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Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

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Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#421

Post by IshKebab »

rkagerer wrote: post #404

Why on earth would employers be motivated to sell this data or provide consent to their payroll processors to disclose it? What's in it for them? I can't imagine the per-employee revenue it brings in would be anywhere near the same magnitude of order as the FTE cost. So it's a drop in the bucket to their bottom line. Meanwhile the reputational risk and PR blowback once found out could be severe (I certainly would nev…

Lots of companies give the information away in return for reliable information about market salary rates. I'm not sure why they'd need to provide such detailed information, and why they'd give it to Equifax.

Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#423

Post by tinco »

xfz wrote: post #394
kube-system wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Credit card companies do ask for permission to pull financial information from brokers when you sign up.

What if you say no? It's not really consent if declining affects your chances of getting credit or, worse, employment.

Yes it is, this is literally how credit works. You convince them you're credit worthy, they give you credit. If you don't like the particular information a credit company needs to trust you, then you try a different credit company.

I don't follow how declining a credit company would affect your employment, is there something I'm missing there?

Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#424

Post by fragmede »

randmeerkat wrote: post #261
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…

If society was a meritocracy this might be true, but I’ve seen plenty of engineers paid significantly more than peers that were far better than them. At the end of the day compensation is really about politics and not performance.

Exactly. There's a difference between an difficult and awkward conversation that goes "Sorry B, A is better than you at writing code", but that's different from "Sorry B, A is honestly a worse coder than you across the board, but they negotiated a bit better at the start, so we pay them more."

Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#426

Post by beembeem »

bradlys wrote: post #55

Can confirm it is 100% correct. Employed in Washington and California. All numbers were correct for the ones I cared about - more or less. They missed three jobs and the dates were fucked up for a few - but is pretty upsetting. Definitely should be illegal. They even had pay period dates and everything for my current job. Including dates I was doing 401k. Like - what the fuck - why is my employer selling that informa…

Employers are outsourcing what should be an internal HR function of employment verification. Except in specific cases regarding government contractors, there is no legal requirement for employers to provide this data to a third party like TWN.

Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#428

Post by gzer0 »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #233
dhosek wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More accurately where you were born and when your SSN was issued (my brothers who are four years older than me got their SSNs at the same time I did). Some of us older folks were born in an era in which you didn't automatically get an SSN along with the birth certificate. And then there are people who weren't born in the US so will have had their SSN not matching birth year. I also think it's less than 5 of the 9 dig…

The first three digits are allocated in blocks to each state.

https://www.ssa.gov/employer/stateweb.htm

I'm guessing this is not a good thing if I am under the [NOT ISSUED] category but am definitely in the issued category?

Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#429

Post by franga2000 »

buro9 wrote: post #348

Salaries are not a secret. Ergo, as employees... Share your salaries. Knowledge is power and if the only entities that have power from knowing salaries are your employers then you have no power. And for people hiring, make hiring decisions that are defensible, equal, and would survive full transparency. Act as if every employee is already sharing salary info, for if they aren't today they will be soon.

Fully agree, but selling information to a for-profit company behind people's backs is not the way to ensure transparency.

Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#430

Post by DavidPeiffer »

dumpsterdiver wrote: post #205

Honest question for people who are concerned about this - why is it troubling? If another company wants to hire you, obviously they'll need to offer stronger compensation than you currently have to convince you to ditch a comfortable position. The fact that employers want employees to stay quiet about their compensation so they don't have to start handing out raises doesn't seem like a good reason to be concerned abo…

There have been stories about people who graduated in 2008 who had an awful time finding a job despite getting "useful" degrees because the economy was in shambles. Their salaries _x_ years out of school were notably lower than similar groups a bit older or younger. Many of them took any job they could get.

Now think about someone who got a job in their degree field, but at a 30% reduced salary than typical (because that's the only way a company could justify hiring someone). If each successive company knows the current salary of their future employee and offers 15% more to be compelling, the employee is still far behind an employee following the same path starting 2 years earlier/later. Add in the opaque nature of salary bands that are basically never widely disclosed to employees and a really rough narrative is formed for a group of people.

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