It sounds like companies can easily use this to collude against employee wages and benefits.
A common tactic is, if a company knows what you're making, they'll try to hold your earnings as close as possible to something only slightly better than any potential raise you'd be entitled to at your current employer, and you'll get the same tactic from multiple potential employers.
If you're only entitled to a 3% raise, organizations with access to this information might only ever offer 5%, and refuse to go higher.
With this information in the picture, lower salaries mysteriously stay low, even for some lateral moves, depending on who you are and what they can dig up on you.
The real issue is some people suck at negotiation and past salaries will tell companies that.
If I have a guardian who pays my rent so that i can take 6months to high ball offers to finally find a job that will pay me a high wage does that mean I'm 'better' at negotiating?
Now at 70% a 10% raise might not seem like a huge deal as your still under market, but it only takes 7 of those to double your salary. And a 15-20% pay raise to jump to the next job is hardly unreasonable. Do those every ~3 years and you will massive difference inside a decade.
Remember, the median salary is just that people really do get paid more than it.
It hardly is THAT hard to get some competing offers. And if you can't be bothered, I guess you don't really want it anyway?
Interviews scheduled during work hours, already working multiple jobs, burnout, lack of openings in your field
> It hardly is THAT hard to get some competing offers. And if you can't be bothered, I guess you don't really want it anyway?
This sentiment signals bias
Competing offers? For what? Serving coffee? Washing dishes? DBA? CTO?
If you offer anyone with a job more money my guess is 100% would take the extra cash, so just because they fail to find, or look, for more cash how does it imply they 'don't really want it anyway'?
While your sentiments are presumably bias-free?
What I meant by signalling bias was I felt the gp was allowing bias about the issue cloud reasoning as to the nuance of the issue
If my comment seemed to imply that I deny nuance then I failed to communicate my point
Which was: sometimes pay is a result of other factors other than either a want or pure negotiation
Thanks, I think that's a much better criticism of the original argument
For existing jobs? Inertia is probably a factor there, as well as fear of the unknown. When you've got something to loose it's different than having nothing to loose.
In my experience, that is not how it plays out.
Candidate A is living at home with his parents in some kind of GP paradise, able to give 100% of his time to interviewing.
Candidate B is working a stable but not fulfilling job, and interviewing on his lunch break / evening / morning to make it work.
Candidate B is going to be perceived as the higher value candidate, and all else being equal get more offers. Some of this is a value bias. You interview A and go "wow, he's not working now, I wonder what is wrong with him?"... you interview B and go "wow, he is a stable guy that can hold a job, he seems a slightly better fit".
Thinking that interviewing is some kind of magic trivia question that you need to devote full time study to is silly. Perhaps some jobs are like that, but I am not sure I would want to work there.
I have been on interviews where this is part of a boiler plate release/waiver for a background check, prior to receiving an offer letter, and on the same form, you are made to list prior employers, and fill in the salary box for each.
And if you don't like it, good luck taking legal action, right? Whether something is legal or illegal, most people lack the resources to even entertain the idea of challenging legality.
The only path that seems to effectively buffer this practice is working with recruiting agencies, which do a better job of negotiating, but do still collect this information. And although recruiters might only be capable of telling you whether you have real leverage for your salary demands, whether the recruiter is being paid by you or the employer is a clue as to who they're working for.
Hint: if you aren't paying them out of pocket, recruiters aren't actually working for you, even if they seem really pleasant.
Then again, I'm fortunate to have highly sought skills and years of experience, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that's the only way to get fair pay.
Edit: I should point out that I'm not making anything to brag about by silicon valley standards, but I also live somewhere with much, much lower cost of living and salaries in general, and make the high end of what's common out here.
2. Make up a figure -- you have a lot of leeway to do so truthfully by adding or not adding various benefits to the number you state.
Lenders want to "verify employment" and I can imagine a service where big employers report who is working for them to an agency, allowing lenders to query the agency to check employment.
What I doubt is that employers report salary data to Equifax. I'm an employer and I've never heard of this. I'm good friends with (well...married to) someone who worked in this field and tells me it is highly illegal to divulge non-anonymized salary data to any entity other than the IRS.
I've been trained how to answer calls from lenders asking about our employees (I can answer "yes that person works for us", and provide no other information, period).
The idea that Equifax built a giant database of everyone's salary data is completely at odds with everything I've ever heard as a person running a business with employees.
Also...if they had this data why am I always asked to provide my salary on loan applications?
I think that transparency could make for a more fair process and also level negotiation since the compensation would then be about the role and how good someone is actually rated, rather than about how much they happened to have been paid in the past or how good they are about lying about it.
Secrecy is good in many places, but I can't think of why it is good for tax returns, asides from perhaps allowing criminals to more easily target those with high incomes?
In some poor communities, there's a strong ethic of sharing good fortune. That's good in many ways, but also makes it hard to climb out of poverty. More generally, lots of people have unbounded spending habits, and some will put a lot of pressure on friends/family if they find out they have any savings.
The downside in the private sector is that employees will find out how much they are getting screwed around with. Double downside when those employees figure out why.
I prefer for every random passerby to know full details of everything I do.