Employers use your personal data to figure out the lowest salary you'll accept
marketwatch.com
marketwatch.com
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 data breach should have been reason enough to ban Equifax and force them to destroy their data. But that can only be done when the government works for the people, instead of money.
The Work Number is in fact Equifax.
I am now a partner in a consultancy. Despite my prior comments, we have still not yet gotten off Gusto. Pasted from a July 2024 e-mail Gusto sent me:
We are making updates to our Payroll Terms of Service to address relevant laws and regulations and include information about new products and features, including our new employment and income verification feature. The updated terms will go into effect for current customers on July 31, 2024.
You can review the full updated terms here.
The new employment and income verification feature
When your employees apply for loans, credit cards, or public aid they may be required to provide proof of employment and income and, as the employer, you often need to manually provide verifications during the approval process. With this update, you can save time and help your employees get faster access by automating employment and income verifications through our new partnership with The Work Number®.
No action is needed from you. This benefit is included in your current Gusto payroll subscription and there are no additional fees. As the employer, you can choose to turn off this new feature in the Settings tab at any time. The feature will be available on July 31, 2024. Learn more >
Thank you for choosing Gusto!
I (angrily) opted my company out, but I'm probably the only partner in the company who would have gone out of their way to do that.
Equifax on the other hand claims:
> Social Services - When government agencies can't verify your information, you may have to wait longer to start receiving benefits.
So, theoretically some employees have a requirement upon them to fill this in.
Such clauses are inane beyond the legality of it.
You have to be rich to defend your rights now.
Equifax Workforce Solutions (provider of The Work Number) has received your employee request communication, but additional information described below is required to fulfill this request.
We will be following up with a secure email to obtain the below requested documents:
Proof of Identity:
Provide a copy of one of the following (must include current/legal name):
- Driver's License (must be current) - Paystubs (must be dated within 60 days) - State or Government Identification Card (must be current) - Social Security Card - Military Identification Card - Passport (must be issued from U.S.A. and be current) - W-2 or 1099 Form (most current year) - Birth Certificate
Proof of Address:
If you are requesting an Employment Data Report (EDR) or selected ‘Mail’ as your preferred method of contact,provide a copy of one of the following (must include current mailing address and be issued within the past 60 days)
- Driver's License (must be current) - Paystub - W-2 or 1099 Form (most current year) - Utility Bill (phone, water, gas, electric, trash or sewer, etc.) - Housing Rental Agreement or Mortgage document - your name must be listed on the document
For Identity Theft Block Requests, along with Proof of Identity and Proof of Address (if applicable), please provide your identity theft report and designation of items to be blocked:
- Identity Theft Report (police report, FTC Identity Theft Report, Police report, or United States Postal Inspection Service)
For Human Trafficking Victim Block Requests ONLY, along with Proof of Identity and Proof of Address (if applicable), please provide victim determination documentation (as described below), and designation of items to be blocked.
Victim Determination Documentation:
Provide a copy of one of the following victim determination documentation confirming that you were a victim of human trafficking, such as:
- Determinations made by federal, state, tribal, or local governments, government agencies, or law enforcement - Determinations by non-governmental entities or task forces authorized by a governmental agency to make such a determination - Self-attestation signed or certified by such governmental agency or non-governmental entity - Determination by court in a case where a central issue is whether you are a victim of human trafficking. (Court documents can be made up of several documents from the court case that together show that the court accepted as true or finding no genuine dispute that you were a victim of human trafficking.)
We will be following up with a secure email to obtain the requested documents.
Data Investigation Team Equifax Workforce Solutions
Obviously. On the other hand, your e ployer sharing your personal data against your knowledge or your will isn’t an incredible invasion of your privacy. Everything is fine citizen, move along and quit asking questions or thinking.
mailing passport scans to the guys who left Struts unpatched for 147M SSNs. what could go wrong.
"secure email". I expect these data will be turn up somewhere in a few years, maybe from a data breach or some other shenigans.
Also, to prevent them from sharing the information, you need to give them even more information. Disgusting that this is allowed.
I value my financial privacy as well, but when I go to someone to ask to borrow a million dollars to buy a house, it seems reasonable that I’m going to have to give them some information pertinent to assuring them I’m likely to and capable of paying them back.
