Many years ago, back when companies could ask for your previous compensation [0], a hiring manager once said to me "don't ever lie about your past compensation".
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.
I don’t recall ever seeing a salary in my credit report. Certainly when applying for credit cards you are asked but generally they have you include all sources of income including bonus, passive income, and alimony.
There are data sources for this info but I don’t think it’s technically a credit report.
Experian does collect and sell income data about people, in fact i think they pay companies directly for this information. This is helpful for salary negotiations. It’s not in a normal credit report though, true.
Mortgage loans and car loans in America also ask for your W-2 or proof of that said income. Can't prove it, they won't let you use your claimed income as basis for loan approvals.
I never had to supply a W-2 for a vehicle loan. Just my SSN. I almost always get unsecured loans too. They just dump money into your bank account and say "please buy a car with this" and you keep the title. For a mortgage you do have to validate your income. The work around is to just buy your house in cash, I guess (sigh). So I guess mortgage loans leave you open there, but those happen less frequently and may not be good map of income level on a shorter period.
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.
An unsecured loan just a straight cash loan. In my experience the interest rates are usually a fair bit higher than a vehicle loan, and I would assume the maximum amount is generally quite a bit lower.
In my experience it really depends. You are still contractually and legally obligated to purchase a vehicle in many of these setups, they just don't follow up or enforce it directly in most cases. Loan rates are nothing like unsecured personal loan rates. Probably higher than best auto loan rates. With rates being what they are it may not make as much sense to use an unsecured loan at this point, but when rates are low the cost was negligible and the convenience worth it.
In Maryland I received my car's title, but it just shows the lien holder's information on it. I've never bought a car in any other state so my information is limited.
i'm pretty sure that in Arizona, and i think in California, they DMV sends the title updated to show the original holder (like BMW Financial Services, Subaru Financial Services, or whatever) has been payed completely, and the person is then shown as the title holder.
I've even had to prove my salary when applying for apartments. No loan involved. The first time that happened I didn't have a w-2 yet, so they called my employer to check.
If I remember correctly, ADP and the other big payroll processors sell your income data, as do many of the finance apps that get access to your bank account data. They also have your rent and mortgage payments typically. It's not always a line item in your official credit report, but the data leaks (and is sold) everywhere. Probably the more correct phrasing would be "in your financial target data profile as sold by [credit agencies, et al]"?
Equifax’s The Work Number buys salary data from employers and they use it for income verification when applying for loans and rentals.
You’d be surprised how much data is out there; and it was all sold by entities you ‘trust’.
One example being the DMV
If you lease a car these days you will be swamped with offers from banks and lease-end "providers" as your end date approaches. I got really mad with the dealer until they told me it was the DMV that was selling that information.
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.
as an example, i have received usmail junkmail addressed to my address, but with the name of my first cousin's husband's name, which makes no sense unless some incompetent data brokers are just merging their datasets in all sorts of random ways and seeing what sticks.
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.
"don't ever lie about your past compensation" — because they can't figure it out on their own and IF they do (at least in my jurisdiction), you've got a nice case on your hands to sue them for violating privacy laws.
The correct answer is: ALWAYS lie about your past compensation. It's the only way to get forward, one way or the other.
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).
A better strategy is to push the conversation in another direction:
- 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 =)
If you are a non-managerial employee, the NLRA explicitly prohibits your employer from restricting you from discussing your compensation.
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.
An old neighbor of mine was a headhunter. He once told me that some companies had a trick to get around the law. Upon getting hired, you'd sign a document saying that you'd agree to all policies in the employee handbook. Pretty standard stuff. One of the company policies was that you needed to prove any previous salary you stated in the negotiation. If it was too far off, they'd just terminate you. The trick is that they didn't ask at all during the hiring process; you're already hired and onboarded and then HR puts a meeting on your calendar to explain the policy to you.
> The trick is that they didn't ask at all during the hiring process; you're already hired and onboarded and then HR puts a meeting on your calendar to explain the policy to you.
It sounds made up. Who would go through the negotiating phase, hire the person go through all paperwork only to then gotcha them and fire them if they lied about their past salary? I've never seen an org that actually played games like that.
I call BS. Why would they hire you at an agreed to price, go through the cost & effort and then try and "get you"? Your old neighbour was either in bed with his hiring clients or not very good at his job.
He recruited for wall street trading firms; based on the finance types I've met over the years in NYC I would 100% believe some did this just because they hated losing. He was just making the point that you should never lie about your salary history, because he can help you if you didn't want to give it but he couldn't help you if you BSed everyone and got caught.
The information asymmetry here is ... pretty bonkers
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.
I'm skeptical. Credit checks don't give you an accurate picture of your compensation and it's not like they get your transactional banking history or tax documents (yet). Even with that it would be impossible to get an accurate compensation figure within 25%, so while I agree there's an informational imbalance if that's how you're negotiating you've already lost.
Eh, I don't have the link at the moment - it was posted some years ago on HN. In the US, your employer very likely reports your salary to a national agency. And other companies can access it.
You can go to the agency yourself, prove your identity, and see all your salary history.
The Work Number by Experian gives all past income information. I think many (most?) companies participate in it, so it's somewhat likely your current income is being reported.
This is accurate, except theworknumber is an equifax product. Experian and transunion have similar products however that share past comp data in exchange for a fee and/or current data sharing. Basically, "theworknumber" lets employers see what you made previously in exchange for the employer sharing what they pay all/most employees currently.
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.
See also sibling comment, the Big Three offer free annual credit reports through https://www.annualcreditreport.com/index.action but I haven't seen work history included. I believe that they do collect & report on this information, but I have been unable to get them to share it with me.
I hate that I have to opt out of this stuff that I never signed up for and never would have. I filed the request to freeze, and see that it will require me uploading many more pieces of data to prove identity and address. Disgusting.
I worked for Equifax many moons ago. They had a problem with people taking jobs there that no one else wanted, solely to gain access to their systems and reset their own credit scores. And, for some reason, they couldn’t roll it back once found out. Great company.
Hmmm, so if it's a low value and they leak it to employers, that could screw you in compensation for a future job... And if it's a high value, the credit card company might argue you were lying to them for a higher credit limit.
> I genuinely don't know why I would ever generate a salary key so I can let someone know how much money I made.
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.
Thank you for the link. I tried to opt out. They sent me this email:
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 they have to be careful. What if they didn't check all this and someone went and tried to opt out on your behalf? That would be an incredible invasion of your privacy!
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.
Those requirements are all facially illegal and unenforceable though. In the US you have federally protected labor rights that you cannot contract out of. The right to discuss pay and working conditions with other workers and the public is one of them.
Yes, imagine being in breach of contract if you apply for a mortgage, and they ask "What do you do" and "How much do you make a year" and "Can we see a pay stub (or income tax info)".
I love that it's a freeze not a purge. And that it's opt-out to have surreptitiously collected data being used against your livelihood.
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.
As a European, it is wild to see a private company warning that disallowing them the ability to process your personal data might hinder your ability to access social services.
