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Ask HN: Why is Pave legal?
1098 points by nowyoudont 30 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 495 comments
If you haven't heard of it, Pave is a YC-backed startup that helps startups with compensation. I can't actually access the system so I'm speaking from hearsay and what's information on public parts of their website. The way I understand it works is that you connect Pave to your HR and Payroll systems, they take the data about who you employ and how much you pay them, combine it with all their other companies, and give companies a collective breakdown of compensation ranges.

My question is, isn't this specifically anti-competitive wage fixing? This seems exactly like RealPage but for employee compensation. As far as I know, colluding on wages like this is illegal. Is there something about the company that I'm missing?




I have never heard of Pave before, but this just sounds like yet another copy of Equifax's "The Work Number" [1]. Basically, HR at many companies gives your salary and employment history data to Equifax, who then sells access to the information to certain parties with supposed need to access it, including potential and current employers and creditors. This report is likely one of the most invasive consumer files out there for many people.

I cannot comment on the legality of this kind of data sharing, but as I and others have pointed out, it has existed for a while. I do agree that it is concerning. You can freeze your Equifax The Work Number report at least, just like other credit reports.

[1] https://theworknumber.com/


I downloaded a personal report from the work number website and found to my horror that my employer was reporting every. single. paystub. gross and net, to equifax.

That felt like a huge breach of privacy. Given that equifax had already proven incompetent at keeping my data secure, I immediately sent HR a request to stop sending my supposedly 'confidential' pay info. They politely told me to kick rocks, so I went on TWN's website and froze that report so no one would be able to request it, and it will be a cold day in hell before I thaw it.


I am an investor in equifax. Let me clear up a misconception on where the data comes from. Half the data comes from large enterprise customers, who “sell” the data in exchange for Equifax doing I-9 verification for free. The other half comes from 39 payroll companies. Every single payroll company except for Rippling and Gusto sell paystub data to Euifax. (Rippling will start next year). Those are exclusive revenue share deals. You cannot be a competitive payroll provider without the revenue share from Equifax. So before you blame your employer, they might not be selling it directly and even if they opted out, your payroll company will sell it anyway.


Do you have a sense of why, according to you Gusto will remain the only company that doesn't sell payroll data to Equifax?


Seems like something gusto can turn into a marketing point. Surely there’s a desire for a privacy respecting payroll/hr platform.


The actual buyers of payroll software don't care and if you think people are going to evaluate their potential employer based on what payroll solution they use, you are wrong.


But it's a signal among many. If your employer purposefully goes out of their way to make these kinds of decisions consistently, it sticks with you.


Yes, this is why government regulations exist. Market forces are only as good as the walls and maze theyre forced into.


This may not be correct. My current company uses Gusto for payroll. Pulling my data, I see everything. I am confirming with Gusto support its sourced from them.


Confirmed with Gusto. They send data to WorkNumber.

"...for the purpose of automating employment and income verifications. This feature helps streamline the process for employees who may need to provide proof of employment or income for loans, credit, or public aid."


Gusto is still pre-revenue?


Gusto is not pre-revenue, it has $500M+ in arr

https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/27/gusto-remote-deal-500m-rev...


Sounds like Gusto is the only acceptable option then. Thanks for the info!


> even if they opted out, your payroll company will sell it anyway

Surely that can't be legal?


As a Gusto admin for my company and user for another (well, my wife is the user), I am happy with our choice of payroll provider.


That's good to know. The company I work for currently uses Rippling; I will mention this upcoming change and suggest that we should consider switching to Gusto.


I hate the argument of "you cannot be a competitive company without being a scumbag."

It's a bad argument through and through.


Perhaps you would find it to be more palatable if it were phrased as: "You cannot be competitive as a company if you do not serve the wants and needs of the customer."?

But, of course, that says the same thing. These companies are scumbags because that's how the customer wants them to behave. In this case, because it makes executing payroll cheaper for the customer, which is a highly desirable trait to the customer.


The customer often does not have the luxury of making perfectly rational choices.

IBM for example waits to fly you out to orientation in Armonk before they show you the binding employment contract with dubious clauses.

These businesspeople know this. Introducing pressure and a sense of inevitability of poor conditions is part of the game. And they know that it's scummy. But Ayn Randians will defend them to the grave as they eschew the responsibility to build a stable enduring economy for one that disproportionately rewards them.

Framing it as the customer wants this level of strongarming is the same as saying they want bloody revolution when it inevitably follows. What customers actually want is for scumbags to be banned from leadership roles in the economy, and for toxic business strategies to be regulated out of relevance.


Can I opt out thru the payroll company?


No, but you can opt out at the Aggregator level. Currently, The Work Number is the largest salary aggregator, you may find this link, helpful:

https://employees.theworknumber.com/employee-data-freeze


Thanks


Maybe I'm missing something... If the data doesn't come from the employer, then how does the "payroll" company get it?


It is indirect instead. The employer tells the payroll company: pay employee $x (and handle deductions, retirement contributes etc ...) The payroll company then has this data and can resell it. I would expect the contract the employer has with the payroll company explicitly allows for the data sharing.


You make an excellent argument here for tight regulation of the industry.


… and the usage?

Most highly-paid people have no idea how much privilege this affords them.

You wonder why so many businesses are nice to you? It’s because they’ve already looked you up and know you’ve got a high income and are a millionaire.

Write a personal check for your next automobile? Sure thing, you can drive it off the lot a few minutes later. They won’t even bother cashing the check for a week or two.

Try doing something like that as an hourly worker, even if you’ve got the money in the bank.


You wonder why so many businesses are mean to you? It's because they've already looked you up and believe from the data that you won't be a good customer.

The dealership can also just call the bank to verify funds. Which would be reasonable and non-discriminatory all without needing a third party and wouldn't involve your salary at any level. Aside from this it's the financing company that cares, not the dealership, who only wants the car off their floor credit plan.

So what you're saying is it _shouldn't_ matter if you have money, because if you're a low income earner, you should be treated poorly, and you're happy to be personally invested in a system which creates this outcome.

It not only should be regulated but you should feel a little gross for saying any of this outloud.


I know text can be flat, nuance and tone lost that would not be lost in conversation, but I'm confused by your reply Akira. I can't read any endorsement of the system in the comment you're replying to, I read it as agreeing with you in disapproving of unequal treatment


Last time I bought a car I was surprised to learn I didn't need to go to the bank and get a cashier's check but could just write a personal one. I assume that verification processes have improved sufficiently that they had confidence the money was in my account.


This is also why certain homes get hit in high-end burglary crews. There are multiple crews hitting those who purchase precious metals with physical delivery (like gold American Eagle coins). It is not all positive. Considering how few victims even bother to report such crimes, it is terrifying.