W2s are perfectly fine.
If by doing this, can employers legally discriminate against you?
I wasn't sure how they could figure this out at the time until someone later pointed out that many corporations do a credit history check on you as part of the background check. This gives them access to past compensation.
The information asymmetry here is, as with much of hiring, pretty bonkers when they had both the current and past comp history during negotiations when you have just yours. You might also have the comp history of your friends too (if you share) but that's still tiny compared to the corporations.
0 - this was in NYC where it's now no longer allowed.
Sounds like HR mythology.
Yeah, "all bets are off" once you are a FTE.
I know of many people who were fired the day their guarantee elapsed- I can’t think of a single person on a guarantee who was fired before then. To put this into context, we had a guy on a guarantee on our prop desk who came in for one week after he joined, put on a (massively winning) trade that got him enough to get his guarantee and then literally didn’t set foot in the office for the rest of the year[1] until the day he came in to collect his bonus and resign/be fired.
[1] And it’s not like he was working from home because people in trading were (for compliance reasons) not allowed to work from home unless there was an emergency like a terrorist incident where the trading floor was closed.
The correct answer is: ALWAYS lie about your past compensation. It's the only way to get forward, one way or the other.
e.g. let's say you sue and then win: that's now in the public record (which any new hiring company can see).
- My current comp is X, but that's not what I am worth to you.
- I've done my research, and someone with my experience is worth Y. I expect at least Y.
You set your salary expectations with your opening bid instead of letting them make the opening bid. It's also contingent on you having done your research =)
I am unable to dísclose that information.
And anyway, if you’re not in a state that has banned employers from asking for salary information, the recruiter always has the option of shit-canning your application for being non-responsive.
Collectively battling this is good, but individually no one wants to because its personally high risk (legal costs, deter future employers hiring you) and low reward (some settlement that won't change your life).
No lie, skirt the irrelevant info
Large companies often share a lot of details too, such as yearly raises, bonuses, weekly rates, etc. Still, it is often inaccurate. For example, I have worked freelance extensively under my name (DBA) and llc and none of it is there.
You can pull your record if you want. If your employer uses workday, they almost certainly share every paystub with theworknumber.
You can freeze your data: https://employees.theworknumber.com/employee-data-freeze
HOWEVER, if you do so, many companies won't proceed with an offer until you unfreeze.
You can go to the agency yourself, prove your identity, and see all your salary history.
I knew the USA has poor data protection law, though the very idea that companies can legally share such personal information is truly mind boggling.
Why on earth aren't people doing something about this?
There are data sources for this info but I don’t think it’s technically a credit report.
Regarding The Work Number: you have the right to see your own report and it's worthwhile to do so. And it's scary. A lot of the information is usually incomplete and/or full of holes. I can't believe anyone would base a decision on this data.
i dream of phone calls costing the entity placing the call some significant-at-scale price, perhaps a dime, and bulk rate physical junkmail needing full postage.
Once in a while they want to see a bank statement or two showing actually paycheck deposits, but I only ever saw that on a mortgage. Once for the car loan they asked to see a balance or two via bank statement. So I showed them a bank account sitting around the $$ for the vehicle loan.
I tend to just avoid loans if at all possible now though.
where is this?
you don't have or keep the title until the bank sees you paid off the loan, in every instance i've seen.
That might work: you'd have bought the car, from the point of view of VW and your DMV, so the DMV sends you the title, not Visa.
Is this different from what you mean?
This is why you shouldn't trust anyone who sells you on the idea that the ability to negotiate your own deals against large corporations is a feature and not a bug.
The information asymmetry, plus the difference in legal fire power & wherewithal to withstand a drawn out negotiation, will always put you at a disadvantage.
It seems like base salary would be easy to track, but other benefits would be much harder.
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.
Now I am her part-time personal assistant which has taken a big load off her plate and reduced her stress significantly. A lot of this work is clerical: writing emails, grants, curriculum/lessons (she's a teacher), ordering supplies, working with spreadsheets, doing misc. graphic design and other office work. I also take care of the household, finances (mostly) and pets. In my spare time I pursue my lifelong passions (writing, game design, and programming), but with each of these my focus has been channeling those passions into generating income. This is not a requirement of my soft-retirement, but rather a choice I made to create balance between us.
