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Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

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Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#591
post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm currently interviewing for a new role, and I've already been told my expected salary is too low for me to be a senior engineer. Hardly my fault I didn't know to ask for a higher amount?! Will obviously be challenging this if I get an offer...

just work for 4 months and job hop.

If they play games, play them too.

Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#592

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…

We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate. . . We seldom, indeed, hear of this combination, because it is the usual, and one may say, the natural state of things, which nobody ever hears of.

- Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#593

Employer 1: Salary only. None of my bonuses or RSUs are included. Bonuses were over half my comp. RSUs were higher than salary at least one year. Employer 2: Salary and bonus only (large tech co; over half my comp is rsus). Employer 3: totally wrong. On the plus side, I now understand why I've occasionally been low-balled and then called a liar when I explain why the offer isn't compelling...

That's a feature though. Who wants to work somewhere like that?

Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#594
post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the issue 'just' that they misgender trans people? That alone is already shitty of course. Or is the issue also that it makes later 'verification' by these agencies more difficult if the recorded gender does not match the apparent gender of the person?

The issue is that they have a field for prior names/AKA/aliases, and it's typically immutable. You can watch a person's face change as they read the report.

Whose face to you mean? The person being deadnamed, or the person reading the list of names and realizing the person opposite them is trans?

It seems to me that, for the purposes of understanding your legal history it makes sense to keep track of someone's deadname at such an agency. If someone accrued massive debt (or massive positive credit) under their deadname, then that still reflects on them. It sucks to have it recorded that one is trans, or to hear a deadname, but I don't see how it can be avoided.

Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#595

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…

The U.S. financial system worked just fine before credit scores became a thing in 1989.

This comment outs you as someone who thinks in Twitter/Reddit memes.

Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their customers are happy. And that means Congress is kept happy. You are not their customer and Congress doesn't care if you are happy.

This is what crony capitalism looks like.

Can you elaborate? Who is crony to whom here? Everyone in the exchange gives the information willingly... people here talk a lot about salary sharing, so here you go, your employer is doing salary sharing with other employers. Someone else facilitates it and makes money. What's wrong with that?

I know why I am going to freeze my data, I don't want employers to know my past salaries - but that's anti-capitalist, I am removing information from the market to give myself an edge in negotiations, and to propagate inequality. Equifax don't have to do it on "capitalist" principles, but they allow me to do that... the only crony thing is the opt-out form I guess ;)

Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#597
I work at a company that's been in talks with Equifax, Experian and a new player (Blend) to provide employment and income verification data. Selling employee data and then spinning it as anything other than a short-term money grab is one of my least favorite things about my current employer.

That said, those who are worried about Equifax should probably rather be more worried about Experian. In our experience Experian is a) bidding more aggressively and b) has worse security practices. On the other hand, the Equifax talks I've been involved in demonstrate some of the changes Equifax has made to reduce risk of leaking sensitive data.

Equifax won't store any PII in our case. We store the data and provide them with an index file that is both encrypted and only contains internal identifiers and a hashed SSN (shared RSA key). Even if an attacker got their hands on all 3 things (decryption key, file and shared RSA hash key), they'd still only be able to know which SSNs are in our data-set, and nothing about those people. Everything else goes through our API, so the flow goes something like:

1. Equifax checks their hash file to see if we have their ssn 2. If so, Equifax authenticates against our API using their client id and secret and then makes their request for the employment/income information.

There are different calls they can make based on how much data they actually need to fulfill whatever the request is (e.g. if you're trying to verify employment you don't need the income data).

This is in contrast to Experian, who as a first step wanted a plaintext flat file containing a full dump of employment and income information for the last 7 years of everybody in our system...

Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#598
post #450

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 think one should not forget that Denmark's society is mostly homogenous. When you have a vastly dominant, culturally homogenous group, it's relatively easy to trust and support one another. In a highly diverse country like the US, where the average New Yorker or new immigrant will have a completely different culture and world view from the average Joe in Missouri, and that's just two examples out of many, it's very…

I hate hearing this argument. Simply because I'm living proof of the opposite: I'm not a native Swede, I immigrated here, I integrated into society by looking at its values, identifying with most of them and sharing those forward. I became a Swede and it has nothing to do with being born Nordic or into a homogeneous culture.

This hand-waving argument on why America is exceptional is really misplaced. America has issues because it has a big population and manages everything in terms of money. Money is the religion of the USA, it's the ideology of the country and when the only metric you use to gauge anything is on how much will be spent and how much return it will give in monetary terms, you end up with a deeply fractured web of perverse incentives and misplaced cooperation to juggle one metric: money.

America was built in a culture of mistrust, it came from inception and it never fought it. Distrust from centralised government, distrust in others (hence having guns, you don't trust you'll be protected from others so you need to take matters into your hands), distrust in commercial relationships, in personal relationships. It makes society feels fake and shallow, like everyone is just playing a part. There is just a lack of communal sense in everything regarding American culture, it's all about individualism and the self.

Sweden may be seen as a communal society but it's really not that simple, I like to say that Sweden is the most communal individualistic country I've been to, people still value self-reliance and individualism, while also keeping in mind a holistic view of society.

I wish Americans could see past this exceptionalism and move towards building something based on trust, it'd be a force to be reckoned with. Right now it's just a huge waste of bickering and pettiness all around, every single issue in America is amplified by this huge egoistic mindset.

Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to think this, but I'm not sure the evidence actually supports it. The UK has similar levels of immigration and overseas-born citizens as Scandi countries, but nowhere near their levels of social cohesion/social democracy. We were more similar < 1980, but I think the rhetoric from right wing corporate and billionaire-owned press, and now the internet, has eroded it to a large degree.

The UK is like Sweden, but Denmark (and Finland) are much more homogenous. And Sweden only retains social trust because it was still homogenous 20 years ago, most people don't realize they essentially live in Rio.

What the fuck are you talking about?

I'm a naturalised Swede, coming originally from Brazil, so I have plenty of hands-on experience to both be offended as to ask what the fuck are you talking about because it's a hugely racist take on multiple layers.

Let me know exactly your points on how Sweden is essentially Rio, I'd love to hear it.

Re: Tell HN: Salary data is for sale

#600

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…

10-12% is higher than my credit card APR is that really what hard money loans are going for now?!

The US average is a above 16%.
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