSN, date of birth, home address, and" No way, no how.
Might as well do it so you can freeze it, they already have the info
Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale
#119Not just Equifax.
There are any number of consultancies that collect salary (and other compensation/benefits) data from many companies and then share that information with all their clients.
It's used as a method of putting downward pressure on salaries without explicitly colluding.
Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they pulled salary info after making an offer, then this is likely qualified as verification of data that prospective employee submitted. They can probably revoke that offer if one provided misleading info during application.
That's some shady behavior though. The whole point of the law is to prevent companies from penalizing employees based on prior salaries. Wouldn't be surprising if Google was finding excuses to retract offers based on seeing that they "overbid" on someone's comp. If anyone has had suspicious stuff like this happen, it sounds like it'd make a great lawsuit. Would be nice if some journalist(s) made a big stink out of Go…
Well I'm pretty sure I did consent to it, at least.