Overall, we are much happier and fulfilled and have managed to carve out a life where we work meaner and leaner without huge sacrifices. In reality, it feels like we are financially better off than we were before.
I'd like to do something like this but everything that has to do with kids is both too expensive and too unpredictable for lean living to be an achievable goal.
I guess it must be nice not living in high col areas.
- how old are they? If the poster is ~60, likely has savings and may even have Social Security income. If they worked as (say) a police officer for 20 years, they may have pension income. A 47-year-old former military officer could reasonably have kids at home and also pension income from the military.
- Many people inherit houses (most houses are eventually inherited). Most sell them, but it can be a viable choice to just move into an inherited house to zero out housing expense. OR one could inherit a house that is >> valuable than one's own, such that selling the inherited house allows one to pay off one's own house.
- Location. The Discourse typically divides between HCOL and LCOL, but ignores that in both there are also people who spend much less than the average. In NYC the average home price is ~$850k, but there are today listings for 3BR homes in the low $200s (<$1,500/mo).
And of course these are stackable. One could have a military pension and buy a cheaper place and have a buffer from an inheritance. (None of this is uncommon.)
Not to mention that the professional prestige itself in an academic profession gives your family a lot of status that other people usually try to attain by buying expensive stuff.
Even in the fanciest neighborhoods, nobody cares if a Princeton Professor drives a 20 years old Volvo.
Are you financially better off or does it only feel that way?
If you were actually better off, why mention feelings?
Sentiment is an important barometer in this case.
So it is going to be a feeling. Is their smaller income going much farther now in how it benefits them, if so they feel better-off
I feel this fucking form of slavery as well hard.
How sorry can life be?
I do think AI and robotics will usher in a much more abundant world in the future. It's unclear how we navigate that - economically, politically, socially.
As you're likely to be in the US, you could always watch the Mike Rowe Dirty Jobs back catalog.
I think the burden of proof is on you to prove that the same number of people would be interested in wiping butts and fixing mains lines in snow storms if they weren't paid for it. To me this seems unbelievable and naive on its face, but I'm willing to keep an open mind if you have some evidence.
I generally think people who believe these jobs would be done without some kind of incentive have never worked them before. They suck. Sometimes jobs really do suck, but they still need doing.
For what it's worth, I don't mind a bit of higher dimensional data reduction when processing raw multi channel data, or geophysical world modelling (magnetic fields, gravity, radiometrics, etc).
I'm pro "everyone cleans their own shit" but the meaning of a garbage truck driver could immense compared to a honest hedge fund manager or a VC Patagonia vest.
Cleaning time of our own shit hopefully won't be a full time job. We'll just figure out the ones creating too much shit and educate them as a society :D
Apologies for a fb reel, but its the easiest way to share.
>> I do think AI and robotics will usher in a much more abundant world in the future. It's unclear how we navigate that - economically, politically, socially.
Delusional optimism. If AI and robotics take over, the only effect will be another wave of layoffs and unemployed, not even the willingness to unblock toilets or wipe butts will save you from homelessness and destitution. We're already on the way to Victorian era poverty, if robots take the shit jobs too, we're back to Oliver Twist: please sir, can I have some more ... tokens?
However if it happens so fast, and so many of us are impacted, I have to believe that will impact how we vote.
How many days per month are you willing to pick up trash, sit in a fire station, or teach elementary school?
It’s not slavery (if you) that other people won’t give you their output without payment. In fact, it’s closer to being slavery in the other direction if they have to work and you get the benefits of their output without payment…
This sounds a lot like you've been conditioned to think there can't be an alternative to the current system. Even if I don't know what a better system would be, I can absolutely imagine that there are better options than what we've got. We should all want that and push for that and ask ourselves what it might be until we find it.
I can tell you this much about what I think would be part of that better system: we wouldn't leave people to sleep on the streets and we wouldn't have for-profit healthcare.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
Perhaps it is your own point of view of seeing everything as an ownership problem that has you looking out from inside a too-small box.