This is "only" used for loans and renting, the German government is never going to query the score this company has assigned you. Social services are never impacted.
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.
I very much hate Schufa for the way they calculate your score (which until very recently was not even disclosed). But hey, at least they don't sell my income data to random private companies. In fact they do not have my income. Just credit related stuff. I demand an overview from them every 3 months that they have to physically mail to me, just to annoy them..
You can tell them your past compensation, and if they dig in and you signed an agreement, tell them it included bonuses. Don't tell how much of your salary was compensation vs bonus.
There was a story recently about how large landlords use salary data to raise rents. If they see you got a raise, they’ll increase your rent accordingly. And pretty soon, retailers will do the same. Your personalized price for a gallon of milk at Walmart will reflect your annual raise. I love living in the future!
Presumably this also means if you don't get a raise, they don't raise your rent as much, knowing it would make you more likely to move. They no longer have to guess about your ability to pay.
Large institutional landlords use Equifax data, TWN, and other 3rd party financial tracking systems to dynamically price renters across the board; new rentals, security deposit, renewals, etc. These are pricing strategies insurance companies use to their advantage, often partnering with landlords to ensure they're getting risk-reduced renters.
This is a very complex problem as far as I can understand.
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.
Seeing what your neighbors are paying for rent is an amazing idea. I know there's quite a disparity in buildings. I imagine landlords will be squeezed from both sides this way - they wouldn't want the website to show how well a given tenant negotiated, so they may negotiate harder.
The ones who will be squeezed won't be the landlords, but the renters.
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.
You can see public housing data in some countries. E.g. the housing development board in Singapore allows you to see rental data down to the physical building you stay in.
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.
I've considered it myself; I don't want to make a business doing contract work again, because I did not enjoy that.
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.
Forgive me for saying this, but I think you may be drinking too much of the kool-aid.
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 was being a bit joking and hyperbolic about the billion dollars, though obviously that wasn’t communicated clearly. I don’t really need a billion dollars.
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.
Given that two separate people didn't understand the joke, clearly bad communication on my end. I do not accept your "my bad!", and instead insist on it being my bad.
> 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
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.
> Clearly poor communication on my end; I was joking about the billion dollars. My bad.
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.
It is genuinely hard for me to say anything completely seriously and without an abundance of sarcasm. My therapist says it might be an avoidance mechanism that I devised as a kid in order to avoid confronting serious topics.
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.
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, though it might make you temporarily feel better about yourself.
Write down 10 of your TODOs that generate income. As per natural law, it's likely that 1-2 of those TODOs will have 80% of the impact while the other 8-9 will have almost no impact. Now here comes the interesting part. You propably already know the 8-9 tasks that have almost no impact, but as per another law, those are also the easiest tasks (checking mails and such). On that list the TODO that feels like the biggest hassle and you least want to do will likely have the biggest impact. Sit down and just do it. Now, without delay. That already makes you more productive than 98% of your colleagues.
I bet if you could make it interesting, YouTube/TikTok/Instagram/Whatever could make it possible to get paid to dig holes in your backyard.
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.
A burger flipper cannot flip 20x the burgers. There isn't really any way to produce more output flipping burgers. Even if you could, if there isn't a queue of people waiting to collect their orders, there isn't any point in producing more blindly.
The person responsible for designing the process that thousands of franchises use probably does make a lot of money.
The elephant in the room is health insurance. We have a system where even if you have a fairly good income, buying insurance as an individual (or as a small company that isn't buying in a volume high enough for insurance companies to want to give you a discount) means that you'll in all likelihood be paying a lot more for a lot less coverage. The ACA attempted to solve this by having insurance companies offer plans on "public exchanges" by state and then subsidizing the costs, but because most people making good money get insurance through a job with benefits rather than buying it directly, in practice there aren't really any options on the public exchanges calibrated for people with high incomes. (Plus, if you live in a red state, they've likely refused to take the subsidies, which means either the prices are higher or the plans are even more meager based on what the insurance companies expect people without benefits through employment to be able to afford, or both).
That's no longer true. You can have ICRA etc plans, for the tax benefits.
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.
They're still maybe right. In CA, it's pretty common for the best plan you can buy as an individual to be half as good as whatever your employer offers and to cost twice as much as the combined employee+employer contribution.
How does ICHRA fix that? What's this "contracting with certain networks" you're referring to?
> Plus, if you live in a red state, they've likely refused to take the subsidies
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.
> 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.
I assure you, I have never in my life worked 20 times harder than someone making minimum wage.
No executive has ever worked as hard as the girl pushing carts at your local supermarket or the "Illegal" hand picking the fruit you eat for 12 hours a day for less than minimum wage or the teen mechanic dealing with a "2 hour" warranty job on a vehicle rusted to shit.
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.
I get this, but also genuinely interested to know how to measure outputs. For me it's almost impossible to get it objectively right.
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.
> I get this, but also genuinely interested to know how to measure outputs.
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.
I spend some time going through what programmers wrote over the past years and many of them were rewarded for getting things done quickly with no complaints.. The more diligent ones probably didn't last since they got things done correctly which takes a lot more time and thought.
It's why I said quickly and correctly. I think it's a cop out to say someone was slow because they were building it correctly. Famously, the old space shuttle software was developed very slowly because it had to be 100% correct at all times. Most software does not need that level of correctness. Part of a SE's job is to understand that.
I pay a lot of attention when someone claims to have solved a problem I suspect to be NP-hard. There are a lot of possible explanations, for example they may have an incorrect measurement function or they may have chosen a simpler related problem that isn't really NP-hard, or both.
Probably not the answer you want to here but I'll share my perspective. Three years ago my wife and I sat down and optimized our finances so I could soft-retire and focus on a few of my life goals while simultaneously working on ways to generate income without the stress of being in the employ of others. It was tough work which mainly involved paying down a lot of debt so we can live more lean. We did a lot of optimization and of course some compromise and lifestyle changes. Fortunately, my wife earns enough for us to still live comfortably on a single income.
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.
We live in a world where someone has to clean the sewers, unblock toilets, maintain electricity lines in snow storms, weld deep underwater, clean, wipe the butts of old people, and 10,000 other thankless, tiring, and dangerous jobs which no one in their right mind would ever do because they found it fun and interesting. Until we have very highly capable robots to do these jobs, we need some way to incentivise doing work which few others want to do, or are capable of doing. Right now we use money as the incentive. On top of that, there are things people do which bring a lot of value to others. They invent new things, for example, and sell them. Others buy them. We also want to incentivise that, even though it's not easy, and not everyone is capable of doing that.
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.
Alternatively, you live in a society that has conditioned you to devalue manual labour and erronously assume that no one exists who actually enjoys physical interaction with the world.
As you're likely to be in the US, you could always watch the Mike Rowe Dirty Jobs back catalog.
Leaving aside the scene from Life of Brian, I have no issue cleaning shit - I've raised children, they poop, I have livestock, they shit, kids will happily frisbee cow pats, raking out sheep shit from under shearing sheds is a job that I've done, as have many .. you end up with a couple of tonne stacked high on a double axle trailer that's great for the garden.