From what I understand from my cousin, a career criminal, there are entire theft rings working off of databases such as these. He knew mostly of car-related theft rings, but I hear about safe-cracking burglaries quite often, usually stealing Rolex watches or precious metals.


That feels like it should be its own post. But be safe out there.


Why? They could also target wealthy neighborhoods with pretty much the same outcome.


Because they get details on items in your safe, that you thought were hidden. The second you buy precious metals with physical delivery, you get not only the criminals who break into houses in your wealthy area, but also the criminals who specialise in stealing and selling the things you just bought.


And if they dont have the data they can monitor behavior towards you from those who do have it. Those who get to drive of with their new car vs those who may not.


What? Criminal gangs have access to databases of purchasers of jewelry and precious metals? Then they B+E, safecrack, and rob them? That’s an insane claim to make without any source besides your cousin.


I can confirm, I'm a member of one of these criminal gangs. Although, we specialize in who recently purchased nvidia discrete gpus.


No thank you. I value my privacy and my negotiating ability more than I value a 'service' I didn't even ask for.


Nobody asked for it. But it’s part of the world we live in. And we’re all walking around oblivious to the advantages and disadvantages it gives us.


We shouldn't be oblivious to those advantages and disadvantages, since then we can't decide as a society whether those advantages and disadvantages should remain or be altered. That alone is a good reason to regulate this away.

Or at the very least, require Equifax to send free physical mail notifications to everyone when their data is accessed, stating when, by whom, why, and what answer was given. (Physical mail because there's no other predictable way for the general population.) Yes, I realize this would be financially unsustainable for Equifax as they currently operate, but that's their problem to solve. Even as someone who myself has excellent credit and many years of high income in my file, they're creepy and shouldn't be catered to at the expense of our privacy.


True, but when do you even have it explained. Last time I was purchasing a car for wife, the clerk simply made a crack about how my information is now all theirs ( I forgot the exact phrasing ). And those are people who are motivated to make sure you buy so thus incentivized to make sure you are not put off.

And don't even get me started on an average person. I get blank stares when I go on a privacy rant. At best, they simply do not have time to care.


That sounds like the most unappealing exchange imaginable. Yes, let me lose both bargaining power with new jobs while simultaneously painting a target on my back, all in exchange for companies being more willing to take my money.


Now this is some remarkable gymnastics. Are you also an investor in Equifax or have some other financial interest in similar services? If not, I'm very curious to hear how you tied yourself into this knot.


I find that I have struck a nerve with some folks.

I have no connection with the industry at all. But that doesn’t prevent me from understanding the implications.

Equifax does this stuff because it is profitable. It is profitable because companies buy it. Companies buy it because they can put the information to use for their benefit. In doing so, some consumers are harmed and others benefit.

Also, for the record: I don’t often buy cars, but when I do I choose the best financial option. Sometimes that would be financing, other time it would be writing a check. One factor that everyone should consider it that your free time has a higher dollar-per-hour value than your work time.


> your free time has a higher dollar-per-hour value than your work time

This doesn't seem right to me. I think it would only apply to someone who felt comfortable with the level and stability of their income.

When I was self-employed or job-hunting, I would always trade an hour of free time for an hour of employment.


Sure, consumers benefit so much that the example you were able to produce is the ability to write a personal check to purchase a car. Totally notable benefit relative to the violation of a person's expectation of privacy.


This is the view from a bubble I am not familiar with, and really don't care about.


> Write a personal check for your next automobile?

Personal check? What year is this?!? :-)


It's USA and the context is banking, so the current year is still somewhere in the 1970s.


Last time I bought a brand new car (~8 years ago?), the dealer told me I couldn't pay more than $X amount, using credit cards, on the car, so I still needed a bank check for the rest (they wouldn't accept a personal check either).

Don't know if things have changed since.


In my experience, it used to be a cashier's check for the balance (if there was a deposit). But a couple years ago at least the dealer I bought from was fine with a personal check. Don't know if it was just this dealer or if personal check verification processes have improved.


Haven't they heard of bank transfers? In Europe you can use SEPA and if you warn the bank in advance, they're basically instant even for large amounts.


I did this for my recent automobile purchase. It's very convenient from my perspective to simply write a check and hand it to them.


But why not just pay by card, that must be even easier?


Many (most?) dealerships have a policy of not accepting more than a few thousand dollars on a credit card, they don't want to pay the fee


I recently bought a car and they were happy to let me put up to 100% of the purchase on a card so long as I paid the card processing fee (something like 2 or 3%).


I think they can just run it as debit. That's what they did for my down payment when I bought a new vehicle this past June.


My regular dealership even has a card surcharge for service these days. Given the rebate I get it's pretty much a no-care for smallish bills. But when I bought the car from another dealer was a bit surprised I didn't need to run to the bank to get a certified check.


I'm not going to pay by card for a huge purchase, and have the card company take 3% off the top. That's just a dick move when you can just write a check that does the same thing.


Why would I care if I'm not paying for the surcharge and I get a rebate from it? I've had a few large purchases recently where a credit card was the norm. If the business prefers a check that's fine too. I'm not going to push it. It's just business. A lot of businesses want my money and are happy to take a credit card number which is often simpler for them. I don't know their costs associated with handling checks and it's not really my concern.


it's a "dick move" to not give the guy who owns your local dealership a 3% tip when you buy a car??


That's not a tip. It's a "processing fee" assessed by credit card companies (a revenue stream). The 3% charged on top of a large purchase like a vehicle goes to the payment processing provider (the credit card company). To cover the cost of professing fees, most dealerships often offer a cash discount (meaning they will quote a lower price if paid by check).


1. The guy who owns the dealership doesn't get the credit card fee

2. If they charge you extra for using a credit card, they're breaking even

3. If they _don't_ charge you extra for using a credit card, they're paying 3% of the purchase cost to the credit card company (so, $1,000+)

So yes, it's a dick move to pay via credit card for any purchase in the thousands of dollars, if you have the option to pay by check or debit card. I always offer to pay by check if I know the money for the CC will come out of their pocket.


Don't really care. It's not my responsibility as a customer to make assumptions about how businesses prefer to get paid. They can add surcharges or just not accept credit cards at all. As someone who has been making some large household purchases this summer, my experience is that it's perfectly ordinary and expected to pay by credit card.


I'd just add that I routinely book flights, hotels, and so forth in the thousands of dollars range on credit cards and I doubt they would want anything different as a payment type.


I did this 2 years ago. I write personal checks all the time (although many are actually "written" by my bank in the US).