I think you'd do well to learn more about how slaves were treated before making these comparisons. Have you been whipped until your flesh opened and had salt, lime juice, and peppers rubbed in the wounds because you messed up at work, where you are also forced to lived?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Thistlewood#Treatment_o...
Yes there are exceptions. No pointing out exceptions won't help you, though it might make you temporarily feel better about yourself.
No. Individual states can refuse Medicaid expansion, but that does not have any bearing on the health insurance marketplace / premium tax credit ("subsidies"), which states cannot opt out of.
The truth of the matter is that employers pay a humongous share of the health insurance bill, and if you shop directly, you will pay that 100% on your own.
You do have to put in a little more effort, but as an employer you can build a hybrid plan and contract with certain networks, and lower your bill tremendously.
How does ICHRA fix that? What's this "contracting with certain networks" you're referring to?
1. Longer hours at work
2. Same hours working but adding time learning
3. Ruthless optimization of time at work.
4. Working smarter (which probably means learning new skills).
5. Doing stuff that makes you uncomfortable. E.g. honest feedback, applying 2 levels above current, hand up to lead messy project etc.
I assure you, I have never in my life worked 20 times harder than someone making minimum wage.
There is no such thing as knowledge work that takes that much out of you. Sure, thinking hard and making choices all day will exhaust you, but you won't stop moving at age 55 because your body was literally used up for pennies to make someone else wealthy.
If you fly business class, you are the elite making your wealth by skimming from people doing the real Labor. Your wealth is enabled by a paper and some writing. You contribute nothing.
The person responsible for designing the process that thousands of franchises use probably does make a lot of money.
You could argue that the value is in the entertaining filming/acting/story telling etc, but if the videos are about digging holes then I think it's valid to say someone is paying you to dig holes.
Any other system of incentives would be insane.
Things are different if you're e.g. a lawyer and have billable hours.
Maybe this doesn't apply to your case, but how would you measure outputs of say product development, or any data related project. Lot's of things don't have a good measure of output before the thing is done. Maybe your product / analysis improves profitability by 10x or maybe it was a flop and lost money.
Tangential, but I'm also seeing the quality of measures going down, with AI it seems that the number of [emails|code|analysis] produced is again a good measure.
Measuring outputs or inputs (hard work) is always hard. Did someone get the thing that was asked done both quickly and correctly? Do they do this consistently?
I also find inputs harder to measure because someone could be in the office 12 hours/day, but on Facebook the whole time. They could also just spin their wheels doing 'fake' work.
Pick two.
Some things just aren't very hard to make.
It's crazy how many times I have to explain this to people, and it's usually when they ask me for a raise.
If I were to start my own business it would have to be a product. I have plenty of interesting projects that I work on in my free time, but I'm not sure any of them are monetizable, or at least not monetizable enough for a venture capitalist to throw money at me (especially since most of them do not involve AI). I could probably think of something that could be monetizable if I really tried but if I don't actually enjoy the work I'm doing on the side for fun then I'm probably not going to do a particularly good job on it.
Though even if I did have some brilliant project that I could sell, I have no idea how to go about finding VC investors. And even if I knew how to find these investors, I think I would ultimately be too afraid to actually commit to it.
Increasingly it's seeming that I will probably not be worth billions of dollars in my lifetime, for no other reasons than I'm too much of a coward and I'm too discriminating with what I actually work on. Sometimes it depresses me to think about it, but hard to feel too sad for myself when I still have a high salary job that involves me staring at a computer screen all day.
I can't tell if you're wildly underestimating how many circumstances are outside of your control or just have an extremely high opinion of how much of an outlier you are (or maybe this isn't meant seriously and just went over my head), but I think that there are vanishingly few people (if any) in the world whose only impediments to a high likelihood of becoming a billionaire are self-imposed. I don't think that even extremely smart and charismatic people are particularly likely to do that. For every one that reaches that level of wealth, there are far more who try and fail, and it's not always because they weren't willing to work on shady things or weren't smart enough; some factors are just beyond the ability of an individual human to overcome, and you might just be lucky or unlucky.
I was just saying that I am too much of a coward to actually even attempt to make my own business.