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 heading to the Graeberian world of bullshit jobs which ironically tends to head towards the direction of meaning.
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
It can be enjoyable in the context of failure analysis: troubleshooting, finding root causes, documenting other people's fuckups then tracing through the assignment logs on who interacted with the server last.
>> We live in a world where someone has to clean the sewers, unblock toilets, maintain electricity lines in snow storms, weld deep underwater, clean, wipe the butts of old people, and 10,000 other thankless, tiring, and dangerous jobs which no one in their right mind would ever do because they found it fun and interesting.
>> 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?
How many acres are you personally willing to farm to let others eat without payment “in a just world”?
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…
> 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.
> I feel this fucking form of slavery as well hard
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?
I think the heart of what they're getting at is that while on paper they are bringing in less income, they have gotten off the hedonistic treadmill, and as a result, quality of life per dollar has increased dramatically. They are less stressed about finances than they were prior, even though their income is lower.
Whenever I read something like this I have to ask if kids are in the picture? Or maybe they've already moved away.
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.
- 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.)
they said "teacher" but also mention writing grants. A high school teacher isn't writing grants, their wife could be bringing in a lot more than the typical teacher.
A tenured position in a reasonably good university can give you quite a good standard of living, and depending on your area, there are even opportunities for occasional consulting work.
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.
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.
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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.
> I wonder if the winning game becomes your own boss and tiny companies.
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.
It is. I am a fractional CTO running my own consulting business and I make 3-5x as much as I ever did working for one company. And all my clients are very happy.
Between this and algorithmic pricing, I envision a future where every penny of your finances is know to both employers and retailers, and together they ensure that you only ever have as much purchasing power as the "free market" decides you should have.
data can also be treated as signal. for example, if they know you are claiming a different income than is verifiable it signals something - good, bad, or indifferent - that they will use in algorithms.
One of the often-overlooked terms of use that people ignore when accessing a payroll processing / human resources website is that the company providing those services can "share" your data with "trusted partners" which essentially allows them to move your income and other personal information to other entities which, in turn, sell that information to anyone who is willing to pay.
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.
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 earn like €100k per year. Not a huge salary, but definitely above average. My family lives in Eastern Europe. Once I was hanging out with my cousin and his friends, all of these people had minimum-wage jobs. Not really my type of social circle, but I have no issues being cool for an evening. Then suddenly my cousin drinks one too many and starts blabbering about how "fucking rich" I am and all eyes turn to me because guess what the whole group smelled an opportunity. Never spent time with them again.
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.
> 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...
I am technically in the upper class based on income and place of residence. I drive an 11 year old vehicle, wear inexpensive clothes (often plain tees), eat out infrequently, etc. I unintentionally spend more in areas that tend not to be obvious to non-friends. I'd be upset if people could easily lookup my income.
It's the lowest trim level of japanese minivan. Many hidden zipties threaded like stitches secure plastic panels and underbody guards.
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.
Yes, you are very exceptional. A well-paid employee (or former employee) who lives somewhere nice, dresses like they are in college and drives a beat-up Civic and hopefully saves all his money, I can close my eyes, spin around, throw a rock, and have 20/80 odds of hitting someone who matches that exact description in this town.
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.
> 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 grew up with a single dad that while having a good salary also had the mortgage to pay. So I was middle class, but never had the niceties my peers had.
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.
Once I was invited to some gathering. Right at the beginning they asked me if I'm from $ENVIRONEMTNAL_ORGANIZATION. I thought they were just fucking with me so I replied laughing/ironically "Do I look like I'm from $ENVIRONEMNTAL_ORGANIZATION?".
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.
…I'm a bit afraid to ask, but are folks from Greenpeace supposed to be rich or something? (I'm not from the US so idk if it's a cultural thing I'm missing.)
Unless you come from privileged background, you don't exactly have the free time to go and prostest against the destruction of habitat of toads. And even if you do have the time, you probably don't care.
Most software related jobs on their own aren't seen as a 'high class' professions. It's a job which got extremely lucrative recently. It's similar to someone who made lots of money from the gold rush. The fact you were poor growing up usually means you'll never be seen as high class at older age either (part of the reason why some of these tech billionaires seem frustrated?)
It's not always too difficult to tell if someone is a software engineer from their behaviour and interests alone.
I think you're describing all the ways that your social class is written all over everything. You could leverage your paycheck to try to change some of this, but your social class influences your decision not to bother.
I've never had a problem like that. People don't bother looking it up -- probably because your socioeconomic class is apparent anyway from e.g. the area you live in. AFAIK, the only ones who have ever looked mine up are banks, when I was applying for mortgages.
Sweden is one of the countries with the lowest salary inequality in the world. In Eastern Europe 100k a year puts you at what 10x minimum wage? I think that would be considered a pretty high salary in France or Spain as well. I think your friend reaction is warranted, but I don't think it would happen often in Sweden...
Even in Germany 100k€ a year puts you in the top 2% (maybe even top1%) for single earners. And in the top 5% for a couple.
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.
Class warfare is a chart-topping hit in the US too. I've been on the receiving end of this rhetoric a few times in social situations but it's always been by college-educated people who get their politics from specific corners of the internet. They view those below them as ignorant, culturally-regressive boors and those above them as malicious hyper-capitalistic villains. That they've never dropped a fry basket or mopped a floor in their lives is of no consequence - they still find it appropriate to call people "tech bros" or, astoundingly enough, tell them that they "don't deserve to make as much as [they] do" because they view others' finances as an affront. It's personal dissatisfaction and consumerist impotence manifested as jealousy, nothing more, nothing less.
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!
But is the income data is also available to individuals? If I can find out the income of another professional in a similar role that becomes the anchoring point. Otherwise the company will just offer {prev_year_income} + peanuts.
It is. You can basically check out the company linkedin, people in similar roles/YoE, then google their name to find out their birthday, then just call our IRS. Ask for declared income for year X, X-1 etc. This gives you an anchor as parent said. It's a way to change the power imbalance when negotiating. I know friends that do this when applying for jobs. There's a law coming that makes this basically worthless, since the salary range for the role must be declared openly with the ad. And that btw is one of the first questions I ask when talking to hiring manager or HR, to find out if it's a good fit.
It works the same way here in the UK. Some companies ask your previous salary, and sometimes check your references, and sometimes your previous employer will disclose what your salary was. If it turns out you lied nothing bad happens, but you've just given your new employer a reason to dismiss you.
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.
> For that reason when I'm hiring I've stopped asking for someone's previous salary, and just ask them what they want instead.
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?
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 employee's time. It has nothing to do with the circumstances of the employees lifestyle. The lifestyle adjusts to the salary.
This allows all sorts of normally illegal discrimination via ai pass through. Never hire pregnant women, sick people or employees over 30 again. Target for race and religion whatever you want. Basically everything that’s scary about chinas social credit score except private run with zero accountability.
> 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 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.
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 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.
> 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, this is a problem for employees.
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.
> they'd discover they needed to offer you salaries in the $350-400k range?
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.