The finance companies are nice enough that it doesn't really matter.

Bought mine with cash but realized it was Sunday and I didn't have a way to get a cashier's check from a savings account.

They offered to put the down payment on a credit card and finance. Paid it off once I had access to the account.

Ended up being a wash, the points were worth a little more than the percentage charge.


If you get your personal data report, you'll see that it tells you who looked you up. It is not every business you've worked with. It is not even every background check that has been done on you.

I'm not saying that rich people do not have privilege - they do. But it isn't because your local car dealer looked up your earnings data.


Personal check? You can buy a car in full with a credit card if you pass the vibe check.


A personal check is much less secure because it’s not linked up to the network anti fraud systems.


This is a great argument as to why we need stronger regulations to make these practices illegal.


Fuck that.

"Oh, aren't you happy we live in a world where the rich are explicitly treated better because they carry around a big sign saying 'I am rich' when interacting with corporations?" No. I am not.


When has that world never existed and when will it cease to exist?


This world has always existed. We can also resist it.


I can almost smell the concentrated capitalism in this comment.


Don't ever work in the public sector then. Your salary is public record, open to anyone who is curious enough to look.


I think that's widely understood and part of the job description of being a public servant. What's not widely understood is HR secretly selling your data while working at a private company.


> your data

Is it yours though? The employer could probably argue that it's theirs. Devil's advocate: I think it's widely understood that entities can be transparent with their data if they choose, other than NDA scenarios.


In a market-first values system, where we rely on the labor market to largely self-regulate given the promises that free market idealogues & corporate actors made us, colluding on wages like this should lead to scorched-earth retribution from the FTC.

Not "Oh hey there, you're not allowed to do that, stop that", but "We are diluting your stock by a quarter and distributing it to your workers" type shit.


> given the promises that free market idealogues & corporate actors made us

I find it amusing/annoying how many Free™-market boosterism messages are actually contradictory "heads I win, tails you lose" constructs. For example:

1. "Regulations are bad, because left to its own devices the market will be optimally-efficient, once everyone has perfect-information about all the prices and deals other people are making."

2. "Regulations are bad, because cartels and collusion will be destroyed by defectors who use their freedom to make secret prices and hidden deals."

Sometimes these arguments come from the same people, but even when they don't they represent two wildly incompatible ideas of what "the free market" really is.


I wonder what the name is for the fallacies committed by this comment and grandparent comment. It's this disingenuous "even though nobody in this thread has expressed these two contradictory things, I'm just going to make them up and pretend that an imaginary member of [group that I don't like] said them".

It's like a strawman fallacy did a fusion dance with an ad-hominem. I see it all the time on HN - surely it has a name.


> It's this disingenuous "even though nobody in this thread has expressed [...]"

No, what's disingenuous is your weird attempt to stifle an entirely on-topic discussion which has made you uncomfortable. You're suggesting that we may not criticize a stance or argument unless another Hacker News user has directly advocated for it. That's not how it works, or else we'd never be able to talk about things like the DMCA or Microsoft's forced-reboot update policy.

That said, how about we steer away from pure-meta personal attack posts to something that at least involves the original topic of markets and market-actors, starting with:

> I'm just going to make them up and pretend that an imaginary member of [group that I don't like] said them"

Your comment is saying--via sarcastic subtext--that I have "made up" items #1 and #2 and that (to substitute GP's term) "free-market ideologues" do not advance either argument about efficiency or cartel-risk.

Is that really what you believe and you'd be convinced otherwise by examples, or would you like to issue some non-sarcastic clarification?


> what's disingenuous

Incorrect. I'm pointing out logical fallacies and emotional manipulation. Nothing disingenuous here, just rationality.

> attempt to stifle an entirely on-topic discussion

Incorrect. This is "flamebait....generic tangents...internet tropes." (as the guidelines say to avoid) because, as already pointed out, nobody in this thread has made these arguments together.

> You're suggesting that we may not criticize a stance or argument unless another Hacker News user has directly advocated for it.

Also incorrect. I never suggested that. Additionally, even if I had, you're not criticizing a stance - that's a dishonest and incorrect portrayal of your comment, which was fabricating an imaginary contradiction between two distinct arguments, as a means of attacking a group you didn't like.

> That's not how it works, or else we'd never be able to talk about things like the DMCA or Microsoft's forced-reboot update policy.

Also dishonest and incorrect. Microsoft is a single organization that makes public statements that you can link to and point out inconsistencies in.

That is not what you're doing - the free-market HN users that you're emotionally attacking (because that's what it is - there's no logic here) are not a single person or entity, but a highly diverse group of individuals with wildly different opinions.

What's more, you didn't even respond to a comment that one of them made - you're fabricating the existence of one of them that has a set of contradictory opinions (that you've also invented) to try to generally attack the idea that they represent. That's very bad form and very clearly against the HN guidelines.

> That said, how about we steer away from pure-meta personal attack posts

You're violating the guidelines and engaging in dishonest and anti-intellectual emotional manipulation and ideological warfare...on a site that's designed for intellectual curiosity. It's very reasonable to call that out.

> Your comment is saying..."free-market ideologues" do not advance either argument about efficiency or cartel-risk.

That is not what my comment is saying or implying - that's you fabricating a strawman.

You are "fabricating" a person because there's no specific person that you're debating with. That clearly does not mean that there don't exist people who don't hold those beliefs individually (or even together) - but you're not referring to a person in your comment, you're referring to an imaginary archetype, and you're doing so as a way of attacking it.

I've absolutely met individuals who hold either of those positions individually. And I have definitely met people that are self-inconsistent with respect to the beliefs that they hold.

Neither of those things justify you inventing a nonexistent self-contradictory person as a way to wage ideological warfare against a group/ideology you don't like.

"Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


I encourage readers to click on that link to all the commenting guidelines, and then carefully consider who is really breaking their spirit in this thread. Goodbye.


> That is not what you're doing - the free-market HN users that you're emotionally attacking

Who said they were talking about HN users? AFAICR, the GP explicitly said that was not what they were talking about.

Maybe you're not arguing from bad faith; just bad reading comprehension.


What precisely do you disagree with about my comment?

I wouldn't say that HN commenters have been especially influential advocates in selling a potent brand of free-market capitalism to the United States of America. That happened long before HN began, and even the other advocacy efforts of people like Thiel are at this point a drop in a very large bucket.

Silicon Valley antitrust enforcement is especially topical because the government is apparently gunning for Google now, but if Realpage-like labor price collusion becomes common in the corporate world (inside or outside of SV) that's a substantially bigger deal.


