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Employers use your personal data to figure out the lowest salary you'll accept

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Re: Employers use your personal data to figure out the lowest salary you'll accept

#61

Post by ralph84 »

Ferret7446 wrote: post #25
canpan wrote: post #8

I wonder if the winning game becomes your own boss and tiny companies. I want to do the jump, but lack of courage, good ideas, sales skills and a very good salary still holding me back (open for suggestions). But if the very good salary would go away, the scales tip instantly.

That was always the "winning game". Only problem is that's a lot of work. The more things change, the more they stay the same; if you want more money, work harder. People who don't want to work harder complain that other people make more money because they either don't understand or are in denial about the amount of work the people they envy put in. Yes there are exceptions. No pointing out exceptions won't help you,…

Work harder on the right things. Digging holes in your backyard with a shovel is hard work but nobody is going to pay you for it.

Re: Employers use your personal data to figure out the lowest salary you'll accept

#62

Post by kortilla »

jmyeet wrote: post #13

[flagged]

This might hold water if US software engineers weren’t significantly better off than SWEs in any other country.

You paint this bleak picture of someone agreeing to scraps to avoid starvation but the numbers are quite clear that working in software puts you way ahead of any of these countries with software labor unions.

You’ll rightly need pretty significant evidence to get people on board with a system that appears to have worse outcomes.

It’s not “literally life or death”. We have unemployment benefits, we have quite low unemployment rates and people can go work in other industries if they want to get paid like a software developer anywhere else in the world.

Re: Employers use your personal data to figure out the lowest salary you'll accept

#63

Post by roenxi »

darth_avocado wrote: post #53
roenxi wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might want to rethink your example if the counterparty offers you 50% more than you wanted then you reject the deal; it makes adding the framing a bit pointless because it is clear you weren't ever going to accept the job for $200k. And you're underestimating how much of an impact the broader market is having on Meta's thinking in this scenario. If your silver tongue or secret number was a factor here then everyo…

> You might want to rethink your example if the counterparty offers you 50% more than you wanted then you reject the deal I rejected the deal because I got even more elsewhere. My framing still stands. In a case when only one employer has the information, sure they’re better served by offering me more money. But in an environment where all of them have the information, this no longer is a problem. At a system level,…

But if Meta wanted to hire you and had perfect information, it sounds like they'd discover they needed to offer you salaries in the $350-400k range? That sounds like it might be good for you.

The story you seem to have told is they just wasted time low-balling you because they didn't have enough information to offer a competitive salary. You weren't ever going to settle for $250k, they didn't have enough leverage and they lacked the information to identify that. I'm not sure how you're seeing this story as one where more information to Meta leads to them offering you a lower salary. It seems like you'd have rejected them regardless unless they went higher.

All the employers knowing that you'd have "taken the job even if they offered $200K" seems to be completely useless to them. They're locked in an auction and the market price for your time is nowhere near $200k.

Re: Employers use your personal data to figure out the lowest salary you'll accept

#64

Post by bjt12345 »

anonymars wrote: post #2

One (more) thing to opt out of: Freeze Your Data - The Work Number https://employees.theworknumber.com/employee-data-freeze As I understand it, payroll whores your salary out to Equifax*, who then pimps it to others * Yeah, that one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Equifax_data_breach

The thing about this is that there still exist clauses in employment contracts requiring pay secrecy by employees.

So, theoretically some employees have a requirement upon them to fill this in.

Re: Employers use your personal data to figure out the lowest salary you'll accept

#67

Post by roncesvalles »

darth_avocado wrote: post #34
roenxi wrote: post #3

I'm not seeing how this matters, they were already doing that - the market is a big auction to work out the overlap between lowest salary employees will work for and the highest salary employers will offer. In that process employees also use data to figure out the highest salary that will be offered. The thing forcing employers to pay the salary they do is that if they offer less someone else will gazump them for the…

> the overlap between lowest salary employees will work for and the highest salary employers will offer There is still an element of unknown because both parties do not know each others numbers, which allows employees to still negotiate. You are now talking about information asymmetry where the party with the information will now have all the bargaining power. When I went from working a $150K job to getting offers fr…

>Now imagine a world where meta knows exactly how much I make and all the other information about me. I’d probably get a minor bump over my previous salary.

Not necessarily. People don't change companies for just any value greater than current TC. There is a big cost to switching companies -- it's going to shake up your lifestyle, you might lose some relationships, reset your company-internal network and reputation, reset technical and organization context etc. Possibly even moving your home (even if a new job is in the same city, people often move to be closer to it anyway).

As a matter of policy I wouldn't switch companies for less than a 30% monetary premium over my current TC (I'm a SWE), and other soft criteria like type of work and company culture. In my early career I've gotten 50-100% premiums each time I made a hop.

Re: Employers use your personal data to figure out the lowest salary you'll accept

#70

Post by WalterBright »

JCTheDenthog wrote: post #43
WalterBright wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The internet has information on what salaries a company pays. One would be foolish to not look it up before negotiating compensation.

Definitely not for all companies let alone all positions.

You can get it from similarly positioned positions. For a simple example, you can google average starting salaries for your major. You can submit your resume to AI and ask it what your salary should be. You can go to a recruiter, who makes money by getting you as high a salary as possible (and they do know their business and their clients).

I've been on both sides of the negotiating table. The idea that the employer dictates terms is not reality.

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