>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.
My policy is the opposite – I switch companies every two years. Especially if I get too comfortable. Usually because I’m bored or because the company grows too much (>100 people is too much for me).
Are you worried that you never get to see the results of architectural decisions you make? Two years is not much time to make an impact and see it through if you’re senior+
If that’s true and this has a null effect, why would a business pay for it? There must be some utility for them. Like others already pointed out: information asymmetry undermines worker’s ability to negotiate, resulting in lower wages for everyone.
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.
What I find funny about this is that stories have been floating around for *years* about HFT/quant firms specifically hiring quants to work out what the lowest they can pay people in the firm is, and still keep them.
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.
When I've applied for jobs and done salary negotiations, I try pretty hard to find out the max I can get using as many variables that I think are relevant (e.g. years of experience, previous companies I've worked for, projects I've contributed to, etc). No one is writing an article trying to expose me for this.
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.
A public company’s overall situation is laid bare. Unless you’re pretty close to the C suite, it has little to no relevance on your salary negotiation.
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.
Many (the majority?) companies are not public, so even if I agreed with your point about publicly traded companies that doesn't really change my point, since we could very easily (without it being contrived) limit ourself purely to the scope of private companies.
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 have read it. I don’t think you get my point. I said ‘access to’. If you think about it, there is plenty of data freely available about the company in most job applications (often including actual salaries they pay their staff - literally the most pertinent data). Yes, employers will use whatever tools they can to guess at what you might accept. It’s a negotiation.
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.
> … said the company “does not use algorithmic wage-setting tools to make compensation decisions for our employees or to set new-hire salaries.”
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)
If your HR software is the same that does payroll and does hiring for your company and many others, it's almost garunteed a flag goes up when you apply to another job with a different company.
"Our AIs"?
The AI models belong to giant corporations (Google, Microsoft) or are receiving millions of dollars serving giant corporations. How are they yours?
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.
Credit agencies do not report income to the IRS, so there's no tax relevance. Credit agencies are not party to your obligations to the IRS at all. You can lie to credit agencies all day long if you like.
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.
Is it Fraud though? Think about it...sounds to me like data obfuscation. There are no laws that enforce the truth if there is no financial damage. So the previous comment stands.
I think you're wrong, but I'm not a lawyer and I don't operate on the fringes of fraudulent behaviour, so I might be miscalibrated.
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 not up to employer to tell me what to accept. If they lowball me, odds are high that I will just not accept it, or if I do, I will be sure to leave them as soon as I get a more reasonable offer, preferably in the middle of a project with no notice beyond what any prior agreement calls for. I will treat them the way they treat me.
People tend to think that income taxes lower your salary. 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.
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.
You're suggesting that 100% of the income tax burden is shifted from employees to employers.
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.
It's not shifted. It's just there. It was never on the employees. Employees don't have their own money to tax. Employees money is employers money. That's its source.
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.
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).
Many years ago, back when companies could ask for your previous compensation [0], a hiring manager once said to me "don't ever lie about your past compensation".
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.
I don’t recall ever seeing a salary in my credit report. Certainly when applying for credit cards you are asked but generally they have you include all sources of income including bonus, passive income, and alimony.
There are data sources for this info but I don’t think it’s technically a credit report.
Experian does collect and sell income data about people, in fact i think they pay companies directly for this information. This is helpful for salary negotiations. It’s not in a normal credit report though, true.
Loan applications. Credit cards. They all ask for your income. I always put 1,000,000. Never been denied a loan.
Mortgage loans and car loans in America also ask for your W-2 or proof of that said income. Can't prove it, they won't let you use your claimed income as basis for loan approvals.
I never had to supply a W-2 for a vehicle loan. Just my SSN. I almost always get unsecured loans too. They just dump money into your bank account and say "please buy a car with this" and you keep the title. For a mortgage you do have to validate your income. The work around is to just buy your house in cash, I guess (sigh). So I guess mortgage loans leave you open there, but those happen less frequently and may not be good map of income level on a shorter period.
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.
> They just dump money into your bank account and say "please buy a car with this" and you keep the title.
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.
An unsecured loan just a straight cash loan. In my experience the interest rates are usually a fair bit higher than a vehicle loan, and I would assume the maximum amount is generally quite a bit lower.
Ahhh, like if you were to put your new VW on your Visa card entirely.
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.
In my experience it really depends. You are still contractually and legally obligated to purchase a vehicle in many of these setups, they just don't follow up or enforce it directly in most cases. Loan rates are nothing like unsecured personal loan rates. Probably higher than best auto loan rates. With rates being what they are it may not make as much sense to use an unsecured loan at this point, but when rates are low the cost was negligible and the convenience worth it.
In Maryland I received my car's title, but it just shows the lien holder's information on it. I've never bought a car in any other state so my information is limited.
Is this different from what you mean?
i'm pretty sure that in Arizona, and i think in California, they DMV sends the title updated to show the original holder (like BMW Financial Services, Subaru Financial Services, or whatever) has been payed completely, and the person is then shown as the title holder.
I've even had to prove my salary when applying for apartments. No loan involved. The first time that happened I didn't have a w-2 yet, so they called my employer to check.
Right - there are plenty of data sources here but it's not a credit report.
If I remember correctly, ADP and the other big payroll processors sell your income data, as do many of the finance apps that get access to your bank account data. They also have your rent and mortgage payments typically. It's not always a line item in your official credit report, but the data leaks (and is sold) everywhere. Probably the more correct phrasing would be "in your financial target data profile as sold by [credit agencies, et al]"?
Equifax’s The Work Number buys salary data from employers and they use it for income verification when applying for loans and rentals. You’d be surprised how much data is out there; and it was all sold by entities you ‘trust’. One example being the DMV
If you lease a car these days you will be swamped with offers from banks and lease-end "providers" as your end date approaches. I got really mad with the dealer until they told me it was the DMV that was selling that information.
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.
as an example, i have received usmail junkmail addressed to my address, but with the name of my first cousin's husband's name, which makes no sense unless some incompetent data brokers are just merging their datasets in all sorts of random ways and seeing what sticks.
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.
"don't ever lie about your past compensation" — because they can't figure it out on their own and IF they do (at least in my jurisdiction), you've got a nice case on your hands to sue them for violating privacy laws.
The correct answer is: ALWAYS lie about your past compensation. It's the only way to get forward, one way or the other.
This is one of those strategies that may be "correct" in the sense that it works once or twice, but isn't a great long term strategy.
e.g. let's say you sue and then win: that's now in the public record (which any new hiring company can see).
Its the perfect case for why labor organizes.
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).
Are you part of a union? How can we get the tech industry unionized?
A better strategy is to push the conversation in another direction:
- 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 cannot dísclose muy current compensation due to an NDA: salaries are company propietary information.
I am unable to dísclose that information.
If you are a non-managerial employee, the NLRA explicitly prohibits your employer from restricting you from discussing your compensation.
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.
