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Comment by nowyoudont | Hacker News Reader

I guess my issue with all the “it’s just info” arguments is this. Employers inherently have an information advantage in salary negotiations. A tool like Pave drastically increases that imbalance.

How am I ever going to realistically negotiate salary vs a company that has this level of information (even during performance reviews)? And frankly something that worries me is, what level of data are they getting? If it’s tied to your HR system, does it get anonymized performance reviews? If every company can perfectly profile me and place me in an expected salary, I as the employee give up all my power. That’s strictly bad for me

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Your salary negotiation point speaks more to a call for open salary data, which many people have been arguing for.

You're missing a lot with your second point though. If a company has excellent salary data and can put in you a band, then it also means that you have better grounds to argue for raises when you gain experience, or argue if you are underpaid, or even find jobs at companies who intentionally pay a higher percentile to market as a way to attract better talent.

In contrast, if we all operate 100% blind with no data, as many here seem to want, it would lead to all sorts of unfair wage situations with people doing equivalent jobs earning vastly different amounts. This sort of environment is biased towards more aggressive people who have strong social skills when it comes to negotiation. In fact, you see exactly this when companies choose not to buy data like this to set their bands.

I super agree that fully open salary data would be amazing.

On the second point, I would argue that you have very little ability to determine when you’ve gained enough experience as an employee to argue for a raise. Whereas an employer with access to Pave has a _ton_ of ability to determine whether you have or have not. Yours is based entirely on personal experience and feel, plus maybe talking to a few coworkers. Theirs is based on aggregated data from thousands of employees

In many tech companies there is a skill matrix and competency attached to jobs, and these are tied to compensation bands. Often these skill matrices are given to employees too. When someone complains that they are not being paid fairly or that they are working at a higher level, these skill matrices are used by management to double check that the right hiring/raise decisions were made.

Mistakes get made and not all managers are the same, but believe it or not there are companies where senior management does try for consistency and fairness in how they set compensation. These companies also often have internal studies run that check for biases or oddities in compensation. E.g. which departments are above the standards, which are below, which are not progressing juniors enough. Without data all this is impossible. You can't build a fair, objective, and especially not transparent system without data.

>What level of data are they getting? If it’s tied to your HR system, does it get anonymized performance reviews?

Pave user here. Absolutely not. It's anonymised comp data. Essentially salaries and job titles only.

Whilst I do agree with your point that data like this should be publicly available, I'm not sure I understand how it gives employers a negotiation advantage?

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