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Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

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571–580 of 805 posts

Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s hard to look at what capitalism has become today and say much positive about it. I say this as someone who works in investment finance where we sell semi-rich semi-professional investors the opportunity to become richer by building solar and wind power plants, and selling them when they are fully operational. Which is about as positive as it gets in capitalism in my experience, considering we’re actually…

> So how do you change the world without capitalism? The answer is probably in taxing the rich, but good luck with that. That would work for a year or two, until you had egalitarianized the money so everybody had the same amount. Then what? And what would be the effect of that?

>> So how do you change the world without capitalism? The answer is probably in taxing the rich, but good luck with that.

> That would work for a year or two, until you had egalitarianized the money so everybody had the same amount. Then what? And what would be the effect of that?

The only way to tax wealthy people is to remove all differences in wealth??

Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#572
post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to be a tool aimed at employers, enabling them to compare and verify salary data of potential candidates. It adds to the information imbalance already present and doesn't seem to be empowering or helping employees unless they actively share their numbers - an option they always had.

> an option they always had No, they didn't. Many contracts explicitly forbid it and not every employee has the knowledge, courage or frankly financial stability to go against their employer.

Is that really true? I can't believe an employer could forbid discussing salary. That seem's completely illegal to me.

Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I submit the myprivacy.equifax.com validation it hangs at "Processing..." indefinitely. #AbolishCreditAgencies

Credit, bank checking (ChexSystems), and personal information aggregators like Lexis Nexis and Thomson Reuters Clear ought to be abolished or curbed indeed. I hate to bring trans politics into this. I'm sure that's the last thing anybody wants to hear about right now. However we are a class of people whose sexuality can be unfairly identified by these databases.

If this helps, me and my team use LX and some product from TR and for our purposes sex by itself is not a strong driver for anything. That said, I absolutely agree with your initial statement. There is way too much information available just from those two sources and those should be restricted as much as possible.

As other users noted, I have personally zero issue when it is an individual case ( my personal misgivings start somewhere where it moves to a political wedge issue ).

Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#574

I checked earlier today and yep, my employer is selling my data and future earnings potential to the company that is infamous for poor data security. A confounding factor is that as a hiring manager, and at least for all the hiring decisions I have been involved in, I know we did not use this to check candidates. So what's the upside? EDIT: ADP Workforcenow appears to do this automatically. I'm curious to find out if…

I've seen how this works before, and what happens is all the companies submit their data to equifax, equifax then goes and creates a set of "profiles" for example "Junior software engineer", take all the data for employees with software engineer related titles and less than 3 years of experience, remove outliers and sell the result to employers as "salary band information". The result is that your employer gets a num…

Pave (https://www.pave.com/) is another startup doing this

Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#575
post #495

Not 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.

Isn't distributed collusion just collusion by another name? I keep hearing the argument that you can't trick the law by technological means. This seems to be an attempt at doing that.

No post body was provided.

Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s hard to look at what capitalism has become today and say much positive about it. I say this as someone who works in investment finance where we sell semi-rich semi-professional investors the opportunity to become richer by building solar and wind power plants, and selling them when they are fully operational. Which is about as positive as it gets in capitalism in my experience, considering we’re actually…

I'm a foreigner with a Danish job and I very much like the country. It's refreshingly different. Money is still very important but I think infinitely less so compared to the states; it isn't what motivates people. It's also interesting to note that Denmark has negative interest rates and anyone with more than 100k DKK is really quite punished for keeping it in the bank. I'm glad that your company provides a vehicle f…

I’m not going to name my employer, but I agree that it’s an excellent vessel for the upper middle class to invest their money.

I wish more entrepreneurs saw the value in semi-professional and maybe even small time investors and green energy investment. Exactly because it gives people more opportunities when they rank up the 100k Danish kroner to reach the negative interest, and green energy is still in a place where everyone can have an impact and see nice returns.

Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#577
What's funny about this type of data is how outdated it can be. When I used to have CapitalOne (I think it was them) their app showed a more elaborate credit report which included job history and other things. My job listed was a job I haven't worked at for nearly a decade. I can't imagine how inacurate this is. On the other hand, the data in aggregate might be useful to determine what kinds of jobs people have in different regions or something to that effect. I certainly hope the data is not shared with full doxing information to people like Facebook, that is horrific to think Facebook has your credit score attached to your profile.

Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s hard to look at what capitalism has become today and say much positive about it. I say this as someone who works in investment finance where we sell semi-rich semi-professional investors the opportunity to become richer by building solar and wind power plants, and selling them when they are fully operational. Which is about as positive as it gets in capitalism in my experience, considering we’re actually…

People who bash capitalism after the last century of expansion should just be considered negationists at this point. Sure it is not perfect but it's infinitely better than any other economic model available.

That was sort of my point, but I may have drowned it in a little too much negativity.

I do however think we should work with capitalism as a model though. It’s quite obvious to me that it needs a strong political regulator to make sure it doesn’t run amok. I’m not against inequality for the sake of being against it, but I do recognise that too much inequality and too few opportunities for a lot of folks is potentially dangerous.

Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current oligopoly of the big three credit bureaus is a travesty and needs substantial reform. That being said, abolishing the concept of a consumer credit report entirely is a terrible idea. It is a fact that different people simply present different risks to a lender in their likelihood of default. Having actual data about a person's previous repayment history is extremely predictive of their future default prob…

> Used wisely When does that ever happen? Lending and borrowing are always at the root of every economic crisis. National debt of countries are already astronomically large and will only keep growing. Just abolish credit as well. If it means the economy will grow slower, so be it.

>If it means the economy will grow slower, so be it.

This is easy for someone to say who already lives a comfortable life.

Credit is simply a more efficient use of wealth. Without credit, money stored is money that is unused, and thus money denied to everyone else. Everyone is poorer as a result because you have millions of people willing to exchange their goods and services but are blocked because they lack a medium of exchange that is being hoarded by the wealthy.

Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I submit the myprivacy.equifax.com validation it hangs at "Processing..." indefinitely. #AbolishCreditAgencies

Credit, bank checking (ChexSystems), and personal information aggregators like Lexis Nexis and Thomson Reuters Clear ought to be abolished or curbed indeed. I hate to bring trans politics into this. I'm sure that's the last thing anybody wants to hear about right now. However we are a class of people whose sexuality can be unfairly identified by these databases.

> However we are a class of people whose sexuality can be unfairly identified by these databases.

Good perspective and thanks for sharing it. I am curious about your choice of words though. You said "sexuality" and not "gender identity". Is there some reason why? I've always thought of the term sexuality to be how you feel about others. Or is that what you meant here?

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