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Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

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Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#241

Post by heavyset_go »

season2episode3 wrote: post #232
kmonsen wrote: post #193

It looks like creditkarma loves, loves, loves to check this data. Except for the bank holding my mortgage only credit karma has checked it. I'm OK with the bank checking, if this system exists clearly bank handing out 1 million should be allowed to access it (my preferred outcome would be the system did not exist, or if it did be run by the government who already have all the data.

It's not just you -- CreditKarma checked my credit monthly for a long time in 2019-2020, until I changed addresses. I have never used a CK product. Obviously it's too late now to do anything about it but the existence of this site and the fact that Equifax is still in business makes me incredibly irritated.

A lot of consumer banking products have CreditKarma integration by default as a perk or for your "convenience". Digging through one of my checking account's apps shows that there are credit score previews with a button to activate CreditKarma and receive detailed credit breakdowns. I'm guessing that credit preview is provided by CK and not my bank, given the CK branding.

Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#242

Post by luckydata »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #218
redanddead wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it not always like this?

Not sure if you lurked much before creating an account. This is not my first account - I've been here since 2014. HN took a strong left turn a couple years ago. Before that it leaned more tech, and before that more founder/entrepreneurial. If I had to guess, it comes from this change in user distribution as HN is a decent way to keep a pulse on tech and IC's simply have more labor concerns. (this is a weakly held tak…

I think a lot of tech workers thought they were an elite of irreplaceable specialists that would never experience power imbalance. That's how my peers were thinking (out loud) about 10 years ago in San Francisco, and loudly opposing the mere idea we needed unions.

They then started having kids, running into HR issues and all of a sudden everyone got a real harsh wake up call and understood what their real place in life is.

The kind of "told you so" that doesn't feel particularly satisfying.

Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#243

Post by sillysaurusx »

geoduck14 wrote: post #195
jf wrote: post #30

Learning that this website exists, and then finding detailed and accurate information in my record is what convinced me to start sharing my salary data with my peers. As I see it, this database is a breach of an implicit social contract between me and the companies that I work for. Since my employers apparently have no issues sharing my salary with their peers, I see no reason not to do the same with my peers.

So.... how much do you make?

$200/hr as a full time ML consultant.

Contracting is interesting. You make more, but there’s more downside. No sick days.

Though the last 3 month contract was kind enough to calculate the start and end dates to be exactly 12 work weeks (60 work days, skipping holidays) which was a nice Jedi mind trick. I still don’t get paid for Christmas, but somehow it doesn’t feel like I’m losing a day since the end date was extended by a day to compensate. But of course that only makes sense if you don’t think too carefully about it. :)

I dunno. It’s stressful but I like the freedom. But you live with a sword over your head; salaried employees don’t.

Plus now my salary isn’t in a database somewhere since it’s not salary. blows raspberry

Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#244

Post by nmfisher »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #152
snambi wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If all employees share their salary information with each other, it becomes a headache for the employer. Each employee may quote the other person's salary demanding a raise. This is the reason behind the "keep your data confidential" idea.

I don't disagree with this. My experience though is that a more common reason it is a headache for some managers if their reports are sharing salary information is that they don't know how to have a conversation with someone about their performance. In particular their less than great performance. So employee B comes in and says, "Hey employee A makes 15% more than I do and we have the same job! I even have more expe…

Yeah, this explains a lot of it. Lots of people think it's unfair that Jim or Pam makes more than they do, but noone ever is blunt with them that "you're making less because you're not as good as them". Even worse are where they've never been told "you're lucky you still even have a job because I was close to firing you for poor performance".

To be fair, there are also the interesting niche cases where someone is equally capable as Jim/Pam, but they're just not as good at selling themselves. Both cases usually more applicable to larger companies.

Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#245

Post by bcrosby95 »

speedgoose wrote: post #239

Meanwhile in Norway, every citizen can check the income, wealth, and taxes statements of other citizens and companies. https://www.skatteetaten.no/en/forms/search-the-tax-lists/

Which is fine. The problem is asymmetric information. Employers have access to this data, but employees don't.

Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#246

Post by zjs »

_3u10 wrote: post #170

It’s doubtful it comes from your employer, it more likely comes from credit applications.

I requested my report using the link in the OP. The only place Equifax could have gotten this information, with this granularity, is my employer. It's not just a ballpark number or anything like that; it's detailed salary information for the last 10 years, broken down by category (salary, bonus, equity). For the past year, they have granular information for each pay period, including both gross and net.

Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#247

Post by ChuckMcM »

throwawayboise wrote: post #180
ChuckMcM wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree with this. My experience though is that a more common reason it is a headache for some managers if their reports are sharing salary information is that they don't know how to have a conversation with someone about their performance. In particular their less than great performance. So employee B comes in and says, "Hey employee A makes 15% more than I do and we have the same job! I even have more expe…

That's not gaslighting. It's just lying.

Fair enough.

For context, and again I don't disagree here, I was using it in the sense of saying something that may be technically 'true' (didn't get the raise I hoped for) & (went to bat for you) but in context would give the opposite impression than the one you got.

Consider a company that has a 'mandatory fire the bottom 10%' and a manager who doesn't want to go through the effort to hire someone and so argues that they should be allowed to keep employee A even though they are their lowest rated employee (that would be 'going to bat for you') and it would easy to imagine the manager wasn't happy with their own raise, and "it's been a tough year" ? How? Tough to get stuff done with under performing employees or tough for the company?

So lying? Yes, all by omission. And of course some particularly bad managers just straight up make things up.

Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#248

Post by MichaelBurge »

ouEight12 wrote: post #226
MichaelBurge wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mortgag…

> 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. 1) Where do I make friends with people who have such large piles of cash laying around they're willing to front me stacks large enough so I can lie and claim it as income on my taxes to inflate the size of the loan I can get? Multiple years in a row? 2) Once I claim it as inc…

I don't want to derail the thread into discussing exact mechanics. I just think if most people underwrote loans according to their intuition, they'd lose a lot of money. And a tax return is controlled by the same person applying for the mortgage, so is less valuable than the same information split among two people.

Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#249

Post by luckydata »

varenc wrote: post #88
BeefySwain wrote: post #21

NOTE: 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…

well there's no law that forces them to make it easy.
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