No worries, I'm pretty bad at being able to recognize humor over text even when it's done well, so I legitimately can't tell the difference between whether it's on my end or yours! And if it is on your end, it's certainly still a more palatable character trait than the amount of ego needed to say it seriously.
There probably is some truth to that, and it can understandably come off as me not listening or being mindful to things people say to me because they think I'm blowing it off, even when it's more of just how I deal with things. My wife, being pretty awesome in many ways, realized this pretty early on and thus more or less always understood that when I make a smartass comment even for serious topics, I'm not really trying to make light of it as much as its just how I cope with things.
Anyway, yeah, I'm sarcastic a lot of the time and I realize that that doesn't always come through with text.
It's more obvious in verbal communication because of course it would be easy to tell by the tone of my voice that I'm being sarcastic.
If some of your projects are monetizable, couldn't you move forward without VC help?
Perhaps related, why do you need to be worth billions of dollars? I feel your visions for what you want your future self to be are highly unrealistic and you're probably setting yourself up for a lot of disappointment and unhappiness.
Sorry for the bluntness, but I think one could be happy on a lot less.
I don’t think anything I have right now is very monetizable; most of the fun stuff I work on now ends up being formal methods stuff, which is cool but hard to make any money with.
I guess what I was saying is that I think I am ultimately think I am too cowardly to just go for it and make my own company. I don’t think I am capable of purposely avoiding income for N months for a project to pick up.
Building a successful set of tiny companies is very hard. Unless you get lucky with the exact right idea, execution, and market timing it’s really hard to build a single business that pays as well as our tech jobs do. Building multiple companies is even harder.
I think everyone sees the survivorship bias examples like the levels.io guy or a few of the app developers who got rich and thinks it must be easy because their businesses were simple. The indie hacker communities are filled with people trying to follow in their footsteps and not getting anywhere despite years of hard work. The levels.io success story is not something that is easily replicated because his signups depend so heavily on his huge Twitter presence, where he pushes his sites under the guise of friendly information sharing. People without Twitter audiences try all the time to replicate his success and then wonder why they’re not getting signups like he does.
Most countries used to be hereditary dictatorships ("kingdoms") just a few hundred years ago, then people picked up rifles (and guillotines) and changed that. Now, since we already have some semblance of democracy at the top layer of power, maybe we could revolutionize the lower layers without the risks inherent to picking up rifles.
I don't see why we should be controlled by sociopaths[0] 8 hours a day, quite often against our interests.
---
The other part of the solution is automatically and continuously redistributing ownership of the company according to hours worked and skill level. This of course has to be required by law, otherwise those sociopaths at the top have so much leverage that if you ask for anything other than money during negotiation, you'll get laughed out of the room.
[0]: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
You will be in trouble if that person left their last job because they were unhappy about pay or if the value you are giving is lower than some other company is willing to pay.
They will leave pretty soon in both cases.
Or even worse, they might be in a hurry to find a job for some reason, then they will accept but see the job as temporary.
Would be interesting to know how this actually effects job market.
As far as I know there are websites for employees to declare how much their employers are paying them. Also would be interesting to know how that actually effects job market.
I didn't see this before but would be cool to have a website to see how much money people around me are paying for rent too.
It is like salary transparency, that misteriously enough never led to low paying folks being better compensated, but by flattening out compensation for everyone who is not upper management by the lowest common.
Here in Sweden, your tax filings are public information; companies can just ask the government what you made last year. I have no idea if they actually do, though, and the data will be somewhat obfuscated if you have extra income on the side.
I assume such situations occur often in Sweden where it's really awkward if you want to hang out with a crowd from lower social class because they know your earnings.
You don't have to be in Sweden to have a pretty good idea within a few minutes of talking to someone, of what the ballpark for their earnings is.
Your social class is written all over your face, your clothes, your manners, your manner of speaking, the company you keep, the hobbies you have, where and how you spend your time...
This is not true for lots of software developers who grew up poor but got rich. I wear shitty clothes, live in the ghetto, my hobbies are video games, cycling, and porn, and when speaking I code-switch easily. If anything, it's the other way around - when I'm around city folks with their mannerisms and discussions about veganism I clearly see I don't fit and I come across as a neanderthal despite my income being around top 10%.