The correct answer is to answer the question you wanted them to ask, "I'm looking for $x"
No lie, skirt the irrelevant info
An old neighbor of mine was a headhunter. He once told me that some companies had a trick to get around the law. Upon getting hired, you'd sign a document saying that you'd agree to all policies in the employee handbook. Pretty standard stuff. One of the company policies was that you needed to prove any previous salary you stated in the negotiation. If it was too far off, they'd just terminate you. The trick is that they didn't ask at all during the hiring process; you're already hired and onboarded and then HR puts a meeting on your calendar to explain the policy to you.
> The trick is that they didn't ask at all during the hiring process; you're already hired and onboarded and then HR puts a meeting on your calendar to explain the policy to you.
Yeah, "all bets are off" once you are a FTE.
Isn’t that too late to negotiate compensation? I had figured most of the value is knowing how to properly lowball candidates
It sounds like negotiation would still be done however it normally would before things got to this point.
It sounds made up. Who would go through the negotiating phase, hire the person go through all paperwork only to then gotcha them and fire them if they lied about their past salary? I've never seen an org that actually played games like that.
Dunno, kind of sounds like hiring and then negotiating compensation.
Christ, that sounds like a colossal waste of time for everyone
I call BS. Why would they hire you at an agreed to price, go through the cost & effort and then try and "get you"? Your old neighbour was either in bed with his hiring clients or not very good at his job.
He recruited for wall street trading firms; based on the finance types I've met over the years in NYC I would 100% believe some did this just because they hated losing. He was just making the point that you should never lie about your salary history, because he can help you if you didn't want to give it but he couldn't help you if you BSed everyone and got caught.
The information asymmetry here is ... pretty bonkers
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.
I'm skeptical. Credit checks don't give you an accurate picture of your compensation and it's not like they get your transactional banking history or tax documents (yet). Even with that it would be impossible to get an accurate compensation figure within 25%, so while I agree there's an informational imbalance if that's how you're negotiating you've already lost.
Eh, I don't have the link at the moment - it was posted some years ago on HN. In the US, your employer very likely reports your salary to a national agency. And other companies can access it.
You can go to the agency yourself, prove your identity, and see all your salary history.
The Work Number by Experian gives all past income information. I think many (most?) companies participate in it, so it's somewhat likely your current income is being reported.
This is accurate, except theworknumber is an equifax product. Experian and transunion have similar products however that share past comp data in exchange for a fee and/or current data sharing. Basically, "theworknumber" lets employers see what you made previously in exchange for the employer sharing what they pay all/most employees currently.
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.
See also sibling comment, the Big Three offer free annual credit reports through https://www.annualcreditreport.com/index.action but I haven't seen work history included. I believe that they do collect & report on this information, but I have been unable to get them to share it with me.
So, lie about RSU and Bonus?
It seems like base salary would be easy to track, but other benefits would be much harder.
Lying about my compensation always worked so far
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
I hate that I have to opt out of this stuff that I never signed up for and never would have. I filed the request to freeze, and see that it will require me uploading many more pieces of data to prove identity and address. Disgusting.
If the credit bureaus don't have a complete profile when you start, they will after provide the missing pieces.
I really wouldn't be surprised if that is indeed the goal defined for that workflow's design.
No they sell it directly: https://theworknumber.com/solutions/industries/pre-employmen...
The Work Number is in fact Equifax.
I worked for Equifax many moons ago. They had a problem with people taking jobs there that no one else wanted, solely to gain access to their systems and reset their own credit scores. And, for some reason, they couldn’t roll it back once found out. Great company.
How does that work with multiple credit agencies?
No idea, it was back in the mid to late 90’s.
Many banks are known for pulling from a particular one.
Life hacks for the 21st century
I'm filling out the form there. I genuinely don't know why I would ever generate a salary key so I can let someone know how much money I made.
Also, to prevent them from sharing the information, you need to give them even more information. Disgusting that this is allowed.
American Express just canceled my wife’s card after 15 years because she didn’t fill in her salary data.
Hmmm, so if it's a low value and they leak it to employers, that could screw you in compensation for a future job... And if it's a high value, the credit card company might argue you were lying to them for a higher credit limit.
> I genuinely don't know why I would ever generate a salary key so I can let someone know how much money I made.
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.
Well, then how did I get a mortgage with the whole thing being empty?
W2s are perfectly fine.
Thank you for the link. I tried to opt out. They sent me this email:
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 they have to be careful. What if they didn't check all this and someone went and tried to opt out on your behalf? That would be an incredible invasion of your privacy!
> incredible invasion of your privacy!
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.
"They care a lot!"
> We will be following up with a secure email to obtain the requested documents.
"secure email". I expect these data will be turn up somewhere in a few years, maybe from a data breach or some other shenigans.
They didn’t ask for any of that when harvesting personal financial data, how lovely
lol, collection is frictionless but opting out is full KYC. tells you exactly what the system is optimized for.
mailing passport scans to the guys who left Struts unpatched for 147M SSNs. what could go wrong.
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.
Those requirements are all facially illegal and unenforceable though. In the US you have federally protected labor rights that you cannot contract out of. The right to discuss pay and working conditions with other workers and the public is one of them.
Yes, imagine being in breach of contract if you apply for a mortgage, and they ask "What do you do" and "How much do you make a year" and "Can we see a pay stub (or income tax info)".
Such clauses are inane beyond the legality of it.
Guess what agency has been gutted and attacked recently? EEOC recently….
Yeah, and have you seen what lawyers want for a retainer these days?
You have to be rich to defend your rights now.
I love that it's a freeze not a purge. And that it's opt-out to have surreptitiously collected data being used against your livelihood.
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.
As a European, it is wild to see a private company warning that disallowing them the ability to process your personal data might hinder your ability to access social services.
Have a look at german Schufa company. I was there pre RGPD, so maybe things have changed.
There's a small law called GDPR which makes this kind of pulls very illegal. Even for Schufa which doesn't forward your direct data.
This is "only" used for loans and renting, the German government is never going to query the score this company has assigned you. Social services are never impacted.
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.
I very much hate Schufa for the way they calculate your score (which until very recently was not even disclosed). But hey, at least they don't sell my income data to random private companies. In fact they do not have my income. Just credit related stuff. I demand an overview from them every 3 months that they have to physically mail to me, just to annoy them..
> Job Applications > Employers may delay making a job offer if they cannot verify your data on The Work Number.
If by doing this, can employers legally discriminate against you?
You can tell them your past compensation, and if they dig in and you signed an agreement, tell them it included bonuses. Don't tell how much of your salary was compensation vs bonus.
There was a story recently about how large landlords use salary data to raise rents. If they see you got a raise, they’ll increase your rent accordingly. And pretty soon, retailers will do the same. Your personalized price for a gallon of milk at Walmart will reflect your annual raise. I love living in the future!
"I have nothing to hide"
At the moment, I think the data that we protect ourselves are useless and those that are public are precious.
Presumably this also means if you don't get a raise, they don't raise your rent as much, knowing it would make you more likely to move. They no longer have to guess about your ability to pay.
I foresee people shopping in masks, with phone off, using cash as a protest, and poor people being black market designated shoppers.
