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Comment by DaiPlusPlus | Hacker News Reader

> Every year the HR departments in Vancouver and Toronto do a hush-hush survey among each other and fix their salaries to the exact same level - maybe 2% but usually closer to 1% higher than the previous year.

Collusion like that would almost certainly be illegal - do you have a source for that?

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There is an entire industry around the collection of and aggregation of salary, benefits, and perk information. Every year your HR department pays a firm, fills out these surveys, and a few months later gets a report on salary ranges and perks for their industry.

If you think about it then it makes perfect sense, how else do businesses know they're offering competitive salaries, benefits, and perks?

Source: I consulted for a company that does these surveys and aggregates the results.

> how else do businesses know they're offering competitive salaries, benefits, and perks?

I would assume from how many applicants negotiate - or outright reject - their job-offers

But yeah - I forgot about the consulting companies that do the survey thing.

But we have our own! https://www.levels.fyi/

Interestingly, I haven’t ever seen actual candidate data used to determine compensation. Ie companies almost never use a candidate demanding more to actually change anything. It’s all based on these “professional comp surveyors” as the parent has described.

Unrelated: I'm sure we have our own fantasies of potential employers (or past-employers) begging us to work for them with them increasing their offers or offering other benefits - but I'm curious if that's ever actually happened to anyone.

Negotiations for big, non-standard benefits (custom health plan, greater retirement match) are practically impossible.

Negotiations for a custom salary are entirely normal IME.

You should absolutely negotiate salary. Saving a few ten thousands a year on salary for a department doesn't really mean that much to your manager or to the company, compared to filling that slot in the org chart.

It is but it happens all the time. Google, Facebook, Amazon, and the rest all have been caught doing it on a large scale. Most of them even agreed not to hire from each others employee pool.

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