I moved out before finishing school (I did finish living on my own) and working 40 - 60 hours next to school - while being officially below the poverty line. This went on during most of my university days.
When starting a job I had to live frugally, because it had a really shitty salary.
Nowadays I am in the top 5 - 2 percent of earners (depending on how you calculate/count.
I still wear regular clothes most of the time. I nearly never eat out. I spend on things people do not really see.
So yeah - I can relate. Especially when being socially thrown together with the kind of people you describe. 100% second this.
Turns out, they were dead serious. For the rest of the evening we had some boring-ass shitty activities and insufferable conversations. 0/10 I checked out early and never showed up again.
It's not always too difficult to tell if someone is a software engineer from their behaviour and interests alone.
But yes, it's possible you are sufficiently outside the grain that you don't have any obvious tells about your social class. And, of course, a dedicated confidence man could fake enough of them to fool enough people enough of the time.
But that would be the exception that would prove the rule. And even if they were publicly available, you have to be deeply pathological to be looking up the tax records of your acquaintances, I can't expect that to be a regular problem in Sweden.
I save more than most and spend more on things like gear and vacation. Nobody knows unless I allow it to be known. Among my peers (coworkers and friends from places I've lived), I easily live in the area w the most poverty. I prefer to keep my income level private. If it were known, it would likely change the nature of my relationships. Worst would be the nonproft where I occasionally help the same ~20 people, most in awful financial situations.
So OP is - for eastern European standards (depending on which country specifically) very well off. Talking as if 100k€ was nothing special is actually quite telling imho.
Asset prices inflated so much that income is not completely irrelevant, but it is at best only half of the picture.
So no: Asset prices not necessarily always go up. It depends significantly on where you build/own and how that area develops over your lifetime.
But - this deferred gratification - paying a morgage now to pay less rent in the future is clearly a bet towards a future in retirement where one has less disposable income, so it makes - from my vantage point at least - sense to invest now to have more freedom later.
Others have freedom now - and need to potentially scale down later. Both are valid positions imho.
Edit: Typo
Interestingly enough I can't recall a single instance of a working-class person acting like this in a similar situation. A friendly ribbing and wise crack here and there, sure, but never as seething as somebody who feels like they should be making more than they do because they went to school for this, damnit!
to rephrase an old Chris Rock joke, "the worst thing to an enlightened college-educated person with a nickle is anyone else with a dime".
Truly, between this and feudalism, our ancestors have already figured out everything that's going to happen to us in this century.
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 from Meta at $300K, the initial number they offered was $250K, and we worked upwards. I absolutely would’ve taken the job even if they offered $200K and not negotiated. But they did, based on information asymmetry. 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.
Edit: I ended up taking a different offer. I don’t work for and have never worked for Meta.
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 everyone would end up being overpaid because they wouldn't reveal that they were happy to work for a reasonable amount. It doesn't matter how much or little Meta knows, they're only going to offer $300k if they have a reasonable belief that you can find a job for $300k somewhere else; informed by a pretty detailed analysis of the employment market. And in fact that appears to be exactly what happened in your story. Nothing about that dynamic has anything to do with your salary history or spending habits and them getting better information on those things doesn't change your negotiating position. Since a key factor is the future, even if they know you'd say yes to $200k, they'd still be best served offering you more money. I've had that happen to me 2 or 3 times because I'm a sloppy negotiator and don't try very hard to optimise salary.
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, this is a problem for employees.
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.
No, such a discovery wouldn't be possible, because nobody would pay that amount to someone who was willing to accept $200K.
> They're locked in an auction and the market price for your time is nowhere near $200k.
There is no magical market price that exists outside the market dynamics. When bidders know that one's current salary is $150K, their willingness to offer higher salaries will diminish accordingly.
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.
1-1.5 years in a fast-paced software team is plenty enough to learn 95% of everything you're ever going to learn there and live through one major system lifecycle.
Same. This is how any market works. I think one of the problems (US only maybe?) is that talking about salary is generally taboo. The first thing you should do with all your friends is be open about how much you make, and then go online and look for more data. That way you start with some good data points. Next is talk about negotiating. I was taught growing up that everything is negotiable, but later in life I learned that not everyone knows that.