Large institutional landlords use Equifax data, TWN, and other 3rd party financial tracking systems to dynamically price renters across the board; new rentals, security deposit, renewals, etc. These are pricing strategies insurance companies use to their advantage, often partnering with landlords to ensure they're getting risk-reduced renters.
How does this interact with RealPage and other algorithmic price fixing software?
Yeah, but think of how much money you’ll save when you’re able to just pay a poorer person to go grocery shopping for you!
This is a very complex problem as far as I can understand.
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.
Seeing what your neighbors are paying for rent is an amazing idea. I know there's quite a disparity in buildings. I imagine landlords will be squeezed from both sides this way - they wouldn't want the website to show how well a given tenant negotiated, so they may negotiate harder.
The ones who will be squeezed won't be the landlords, but the renters.
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.
You can see public housing data in some countries. E.g. the housing development board in Singapore allows you to see rental data down to the physical building you stay in.
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.
Wait til you find out what customers do to figure out the lowest. There’s a little more accountability.
What you describe is the reason the web site you posted it on exists.
I've considered it myself; I don't want to make a business doing contract work again, because I did not enjoy that.
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.
Forgive me for saying this, but I think you may be drinking too much of the kool-aid.
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 was being a bit joking and hyperbolic about the billion dollars, though obviously that wasn’t communicated clearly. I don’t really need a billion dollars.
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.
Ah, okay. I didn't realize that. My bad!
Given that two separate people didn't understand the joke, clearly bad communication on my end. I do not accept your "my bad!", and instead insist on it being my bad.
> 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
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.
Clearly poor communication on my end; I was joking about the billion dollars. My bad.
I was just saying that I am too much of a coward to actually even attempt to make my own business.
> Clearly poor communication on my end; I was joking about the billion dollars. My bad.
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.
It is genuinely hard for me to say anything completely seriously and without an abundance of sarcasm. My therapist says it might be an avoidance mechanism that I devised as a kid in order to avoid confronting serious topics.
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.
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, though it might make you temporarily feel better about yourself.
Define work harder. I think it is worth defining as it is ambiguous and could mean one or more of:
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.
Write down 10 of your TODOs that generate income. As per natural law, it's likely that 1-2 of those TODOs will have 80% of the impact while the other 8-9 will have almost no impact. Now here comes the interesting part. You propably already know the 8-9 tasks that have almost no impact, but as per another law, those are also the easiest tasks (checking mails and such). On that list the TODO that feels like the biggest hassle and you least want to do will likely have the biggest impact. Sit down and just do it. Now, without delay. That already makes you more productive than 98% of your colleagues.
In software engineering it isn’t necessarily the winning game. FAANG salary vs self employed isn’t that a case of “work hard and it’ll come”.
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.
I bet if you could make it interesting, YouTube/TikTok/Instagram/Whatever could make it possible to get paid to dig holes in your backyard.
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.
You can be the hardest working burger flipper at McDonald's, but you are not going to be as financially secure as someone coasting on a FAANG salary.
A burger flipper cannot flip 20x the burgers. There isn't really any way to produce more output flipping burgers. Even if you could, if there isn't a queue of people waiting to collect their orders, there isn't any point in producing more blindly.
The person responsible for designing the process that thousands of franchises use probably does make a lot of money.
The elephant in the room is health insurance. We have a system where even if you have a fairly good income, buying insurance as an individual (or as a small company that isn't buying in a volume high enough for insurance companies to want to give you a discount) means that you'll in all likelihood be paying a lot more for a lot less coverage. The ACA attempted to solve this by having insurance companies offer plans on "public exchanges" by state and then subsidizing the costs, but because most people making good money get insurance through a job with benefits rather than buying it directly, in practice there aren't really any options on the public exchanges calibrated for people with high incomes. (Plus, if you live in a red state, they've likely refused to take the subsidies, which means either the prices are higher or the plans are even more meager based on what the insurance companies expect people without benefits through employment to be able to afford, or both).
That's no longer true. You can have ICRA etc plans, for the tax benefits.
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.
They're still maybe right. In CA, it's pretty common for the best plan you can buy as an individual to be half as good as whatever your employer offers and to cost twice as much as the combined employee+employer contribution.
How does ICHRA fix that? What's this "contracting with certain networks" you're referring to?
> Plus, if you live in a red state, they've likely refused to take the subsidies
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.
> 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.
I assure you, I have never in my life worked 20 times harder than someone making minimum wage.
No executive has ever worked as hard as the girl pushing carts at your local supermarket or the "Illegal" hand picking the fruit you eat for 12 hours a day for less than minimum wage or the teen mechanic dealing with a "2 hour" warranty job on a vehicle rusted to shit.
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.
I don't pay my employees based on inputs like how hard they work, I pay based on outputs.
Any other system of incentives would be insane.
Things are different if you're e.g. a lawyer and have billable hours.
I get this, but also genuinely interested to know how to measure outputs. For me it's almost impossible to get it objectively right.
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.
> I get this, but also genuinely interested to know how to measure outputs.
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.
I spend some time going through what programmers wrote over the past years and many of them were rewarded for getting things done quickly with no complaints.. The more diligent ones probably didn't last since they got things done correctly which takes a lot more time and thought.
It's why I said quickly and correctly. I think it's a cop out to say someone was slow because they were building it correctly. Famously, the old space shuttle software was developed very slowly because it had to be 100% correct at all times. Most software does not need that level of correctness. Part of a SE's job is to understand that.
I pay a lot of attention when someone claims to have solved a problem I suspect to be NP-hard. There are a lot of possible explanations, for example they may have an incorrect measurement function or they may have chosen a simpler related problem that isn't really NP-hard, or both.
Fast, quality, cheap.
Pick two.
> I don't pay my employees based on inputs like how hard they work, I pay based on outputs.
It's crazy how many times I have to explain this to people, and it's usually when they ask me for a raise.
Probably not the answer you want to here but I'll share my perspective. Three years ago my wife and I sat down and optimized our finances so I could soft-retire and focus on a few of my life goals while simultaneously working on ways to generate income without the stress of being in the employ of others. It was tough work which mainly involved paying down a lot of debt so we can live more lean. We did a lot of optimization and of course some compromise and lifestyle changes. Fortunately, my wife earns enough for us to still live comfortably on a single income.
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.
Wonder what you'd do with your passion in a just world where everything of creativity (okay almost) would not need to be turned into a income.
I feel this fucking form of slavery as well hard.
How sorry can life be?
We live in a world where someone has to clean the sewers, unblock toilets, maintain electricity lines in snow storms, weld deep underwater, clean, wipe the butts of old people, and 10,000 other thankless, tiring, and dangerous jobs which no one in their right mind would ever do because they found it fun and interesting. Until we have very highly capable robots to do these jobs, we need some way to incentivise doing work which few others want to do, or are capable of doing. Right now we use money as the incentive. On top of that, there are things people do which bring a lot of value to others. They invent new things, for example, and sell them. Others buy them. We also want to incentivise that, even though it's not easy, and not everyone is capable of doing that.