Does my personal health information belong to my doctor? Not according to HIPAA, at least not in a way that gives the doctor control over selling it. While my pay is currently not protected by similar regulation, it seems like the kind of protection regulation similar to HIPAA could defensibly target.


Your personal health information is information that pertains to you and you only. Your compensation is part of a contract between yourself and your employer, hence why both parties have to sign it, and why both parties have ownership over it.

Not arguing that payroll information can't be protected, my only point was that your comparison was off.


Because hospitals and clinics don't care or record the treatment they provide?


Not to mention insurance.


I'm not saying it is currently the case that I own my compensation number, I'm saying it's not impossible to imagine creating regulation to make that happen.


Most companies request people not share pay information. Information asymmetry is a huge deal in negotiations.


Such a “requirement” is illegal. https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/your-right...


And pot was illegal in the 70s.


It still is.


At the US federal level. It may or may not be illegal at the state level--and is regulated in any case.


It is still illegal in every US state. States can legalize it at the level of their own laws, and they can choose not to enforce federal laws, but that doesn't actually make it legal while federal laws are in place that conflict. A federal agent could choose to walk into any dispensary in a "legal" state and arrest everyone there, and they could be prosecuted in federal court. Yet at a practical level there has been a decision to defer to the states on what they will enforce, but that is a decision of executive authority rather than the law.


I expect you'd have a pretty complicated jurisdictional case if a team of FBI agents were to go into a dispensary in a state where it was legal and round everyone up. And pretty much no sane politician would go anywhere near it. I also wouldn't (hypothetically) travel with the stuff over state boundaries.


But in the US, federal labor law makes it illegal for employers to prevent employees from sharing pay information (at least for employees who are entitled to unionize).


They can request it, but can't stop you if you do.

You can also request them to do likewise, with similar recourse.

A request is nothing without teeth behind it.


Teeth like employment at-will?


It's generally quite unlikely that sharing your salary is going to result in getting bitten by that. You'd need to do labour organization (or be completely surrounded by rats and snitches and other vermin at your workplace, who already have an axe to grind) to actually get blowback for this stuff.

Most of the taboo around it is cultural, because people here attach their self-worth to their paycheck.

You could also always do it anonymously or pseudonymously. You'd have almost no chances of retaliation in that case.


https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32216332


Isn't being dismissed because of something like that and being able to prove it is a bit like winning a lottery?


The singular of anecdote is not data. Getting hit by lightning is also unlikely, but it happens to thousands of people every year.

That doesn't mean I'll be flying a kite in a thunderstorm, but it also doesn't mean that you should lock yourself in a bunker the moment the sky turns grey.

Most of the taboo around this is cultural, not retributive.


Firing people at will includes firing them because you got the feeling they may be behaving in any way in any situation perhaps in conflict to any request you made. Odds are someone won't get fired for stealing office supplies and in at will place they may be more often fired for misunderstandings related to a misperception where they don't come clean on something they never did.

That there was no way to sue the company in that example is a demonstration that the employee lacked any right to break any taboo.

As such there are teeth anywhere that is at will for any request whether it is reasonable or not and whether it relates to a taboo the employee may be expected to have or not.


>The singular of anecdote is not data.

No funnier response to a post directly proving you wrong. L


Basically the only advantage an employee can have in this sort of negotiation is not needing to be employed by that company.


I never have but I have never been told I couldn't share pay information. Certainly I have with my accountant and financial advisor. I've also been asked when applying for a new job whether or not I've been 100% forthcoming.


Well, if we're discussing whose data it is the information about how much I pay you, even from a devi's advocate perspective, you can't do better than arguing that this data pertains to both of us. So we should share the property of that data somehow. I don't see how you could argue that that data would be solely the employer's data.


If it has my name on it, it likely belongs to me. The portion that clearly belongs to the company, are the role, the amount, and my initials (maybe an anonymying number would be better?)

They're welcome to do what they want with that, but once it includes the ability to make inferences about me as an individual, more than the company, it becomes my data. I likely have to choose to share it to meet the terms of the emploment contract, but that doesn't change the appropriate ownership.

Try and apply whatever rules you want to IP the company claims to own? Surely the exact details of some trade secret process also belongs to me and I can do whatever I want with it because I need to know it to fulfill the terms of that same contract right? I can sell it to a 3rd party just 'cause right?


If I administer a survey, collect responses, and put them into a spreadsheet, is the data in that spreadsheet not mine despite the fact that it consists of things that other people told me? I can't share it without the permission of those surveyed, assuming I didn't promise not to?


These are answered questions. If you are talking about the raw data, you have to get the respondents to agree that their answers become your property (either implicitly or explicitly, there are rules around both), or no, you do not own the data in the spreadsheet.


A key distinction is that people need employment. People don't need to fill out surveys. That's why there are many things companies aren't allowed to require of their employees, that they are allowed to require of other parties.

So while, in many jurisdictions, it's fine for companies to sell data collected on their employees, and it could be argued that those employees consented to this data sharing by working there, one could also easily argue for an employee protection law that prevents companies from requiring their employees to consent to this.


It really depends on which kind of data you're collecting. If you're collecting health related data that is linkable to the people it pertains to, the GDPR would prevent you from sharing that data with third parties without one of the admissible legal basis, the most common of which is the consent of the people whose data you collected. In the case of health data, maybe even USA laws would prevent you from sharing it.

Edit: it is now some time since I studied the GDPR, so I'm actually unsure if, for healt-related data, it can be used any legal basis other than consent. The reason being that health, together with a few other categories, has special protections.


Technically sure, but the sort of people who live that way don't get invited out anywhere.


... should companies be nervous about this also though? Is the decision for their payroll info to be visible to unknown buyers an intentional, well-considered one? Is this effectively leaking potentially strategically important info?

Like, I haven't seen this happen, but could a recruiting team buy the compensation data on staff at a competing firm, identify those that look like a good deal, and poach them starting with a "we'll offer you k% more than your current employer"?

Could market analysts use this data to notice when a company starts firing more people, or starts giving fewer/smaller raises? What if the next time your company showed up in a Gartner or Forrester report, it came along with a caveat "however given decreased investment in staff, their pace of product development or quality of client services may be at risk."


The employer requires this data to do payroll correctly. Apart from that, it sound only be used for expressly authorized purposes. But maybe that's a european GDPR-influenced way of seeing this issue.


Yeah I used to work for the navy. Pay was standardized under the GS pay schedule and anybody could have looked that up. I was fine with that.

In the private sector, your comp is determined by a negotiation undermined by an asymmetric information disparity. HR at a hiring company has way more information around market comp as it is without having your exact current comp when they make an offer.