The main problem with the UK system is that it means that if you were underpaid before you're likely to continue to be underpaid in your next role (if you accept a low salary again). For that reason when I'm hiring I've stopped asking for someone's previous salary, and just ask them what they want instead. If it's in the right ballpark everyone's happy. If they lowball themselves I ask why and usually get "That's x% more than I'm on now.", which leads to a conversation about how they're underpaid and should be asking for more. If they ask for too much then I just don't hire them because I can't afford them.
There's a new law coming in where companies have to disclose salary bands now, which at least means people will understand the bottom end. That's going to make the salary negotiation part of hiring a lot easier.
Why don't you post what you're paying in the job ad/offer? Some people even skip ads without a salary or a salary range because of all the uncertainty. As a potential employee somewhere, you've obviously already calculated a range or a fixed number - so why ask the employee?
How is this even legal?
- $30k for anything that helps my community / humanity
- $100k for anything harmless that I just don't give a damn about
- 3 million per month after tax to work on weapons of war
https://www.workday.com/en-us/products/payroll/overview.html
I would not trust applying for any company with workday.
As an employee you should fight for income taxes to be as high as possible since they are neutral for you and might fund useful things for all. When left in the pocket of your employer they just become their takeaway. Employers won't spend it on improving the company if they don't have to. And the only things that force them to spend money in a predictable manner is regulation and markey opportunity to earn more. When they have those needs they mostly do it with credit anyways.
Conversely as an employer you should advocate for lowest income taxes possible for your workers.
The incidence of taxation (which party bears the burden of the tax, irrespective of who 'pays' it) is widely studied. As it relates to payroll taxes (paid by the employer) and income taxes (paid by the employee) most research finds that employees bear most (but not all) of the burden. This is the opposite of your claim.
Employees get taxed when they spend money by being consumers. Sales taxes and VAT are their tax burden. But income taxes of the employees are the burden of the employer. It's employer who has to fork that money because otherwise he wouldn't be able to pay enough so that the employee agrees to work.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...
Higher taxes cause gross pay to raise.
There's evidence that increasing cost of operation of corporations through taxation is not fully born by workers. It falls in large part on the owners and landlords (who were omited in earlier works on income tax incidence).
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=8997844...
Debunking your claim:
> While in practice employers know exactly for how little money (in hand) you are willing to work and in absence of income taxes would just pay this much less so that your money in hand is the same.
I exaggerated my claim to draw attention to the fact that it's not like many people believe, that income tax burden lands fully on the worker.
While my claim sound proposterous the opposite claim that is also false (maybe even equally so) rarely ever raises an eyebrow, which I think is very telling.
Tech companies seem to get it but so few others do, including startups.
I usually have 1/3rd the staff I'd normally need but I hire top tier people at 2x what most startups pay. In the end I save money.
It's one of the more abusive uses of click-through agreements - in order to get paid, you have to login and setup your payroll information, and in order to login, you have to click through and agree to these terms, and there is no way to opt out during or after the process.
However, if you do so for the purpose of some kind of benefit, financial or otherwise, it's clearly fraud.
It's hard to remember that that's still illegal these days -- but it is, for you and for me, at least.
But my premise is that there is benefit derived from the lie, either financial or otherwise. I believe this is clearly fraud and risks civil penalties if pursued by the party who used the information to extend the benefit.
An interesting case is if you lie about previous salary to a prospective employer who does not have the ability to confirm the data. In that context, with no formal pre-employment agreements or contracts, the lie is probably just negotiation strategy with no civil liabilities. I repeat that I am not a lawyer. :)
It is perfectly possible for both sides to approach a salary conversation as the negotiation that it clearly is. In reality, many job candidates barely think about negotiating the salary, but I doubt that’s due to not having enough data points. I think it’s probably more to do with not wanting to be perceived as ‘greedy’ or some other moral badness, and finding it more comfortable to let the recruiter/employer play them like a fiddle. Moral pride to spite their face. Sure, we can feel good in the moment by angrily pointing out that companies take various measures to maximise income and minimise expenditure, as if it’s surprising or ‘wrong’. But it might also be helpful to remember that we are in exactly the same situation. Then perhaps we can start negotiating better deals for ourselves, thus improving life for ourselves and our dependents.