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.
Alternatively, you live in a society that has conditioned you to devalue manual labour and erronously assume that no one exists who actually enjoys physical interaction with the world.
As you're likely to be in the US, you could always watch the Mike Rowe Dirty Jobs back catalog.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenny_(2006_film)
That's true for some jobs, but I'd be very surprised if anyone enjoys cleaning shit, for example
Leaving aside the scene from Life of Brian, I have no issue cleaning shit - I've raised children, they poop, I have livestock, they shit, kids will happily frisbee cow pats, raking out sheep shit from under shearing sheds is a job that I've done, as have many .. you end up with a couple of tonne stacked high on a double axle trailer that's great for the garden.
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 heading to the Graeberian world of bullshit jobs which ironically tends to head towards the direction of meaning.
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
It can be enjoyable in the context of failure analysis: troubleshooting, finding root causes, documenting other people's fuckups then tracing through the assignment logs on who interacted with the server last.
By someone you mean... yourself?
Jason Pargin has a great viewpoint on this: https://www.facebook.com/reel/1179783609733134
Apologies for a fb reel, but its the easiest way to share.
>> We live in a world where someone has to clean the sewers, unblock toilets, maintain electricity lines in snow storms, weld deep underwater, clean, wipe the butts of old people, and 10,000 other thankless, tiring, and dangerous jobs which no one in their right mind would ever do because they found it fun and interesting.
>> 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?
How many acres are you personally willing to farm to let others eat without payment “in a just world”?
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…
The slavery comes with not being paid in proportion to the value provided.
> 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.
Assuming that a farm would be owned by one person has already put a very tiny box around your world view
> I feel this fucking form of slavery as well hard
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...
no, but i once had my catered lunch taken away during a recession /s
> In reality, it feels like we are financially better off than we were before.
Are you financially better off or does it only feel that way?
If you were actually better off, why mention feelings?
They may have less money but also more time for things they care about, and less burden and stress in daily life.
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
On some level the feeling matters more than the reality, past a certain survival threshold.
I think the heart of what they're getting at is that while on paper they are bringing in less income, they have gotten off the hedonistic treadmill, and as a result, quality of life per dollar has increased dramatically. They are less stressed about finances than they were prior, even though their income is lower.
Sentiment is an important barometer in this case.
But how long until your wife replaces your job with AI?
Whenever I read something like this I have to ask if kids are in the picture? Or maybe they've already moved away.
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.
It’s a very common arrangement, both with and without kids, once you look past the gender of particular participants.
It's very common for a teacher's salary to pay the expenses of two adults and 2+ kids?
I guess it must be nice not living in high col areas.
Whenever you see something like that, remove USA from the bias, and you probably better understand how stupid the USA is.
Given paid off debts and frugal lifestyle (as mentioned by the OP), why not? No one keeps anyone hostage in the high CoL areas.
There can be a lot of factors at play:
- 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.)
they said "teacher" but also mention writing grants. A high school teacher isn't writing grants, their wife could be bringing in a lot more than the typical teacher.
A tenured position in a reasonably good university can give you quite a good standard of living, and depending on your area, there are even opportunities for occasional consulting work.
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.
It's not the winning game at all.
I wonder if the solution is democracy.
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-...
> I wonder if the winning game becomes your own boss and tiny companies.
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.
It is. I am a fractional CTO running my own consulting business and I make 3-5x as much as I ever did working for one company. And all my clients are very happy.
Between this and algorithmic pricing, I envision a future where every penny of your finances is know to both employers and retailers, and together they ensure that you only ever have as much purchasing power as the "free market" decides you should have.
Both Amex and Chase regularly ask me to confirm my income. I wonder why they do that if the data is already available to them via Equifax.
data can also be treated as signal. for example, if they know you are claiming a different income than is verifiable it signals something - good, bad, or indifferent - that they will use in algorithms.
One of the often-overlooked terms of use that people ignore when accessing a payroll processing / human resources website is that the company providing those services can "share" your data with "trusted partners" which essentially allows them to move your income and other personal information to other entities which, in turn, sell that information to anyone who is willing to pay.
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.
What a hassle!
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 earn like €100k per year. Not a huge salary, but definitely above average. My family lives in Eastern Europe. Once I was hanging out with my cousin and his friends, all of these people had minimum-wage jobs. Not really my type of social circle, but I have no issues being cool for an evening. Then suddenly my cousin drinks one too many and starts blabbering about how "fucking rich" I am and all eyes turn to me because guess what the whole group smelled an opportunity. Never spent time with them again.
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.
> 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...
I am technically in the upper class based on income and place of residence. I drive an 11 year old vehicle, wear inexpensive clothes (often plain tees), eat out infrequently, etc. I unintentionally spend more in areas that tend not to be obvious to non-friends. I'd be upset if people could easily lookup my income.
An 11 years old vehicle could be a Corolla or an S-Klass.
It's the lowest trim level of japanese minivan. Many hidden zipties threaded like stitches secure plastic panels and underbody guards.
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.
People driving 11 years old S-Klass aren't usually rich, only irresponsible.
Yes, you are very exceptional. A well-paid employee (or former employee) who lives somewhere nice, dresses like they are in college and drives a beat-up Civic and hopefully saves all his money, I can close my eyes, spin around, throw a rock, and have 20/80 odds of hitting someone who matches that exact description in this town.
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.
> 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 grew up with a single dad that while having a good salary also had the mortgage to pay. So I was middle class, but never had the niceties my peers had.
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.
Once I was invited to some gathering. Right at the beginning they asked me if I'm from $ENVIRONEMTNAL_ORGANIZATION. I thought they were just fucking with me so I replied laughing/ironically "Do I look like I'm from $ENVIRONEMNTAL_ORGANIZATION?".
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.
…I'm a bit afraid to ask, but are folks from Greenpeace supposed to be rich or something? (I'm not from the US so idk if it's a cultural thing I'm missing.)
Unless you come from privileged background, you don't exactly have the free time to go and prostest against the destruction of habitat of toads. And even if you do have the time, you probably don't care.
Most software related jobs on their own aren't seen as a 'high class' professions. It's a job which got extremely lucrative recently. It's similar to someone who made lots of money from the gold rush. The fact you were poor growing up usually means you'll never be seen as high class at older age either (part of the reason why some of these tech billionaires seem frustrated?)
It's not always too difficult to tell if someone is a software engineer from their behaviour and interests alone.
I think you're describing all the ways that your social class is written all over everything. You could leverage your paycheck to try to change some of this, but your social class influences your decision not to bother.
I've never had a problem like that. People don't bother looking it up -- probably because your socioeconomic class is apparent anyway from e.g. the area you live in. AFAIK, the only ones who have ever looked mine up are banks, when I was applying for mortgages.
Sweden is one of the countries with the lowest salary inequality in the world. In Eastern Europe 100k a year puts you at what 10x minimum wage? I think that would be considered a pretty high salary in France or Spain as well. I think your friend reaction is warranted, but I don't think it would happen often in Sweden...