What I find particularly egregious about this is that management at this company had admonished me that my comp was 'confidential' and that I shouldn't discuss it, while simultaneously selling it to equifax.


There are countries (Sweden IIRC) where the salary record is public, probably to eliminate this information asymmetry.


Finland has National Jealousy Day:

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/11/finland-has-just-publ...


Some jobs fall under this "public sector" transparency but work much more like a private employer when it comes to salary negotiation. For example a state university recruits staff and negotiates compensation much like a private employer (no equity options of course) but your salary will be public if you are hired.


Why would that be a widely understood part of the job description? Almost every American teacher, firefighter, planner, street engineer, health inspector, police officer, train conductor, bus driver, along with the managers, office administrative staff, janitors, and groundskeepers that support those activities are public sector employees. What do they have in common that would suggest they deserve less privacy than you do?

Most of these jobs are not special or meaningfully "public". They're just normal jobs for firms that happen to be public bodies. I don't think it's at all obvious that people are knowingly and deliberately making these tradeoffs by working there.


>What do they have in common that would suggest they deserve less privacy than you do?

That they receive their salary from the tax payer, the public is their employer, and it'd be pretty odd if your employer didn't know what they paid you. They're executive organs of the state, police and firefighters, unlike private workers, also don't get to choose what laws they enforce or what fires they put out. If you're a civil servant you obviously forego most of the rights of private sector workers in exchange for usually lifetime employment and set pay rates.


I don't think it's odd that we get to know what bus drivers get paid, but I don't think there's any special grand bargain to these jobs that make the privacy implications less significant. If we get to know what the janitor at my village hall makes, I have a lot less of a problem with Equifax knowing how much more Python developers make.


Usually they all get paid more or less the same since compensation is directly tied to the job title/rank and other public criteria. This information (in aggregate) shouldn't ever be non-public (under any circumstances) due to obvious reason. So even if your specific salary/wage is not published anyone who knows what's your specific title/job would be able to estimate it somewhat accurately.


Public servants do not make enough money to be useful targets. The meaningful threat comes from large compensation tied to other asset information (tying an online person to that income, not difficult). You can buy lists of these already tied up and ready to download for your scheming pleasure. From English Rolex robbers to Florida kidnappers, they all enjoy the data.

I do not think it can be stopped, but the days when a wealthy person could safely live in a suburb and have the kids imagine that they are middle class is long gone. It is terrifying. The best thing for a wealthy discrete person to do is move to Singapore or Australia, or somewhere with a sufficiently low crime rate to feel comfortable, or get quality security, which sucks.


The security minded can move to a gated community, which are all over the place and have existed for a very long time, and don't require moving to Singapore or Australia to live in one.


I can't see a gated community being much of a deterrent to a gang of kidnappers sophisticated enough to use these services to find potential victims. Maybe if the gate has armed guards and a strict "no tailgating" policy with ID checks etc.


There's a whole industry for protection of high net worth individuals. The financially minded ex military special forces folks can often find lucrative jobs on places like silent professionals earning on the order of 500-1500$ a DAY for close protection of the kinds of folks who would be targeted for this stuff.

Example: https://silentprofessionals.org/jobs/protection-agents-liais...


The information available via the public record is not as detailed (typically annual salary)and not definitively tied to any person. The Work Number is tied to your SSN and is much more detailed than the public record (each paycheck and a breakdown of different compensation).


In the US, most municipalities will publish each employee's compensation every year. You can literally look them up by name.


I think this is a little off, in that the data isn't coming from the various government entities or at least isn't required to be provided. I know at least in California most of the info is gathered by third parties using FOIA requests. It's also not associated with a SSN and just typically gives the annual compensation with limited categories. The Work Number on the other hand gets paycheck level details. Considering the data would be useless without a unique identifier, SSN is sent with it. Using The Work Number data, you could see pay period granularity changes to their compensation.


Here is what Washington State does:

https://fiscal.wa.gov/Staffing/Salaries

Literally every single State employee's salary is listed here.


That is exactly what they are saying. The public records typically contain annual compensation, not the detailed breakdown available via Work Number.


Which is fine. The problem is the imbalance of information and therefore bargaining power between workers and employers. With this information salary negotiation is like playing poker with your cards open so only thing it does is depress wages.

That's not a problem for the public sector because both sides can see it and there is no real negotiation (you still save time/money by not having to go thought the interview process to figure out your potential compensation).


or live in Sweden (where your earnings as well as your address and property, car or pet ownership are public record)


I’ve read about that. Is ipen to ANYbody? Is there a link?

Thanks


Multiple websites resell the financial data for like $4 per check, for example https://www.ratsit.se/ (you can try with 'sven svennson') One can also just call the tax agency and ask. The person looking up the information does not need to provide their data.

Living addresses, birth date, vehicles, pets are available in plain text without login and can be Googled.


IIRC in Norway at least everyone (who lives there) can check it but your name will be recorded and visible to that person.


The problem is not public salary. In EU multiple countries have it public with noe issues to anyone. I'm outside of EU and also have my data public due to owning an LLC.

The problem is identity fraud, and evil corpos like equifax plus some weird laws facilitate it way too much on a giant scale. This is what's infuriating.


22 states currently have salary history bans. You can save the trouble of jumping through Equifax's hoops if you have that protection.


Many if not most companies outsource employment verification to The Work Number. When you get a new job, a frozen report will complicate your background check.

They don't give out salary info in employment checks though. AFAIK they require your explicit permission except for government agencies who use it to verify your eligibility for benefits. I would be surprised if they are not selling aggregate salary data though


If they want my info, they can ask me. I would rather them not have this info before an offer is made.


That's normally how it goes. At least, I've always had the background check happen after an offer is signed. It's usually a separate company and they just report back whether your job titles/employment dates match your resume


I don't know how common it actually is. I've always provided references and probably OKd a background check but post-school my few jobs have always been through people I knew and there was really no reason to run a check except fr pro-forma reasons.


> They politely told me to kick rocks

The only way this stops is when people return the favor (on the spot, without a notice period).


Yep. Equifax got hacked a few years ago and the Government let them use ITS credit monitoring tool for those affected instead of reaching into its own pockets to pay for a third-party solution.

#sad #speakingOfMonopolies


I froze the report, and I also told my employer not to report anything to Equifax (which luckily my employer allows).

This made getting approved for a mortgage more difficult. These days, loan officers just expect to be able to hit a button and get all your info.

We're losing the privacy battle.


Loan officers typically want to see bank account balance, paystubs, and tax records.


unfreeze it just for that report. You can ask the bank, credit card, mortgage loaner which credit bureau they use and then unfreeze your account for 2 weeks.