I think the concern is how invasive they can be when doing this. It's one thing to quickly search your name on Google or something, but they can do creepier stuff. They can look at many, many more variables that I can, and it's a little creepy. It seems a little wrong to use peoples' credit scores in order to squeeze down a lower salary. I don't think there's anything even remotely comparable that a prospective employee can do.
If it's publicly traded, the company's financial situation is laid bare.
Nobody is obliged to accept a lowball offer, either.
As we’ve seen time and again this year, highly profitable companies will often lay off workers. So the overall health of a company has little to do with how much it necessarily values employees.
And the tech industry has a record of both using machine learning to skirt laws and a history of illegally colluding to suppress wages. This feels like a greatest hits album for both.
That is my concern: that all of this data combines with some black-box invasive “AI” model and then, magically, all my offers end up being lowball. Not whether I can decline to accept a specific lowball offer.
This was exposed because the colluders were cheating on their agreements with each other. That's the perennial problem with colluding - there is no enforcement of it. That's why cartels are unstable.
> lowball
When you enter a negotiation, you are always going to get a lowball offer. That's why it's a negotiation. There are many resources on how to negotiate. It's worth your while (literally) to study them.
> So the overall health of a company has little to do with how much it necessarily values employees.
Employees are valued according to the value they contribute to the company. Not the profits or losses to the company.
Companies are not a jobs program, nor a social welfare organization, nor one's parents. The only thing a company owes you is what the terms of the contract you signed with them says they owe you.
A company exists to make money for its owners. The employees are hired because they produce value in excess of what they cost.
Maybe on an infinite timescale, but there are plenty of examples of cartels that have been stable for decades or longer.
Hell, even the SV wage collusion was stable long enough to affect plenty of salaries for years.
> There are many resources on how to negotiate. It's worth your while (literally) to study them.
I am not new to this game, and your perfunctory advice of “learn to negotiate” is neither helpful nor relevant to the issue of collusion-through-algorithm.
> Employees are valued according to the value they contribute to the company. Not the profits or losses to the company.
So we agree then the overall financial state of the company is almost completely irrelevant to a salary negotiation. Good.
Which means your equivocation of quarterly filings with past salary information is entirely disingenuous.
They are different, and the company is entering into negotiation with you with asymmetric information. That’s always been the case in a general sense; it’s more so if they know your detailed salary info.
> Companies are not a jobs program, nor a social welfare organization, nor one's parents.
I’m not sure you could be more patronizing if you tried.
We’re all adults here. I don’t think pointing out the disconnect between employer financial status and layoffs / salary negotiation at all implied that I thought anyone was owed a job.
It sure does put perspective on the lie that “a rising tide will raise all ships” though.
Of course no one is obligated to accept a job they don't want (unless the whispers of Trump bringing back the draft end up being true...sigh...), but I'm not entirely sure what your point is? I don't think anyone is saying that these companies are committing crimes, just that it's kind of crappy to take advantage of people that you know are desperate.
I'm not saying there should be a law against it, I'm not saying that the FTC should get involved, I'm not saying that you shouldn't apply to companies that are doing this, but I am saying that it's kind of shitty to try and see if someone you're hiring is struggling, and then use that as a means of lowballing. It's a dick move. The court of public opinion, in my mind, has a lower bar than anything involving "enforcement".
I've been on both sides of the negotiating table. The idea that the employer dictates terms is not reality.
When the HR/CRM/ERP/whatever internal software has the plan to compute these metrics and they display it as metadata next to the people’s names, it’s hard not to curious « just to check ». Maybe it’s not in the company policy but you can never be sure of individuals actions (especially big corps as mentioned in the article)
A better solution is passing laws on wage transparency. For most jobs, the company has a range in mind. Make them post that range in the job offer itself. Short of robust labor unions bargaining for better wages, transparency in the job posting is the next best thing.
What sort of both-sides nonsense is this? The power imbalance is the reason this is noteworthy. They aren't the same.
What I want in comp is a mixture of what I know you can pay and what I can get elsewhere.
What you want to pay is a mixture of what you think I'll be ok with and what you can get someone "just as good" for.
It takes two to tango.