Even in Germany 100k€ a year puts you in the top 2% (maybe even top1%) for single earners. And in the top 5% for a couple.
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.
But it’s not guaranteed that you’ll ever be as rich as a pensioner who owns a flat outright.
Asset prices inflated so much that income is not completely irrelevant, but it is at best only half of the picture.
Class warfare is a chart-topping hit in the US too. I've been on the receiving end of this rhetoric a few times in social situations but it's always been by college-educated people who get their politics from specific corners of the internet. They view those below them as ignorant, culturally-regressive boors and those above them as malicious hyper-capitalistic villains. That they've never dropped a fry basket or mopped a floor in their lives is of no consequence - they still find it appropriate to call people "tech bros" or, astoundingly enough, tell them that they "don't deserve to make as much as [they] do" because they view others' finances as an affront. It's personal dissatisfaction and consumerist impotence manifested as jealousy, nothing more, nothing less.
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!
> They view those below them as ignorant, culturally-regressive boors and those above them as malicious hyper-capitalistic villains.
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".
But is the income data is also available to individuals? If I can find out the income of another professional in a similar role that becomes the anchoring point. Otherwise the company will just offer {prev_year_income} + peanuts.
It is. You can basically check out the company linkedin, people in similar roles/YoE, then google their name to find out their birthday, then just call our IRS. Ask for declared income for year X, X-1 etc. This gives you an anchor as parent said. It's a way to change the power imbalance when negotiating. I know friends that do this when applying for jobs. There's a law coming that makes this basically worthless, since the salary range for the role must be declared openly with the ad. And that btw is one of the first questions I ask when talking to hiring manager or HR, to find out if it's a good fit.
Here in Japan they ask you your current salary (it's even mandatory by most companies), so it's easier here :) ... :(
That’s why you have to get competing offers
And if you lie?
It works the same way here in the UK. Some companies ask your previous salary, and sometimes check your references, and sometimes your previous employer will disclose what your salary was. If it turns out you lied nothing bad happens, but you've just given your new employer a reason to dismiss you.
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.
> and sometimes your previous employer will disclose what your salary was
How is this even legal?
I suspect it's not, but it's also hard to prove something has occurred in private communication between third parties.
> For that reason when I'm hiring I've stopped asking for someone's previous salary, and just ask them what they want instead.
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?
Everyone just says the top of the range.
It's japan, they're a high trust society
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 employee's time. It has nothing to do with the circumstances of the employees lifestyle. The lifestyle adjusts to the salary.
This allows all sorts of normally illegal discrimination via ai pass through. Never hire pregnant women, sick people or employees over 30 again. Target for race and religion whatever you want. Basically everything that’s scary about chinas social credit score except private run with zero accountability.
> 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 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.
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 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.
> 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, this is a problem for employees.
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.
> they'd discover they needed to offer you salaries in the $350-400k range?
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.
>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.
My policy is the opposite – I switch companies every two years. Especially if I get too comfortable. Usually because I’m bored or because the company grows too much (>100 people is too much for me).
Are you worried that you never get to see the results of architectural decisions you make? Two years is not much time to make an impact and see it through if you’re senior+
If that’s true and this has a null effect, why would a business pay for it? There must be some utility for them. Like others already pointed out: information asymmetry undermines worker’s ability to negotiate, resulting in lower wages for everyone.
It's still a case of asymmetric information.
> I'm not seeing how this matters
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.
Reactive, defensive positions just aren't going to do it. Go ahead and find ways to poison their data at this point.
if only requiring employers to post the salary for a job could fix this
What I find funny about this is that stories have been floating around for *years* about HFT/quant firms specifically hiring quants to work out what the lowest they can pay people in the firm is, and still keep them.
Needs to be made really illegal so they are scared of multi million law suits and whistleblowers.
Here's a freebie:
- $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
When I apply for a job, I use data to figure out the highest salary the company will accept.
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.
When I've applied for jobs and done salary negotiations, I try pretty hard to find out the max I can get using as many variables that I think are relevant (e.g. years of experience, previous companies I've worked for, projects I've contributed to, etc). No one is writing an article trying to expose me for this.
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.
> remotely comparable
If it's publicly traded, the company's financial situation is laid bare.
Nobody is obliged to accept a lowball offer, either.
A public company’s overall situation is laid bare. Unless you’re pretty close to the C suite, it has little to no relevance on your salary negotiation.
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.
Many (the majority?) companies are not public, so even if I agreed with your point about publicly traded companies that doesn't really change my point, since we could very easily (without it being contrived) limit ourself purely to the scope of private companies.
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".
You have less data than the company
What are you talking about? You have access to far more info on them than they do on you.
Go read the article
I have read it. I don’t think you get my point. I said ‘access to’. If you think about it, there is plenty of data freely available about the company in most job applications (often including actual salaries they pay their staff - literally the most pertinent data). Yes, employers will use whatever tools they can to guess at what you might accept. It’s a negotiation.
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.
> … said the company “does not use algorithmic wage-setting tools to make compensation decisions for our employees or to set new-hire salaries.”
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)
Also: "Potential employees of employers use public data to figure out the highest salary they'll offer"
> Also: "Potential employees of employers use public data to figure out the highest salary they'll offer"
What sort of both-sides nonsense is this? The power imbalance is the reason this is noteworthy. They aren't the same.
I think we are done with the "power imbalance" lens on everything.
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.
Why don't companies realize the more you pay a highly skilled worker, the more you get out of them?
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.
If your HR software is the same that does payroll and does hiring for your company and many others, it's almost garunteed a flag goes up when you apply to another job with a different company.
https://www.workday.com/en-us/products/payroll/overview.html
I would not trust applying for any company with workday.
And our AIs can give us insight into what is the highest salary that the given company can offer.
"Our AIs"? The AI models belong to giant corporations (Google, Microsoft) or are receiving millions of dollars serving giant corporations. How are they yours?
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.
just create your own company, report you pay yourself the equivalent of $676,942.00 to this credit agency. Then watch your numbers go up
You might have to pay tax on that
Credit agencies do not report income to the IRS, so there's no tax relevance. Credit agencies are not party to your obligations to the IRS at all. You can lie to credit agencies all day long if you like.
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.
Is it Fraud though? Think about it...sounds to me like data obfuscation. There are no laws that enforce the truth if there is no financial damage. So the previous comment stands.
I think you're wrong, but I'm not a lawyer and I don't operate on the fringes of fraudulent behaviour, so I might be miscalibrated.
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 not up to employer to tell me what to accept. If they lowball me, odds are high that I will just not accept it, or if I do, I will be sure to leave them as soon as I get a more reasonable offer, preferably in the middle of a project with no notice beyond what any prior agreement calls for. I will treat them the way they treat me.
People tend to think that income taxes lower your salary. 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.
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.
You're suggesting that 100% of the income tax burden is shifted from employees to employers.
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.
It's not shifted. It's just there. It was never on the employees. Employees don't have their own money to tax. Employees money is employers money. That's its source.
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.
The poster is referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_incidence
It's really not as straightforward as they make it to be:
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...
This is absolutely despicable!