The freeze is mostly ineffective for when you actually want it to work. From what I remember (even for the credit freezes) is that if you provide written consent to, say, a background check, then that overrides your freeze. So if you're applying for a job (basically the major instance where you'd want your salary information private) they're going to ask for your consent to do a background check and bingo they'll know how much money you make.

IMO this type of information should be illegal to sell or request.


I’m not sure this is true. The last time I changed jobs I had my TWN report frozen, and the background check company was really confused and said “we can’t seem to verify your job history through our normal means” without specifically saying why. I had to send some redacted paystubs.


With the passage of the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act which was signed into law on May 24, 2018, security freezes do not apply to the making of a credit report for use in connection with "employment, tenant, or background screening purposes" (see Sec. 301(a)(4)(I) of the Act [page 34 of the PDF below]).

https://www.congress.gov/115/plaws/publ174/PLAW-115publ174.p...

To be fair, I'm not sure if the same rules apply to whatever type of "freeze" the work number offers. I'm not even entirely sure it's regulated at all.


I agree that it is actually pretty confusing what kind of "freeze" The Work Number offers when you do it, especially since The Work Number does not distinguish between hard inquiries and soft inquiries and groups both together as "Verifiers who have procured or attempted to procure your data in the past 24 months". Most freezes only block hard inquiries, which involve the extension of new credit. Background checks typically come in as soft inquiries and therefore bypass security freezes. Oddly enough, there are some companies that extend credit even with soft inquiries, so a security freeze will not stop fraud there.

That said, I have seen anecdotes online that say that when somebody pulls a frozen The Work Number report, it comes back as blank even if there is information in the file. This is different than how freezes are handled elsewhere. Most places just report back that the report is frozen when a frozen report is requested. They do not imply anything about the state of the information in it.


In case folks want to quickly know how to start a freeze, heres the info from the website:

To communicate a freeze request, send an email to the address below requesting a Freeze Placement Form: TWNFreeze@equifax.com


As a datapoint for how I've seen this used in the real world, I've spoken to startups who will defer to Pave regarding how much they'll offer to pay. The startup I spoke to said 'We pay you the 85th percentile for your YOE and role based on Pave data'.


Then I want 99th.


Considering the median tech startup employee is already above average, I think the 99th percentile, and above, really only belongs to literal, bonafide, geniuses…


Is this true? I look at jobs on well found and most startups pay worse salaries than what I was making at insurance companies. Not too mention the worse benefits that they appear to offer as well.


*Tech startups in the SF Bay Area, who have employees physically located in the same.


I just signed up to see what they have on me.

I love that they have ALL my personal info, but I can't create an account with a password longer than 16 characters.. Why the heck are they not storing the hash?

Great security.


Pave is a company that has been snapping up other existing companies that performed this kind of aggregation of compensation data. Basically companies look at this benchmarking data to figure out what they should pay for different jobs and levels. Just some extent companies genuinely need this kind of data to figure out what to do. But I also think it breaks supply and demand. Companies are not discovering price of labor but just using each other’s signals to decide what to pay collectively

https://www.pave.com/blog-posts/announcing-paves-series-c-an...


These services feel not dissimilar to the Realpagr case that is ongoing now with rent price fixing.

How does this ultimately not end up having a depressing impact on salaries?


It does depress salaries, which is the point.


This thread got pretty off track. But, if I were to opt out of this database and went looking for a job, would potential employers not be able to see specific history about me (or at least not from Equifax)?


“I’m an employee looking for my data”. Links to https://employees.theworknumber.com/

Spits out 403 error forbidden

Gosh, that’s awful.


If one is required to sign an agreement to a background check, could this supersede one’s freezing of one’s Work Number?


In my experience the background check company (Hireright IIRC) was not able to complete the check “normally” with my TWN report frozen. Had to send redacted paystubs.


The FTC Guidelines for Collaborations Among Competitors https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/attachments/dealings... says it’s illegal to share “competitively sensitive variables”, not just any data. Some forms of data sharing such as industry averages may not be illegal, but more detailed data such as numbers of applicants or price elasticity that enable the companies to act together as if they were a monopoly probably are. RealPage crossed the line by sharing an optimization algorithm and encouraging collective action. I’m not sure what Pave does.


> Under the Sherman Act, agreements among competitors to fix prices or wages, rig bids, or allocate customers, workers, or markets, are criminal violations. Other agreements such as exclusive contracts that reduce competition may also violate the Sherman Antitrust Act and are subject to civil enforcement.Dec 20, 2023

A good US.A. could probably argue this meets that bar. Didn't they just do something similar with the rent fixing from that similar SaaS product?


Op mentioned realpage, which is the company that does rent fixing as a service (RFAAS)


How sure are you that the incentives in place don't encourage inching toward this behavior as they begin to establish themselves?


As described, it is a fair ways away from what RealPage is doing. Specifically:

* RealPage sells raising rents, not just market info.

* RealPage pressures clients into taking their higher rents.

* RealPage also pressure clients to refuse to rent at lower rates for their own narrow economic interest - in other words, they actively seek to circumvent competitive pressure to keep rents high. (edit: to clarify, I mean they discourage lowering rent to attract a renter)

Pave does sound like it gives businesses a leg up over employees in wage negotiations, but until it e.g. starts promising clients that they will be able to pay lower salaries, the critical element of coordination won't be in the mix. Pave gives you the data, but you can still choose to pay above market to attract talent.


What's the point of getting this data if it's not to pay less money? What is the value add?


It's almost certainly for the companies to pay less money, but with a more generous reading, I think it could be argued that that doesn't necessarily have to come out of employee salaries. That data could be used to:

- Set reasonable ranges to find the right candidates they are looking for faster and minimize hiring friction

- Standardize payment levels in a way that reduces legal liability in certain states like Colorado/California. Or the most generous reading of "reduces legal liability" would be "promoting fairness".

- Reduce the time spent by HR/other teams of negotiating or setting salaries, as they can simply target some target like "we want to pay more than 60% of companies like us"

- For budgeting/forecasting with new hires, this allows companies to have more confidence in their estimates as they plan hiring.

- Some companies now offer calculators even before you're hired with what your salary/compensation might look like, such as https://posthog.com/handbook/people/compensation

But yes, overall I do believe that most companies also expect a general reduction in salaries when they use these tools.


I routinely get emails like "we'd like to hire you as our CTO, and because we just got a bunch of VC money, we're prepared to offer you a generous comp package of up to $90,000 salary plus .05% equity! Must be onsite in San Francisco."

If they were aware of market rates, they could avoid making potential candidates laugh at them.


Founding engineer is the biggest ripoff in tech.


But... but... they already did the hard part of coming up with the idea! All you have to do is code it.


Literally the worst experience of my life. I don’t even mention it on my resume or LinkedIn or anything. I suppose it was a success and the product is still doing fine. I just never want to do that again unless it’s for myself.


Were you ever at Crittercism by chance?


No, this was a sort of AI assistant before AI thing. It was a whole bunch of state machines and decision trees and NLP. It actually worked fairly well.


Gotcha. Your name looked awfully familiar and I was going to be very happy if you were another person with it.

Not that I’m not happy with you, the OG and clearly greatest of the name!


> plus .05% equity!

"Dilution? What? Stop worrying about made-up words and let's go change the world!"


That actually made me shudder.


Because it's just as much to pay more money and get the employees you want.

When you don't know what the market is paying, you're liable to lowball offers and refuse to raise them, and not get the employees you want.

If you know market rates, you can provide reasonable first offers, or have a more accurate idea of how high you should go.


Which would be perfectly fine if you made this completely transparent and made the same information available to your applicants. Them not knowing the market rates (at least not even remotely as accurately) puts them at a significant disadvantage and you can't expect that most company won't exploit because it would be irrational to do that.


That's a really interesting idea.

It makes me wonder how it would affect salaries if companies were required to make the salary distribution public for all their roles. So you knew both the range where you were applying, as well as at other companies.

And also how that would interact with unionization. E.g. would it make collective wage bargaining less necessary to some degree? If workers felt they had the data to know they could bargain individually for more money?


What I've heard from leadership at more than one company is that they choose a percentile of the market they want to pay and then set the compensation there. For example, they may say "we want to pay at the 75th percentile for SWEs with X experience in the Bay Area".

I certainly don't trust that this doesn't hold wages down overall, particularly in the boom hiring market we had until recently.


To pay more money.


The limit on pay is the amount of money they can budget to the position not what other people are paying.


And how do they arrive at the budgeted number? Lots of companies want to ensure they are paying a sufficiently high number to get sufficiently capable employees in a competitive market. While many (including me) find things like Pave gross, it's not a one way street, they can push wages up.


You’re thinking of the actual budget for a position not what a company could in theory budget.

A small businesses owner who pays themselves whatever is left over after expenses doesn’t care about what other companies pay, the company only has so much money. Apple could increase salaries up to the point where they make zero profit, but the goal is profit maximization not salary maximization.

It’s fundamentally the attempt to limit salaries that causes companies to look at the overall market.


Small business owners aren't the target market and are likely to not use such a product.

Hiring well is hard - it's not super obvious if you aren't paying enough or your company isn't desirable or what else is the cause of not seeing good candidates. While in theory you could solve that by wildly overpaying, in practice you have to be able to justify your decision to higher ups in most cases, and pointing to a tool that shows what you really need to pay to get good people can be very helpful. I still find it gross, but, there are practical situations where it will drive salaries higher.


> justify your decision to higher ups

What you just described is speeding up a process not increasing wages.

If a company simply isn’t offering enough money they aren’t going to get the workers they want. Which then forces the company to either go without or increase their compensation, just like how every other market works.

> your company isn't desirable or what else is the cause

The clearest example of this principle is companies eventually learn they need to pay the asshole tax. Market research may suggest X is a reasonable number, but they simply don’t get enough people without paying appropriately.

> will drive salaries higher

It will drive some offers higher and get workers sooner, but an offer not accepted is a salary that doesn’t exist.


> If a company simply isn’t offering enough money they aren’t going to get the workers they want.

I've never seen a worker walk away once an offer is made. Getting workers in the door in the first place is hard, though.

Which means that it is really the marketing that needs to be improved. But how...

> how every other market works.

Every other market that has suffered from this kind of marketing problem starts to publish sale data! The labour market has just been slow to catch up with everyone else here. No doubt because, historically, getting people in the door was easy. That has only somewhat recently started to change.


> I’ve never seen a worker walk away one an offer is made.

I’ve personally walked away from several offers. It’s not uncommon to receive multiple offers at the same time and you can only accept one.

So perhaps your offers have been excessively generous?


Or only the most desperate stumble through my door?

But either way, it's pretty clear that the prevailing problem is finding people at all. Not just me, but most businesses have been struggling with the same problem. You can't tempt someone with more money if you have no way of communicating with them.

Which goes back to the marketing problem. Absolutely there is a marketing problem, but publishing price data is exactly how other markets have solved the problem. We shouldn't be shocked or disappointed that labour is going the same way. That's how markets deal with the problem.


RealPage pressures clients

To be clear, they're not "pressuring" them, they simply drop clients as a rule who don't use their suggested rent prices at least 80% of the time.


Now that is interesting. I personally find the difference almost without meaning, BUT I am very curious. What is the incentive for them to do this? To they get a point off of the increase?


Yah, that's the main difference: RealPage pressured landlords (i.e. tracked then) if they did not raise rents based on its recommendations.

If they had limited themselves to simply reporting the numbers, and letting landlords make their own decisions they would probably be legal.


Competitors making similar price adjustments or salary adjustments based on seeing each other's public announcements or sharing data is legal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_collusion

That's why it's "legal tacit collusion" when one leading law firm announces salary increases and other law firms immediately match it: https://www.reuters.com/legal/legalindustry/large-law-firms-...

That type of salary matching has been happening for decades.

What's illegal is competitors making agreements with each other to set wages -- via secret emails, etc.


Yes, but the information here is not public, since it's being sold as a service.

If it were public, employees and job seekers would also have the information.


Huh, this tacit collusion being legal thing is mind boggling.

The law firm example seems imperfect though. Publicly announcing that you’re raising salaries isn’t really the same as internally sharing that data and choosing to set the same salary based on that.


>Huh, this tacit collusion being legal thing is mind boggling.

Not really ... If you're looking to hire workers in a particular region, how do you know what a competitive wage is? Well ... you look at what similar firms are paying their workers. How do you know what similar firms are paying their workers? You read surveys, industry reports, public statements, etc.

Nothing about any of that means you cannot offer a higher or lower salary for the same position.


Information is either internally confidential or it's not. If the latter then it's very reasonable to expect other firms to take actions based on that information.


> when one leading law firm announces salary increases and other law firms immediately match it

Because it's public so doesn't reduce the amount of bargaining power employes have and therefore distort the market. Which is the main problem here.


Companies like Radford have been doing this for decades and are used by pretty much everyone, Pave is just a more efficient version of the same game.


Beyond salary, there is a whole industry of data brokers who get transactional data from individual participants in an industry vertical (CPG, Health Insurance, Salary, etc), aggregate it with their competitors and present it back to those participants as benchmarks. Management Consulting likewise is a way to launder getting strategic insight into your competitors from a third-party.


There's a long long history--especially when a lot of information was more opaque than today--when companies quietly shared a bunch of information with middlemen because they needed that information from other companies to function and the middlemen skimmed some of the the take.

Even price sheets that we would consider very rudimentary today were part of that.


I got access to Pave through one of my investors. Seeing the data made us set salaries and contractor rates higher, not lower. It’s like salary banding at big companies. It’s a framework for how much other people are paid at the same level, not a contract. HR will make it seem like a rule, but if you do spectacular work - you can always negotiate.

Collusion requires an agreement between rivals that negatively disrupts market equilibrium. Is this company not actually making the market more efficient and transparent? That said - an efficient market is good for the collective, not necessarily the rogue / outlier individual.


The market might be more transparent for the people who have access to pave, but for those who dont, the information asymmetry becomes worse.


Ding ding ding. Improving information for only the already-more-powerful side of such an asymmetric relationship doesn’t help the weaker side.


I agree and as an employee I encourage everyone to take a second post their salaries on levels.fyi. We have our own compensation tool that is free & likely as good or better than Pave as long as people add their info.


> Collusion requires an agreement between rivals that negatively disrupts market equilibrium. Is this company not actually making the market more efficient and transparent? That said - an efficient market is good for the collective, not necessarily the rogue / outlier individual.

I'm sure you practice what you preach and tell all your employees what their coworkers earn?


I'm sure he means transparency in the market where employers are competing with each other, not the market where individual employees are choosing employers

With a few exceptions, I've found that companies that talk about transparency are transparent with everything but employee salary


> HR will make it seem like a rule, but if you do spectacular work - you can always negotiate.

Every single developer should take this to heart. The phrase I once used at the end of an annual review was, "you can't give me a review like that but a raise like this!"

Yes, my manager had to get permission to give me the % increase I wanted, but it was to his benefit to do it since he wanted me to stay.


> Is this company not actually making the market more efficient and transparent

No, not at all. Unless applicants/employees get full access to the same information.


Ok, so your company ended up raising salaries because you were underpaying. That certainly wouldn't be the case if you found out your salaries were ABOVE average. You'd keep it the same at best, but most likely lower it.

That's the point of these systems. If it's not illegal, then it should be.


Or at any rate, "as one member, we ended up spending more when we started participating in a thingy" isn't super-strong evidence that the thingy is OK.

__________

To illustrate this, imagine some kind of over-the-top incontrovertible conspiracy to depress wages. I'm talking a secret volcano-island base, a letterhead with a Et redigam operarios in servitutem in latin, members greeting each-other as "Hello, fellow conspirator!" while twirling deliberate Snidely Whiplash mustaches, etc.

Then a new company joins the cartel, and it turns out that company was one of the ones previously paying below the fixed-price.

The fact that some members pay more on joining doesn't change the core nature of the system, especially if there's "noise" in the organic prices.


anecdotes are not evidence


Not a lawyer, but this document seems highly relevant.

DOJ Withdraws “Safety Zones” for Information Sharing and Other Collaborations https://www.crowell.com/en/insights/client-alerts/doj-withdr...


Wage fixing is when multiple companies agree to set wages at a certain amount.

Sharing compensation data across companies doesn't necessarily mean wage fixing. Company A can use the compensation data from Company B to try and compete better for talent.

Not saying thats what it will be used for, but it's technically not wage fixing.


> Wage fixing is when multiple companies agree to set wages at a certain amount.

I am not an expert on wage fixing laws in the US, but I came across a class action on wage fixing a few days ago (Ron Brown et al v JBS USA Food Company et al) where part of what was aledged was the illegal exchange of salary data via surveys [1].

> The Red Meat Industry Compensation Survey conducted by WMS on behalf of the Defendant Processors violated the Safe Harbor Guidelines in at least three ways. First, the Defendant Processors, not WMS, collectively managed and controlled the annual Red Meat Industry Compensation Surveys. Second, those Surveys often contained information about the Defendant Processors’ future compensation plans and practices. Third, Defendant Processors had extensive discussions about the Survey results, including at in-person meetings, during which they disclosed their respective compensation rates, practices, and plans

[1]: https://www.classaction.org/media/brown-et-al-v-jbs-usa-food...


>part of what was aledged was the illegal exchange of salary data via surveys

Alleged doesn't mean illegal. In this case this point never saw court; the sides settled.

And what this claimed to have happened is not what is happening here.


> Alleged doesn't mean illegal

What is alledged is that they did that. And if they did, they would have violated the law from my understanding.

> And what this claimed to have happened is not what is happening here.

That might be, but that's not entirely clear to me. I don't know if what Pave is doing is legal or not, but it seems to me that the line is quite fine and it would be fascinating to see this play out at court.


I'm asking this as someone with 0 legal knowledge: doesn't the context matter? If every company takes this data and is like "we want to pay at the 95th percentile" (which is what they all do), that seems like wage fixing even if they're not all agreeing to it together.


If they’re all shooting for the 95th percentile and have up-to-date data then you certainly won’t have fixing; rather you’ll get insanely rapid wage inflation!


There's also a more cynical explanation.

It's possible the purpose of wage benchmarking companies is to allow bosses to say they pay the 95th percentile - which is useful to be able to say, when someone at an all-hands Q&A asks about raises and bonuses.

Then the benchmarking company simply has to define 'comparable roles' broadly enough to give the customer the result they want.


Not necessarily, if everyone's wages (except 5%) were set at minimum wage then the 95th percentile would be the minimum wage.


Yeah, it seems more like they'd all shoot for 45th percentile and say "We pay competitive wages" instead, slowly driving the wages down.


That's what my employer does. The head of our HR team got in front of the entire company and said that they aim for 50th percentile for everyone in every pay band. It instantly made me want to job hop, tempered only by the million things I have going on in my personal life that have a better expected value than a 5 or 10k pay bump.


That's... hilarious. We all know they are thinking that but to say it loudly and proudly to the employees is a self own on a level that makes me Cheshire Cat.


Which is... exactly what the software industry has seen over the past 30 years?


> If every company takes this data and is like "we want to pay at the 95th percentile"

It's thought by some that this is how CEO compensation has gone up so much: Corporate boards of directors have compensation committees, which are fed survey data about comp ranges; a comp committee will say, "We want our CEO's comp to be in the top quartile" — which, as time goes on, leads to an inexorable upward ratchet effect.


I think some basic math knowledge would help more, if every company paid at the 95th percentile then it wouldn't be the 95th percentile, it would in fact be the average. But no, these distributions are not flat like that, there is a large spread and "by definition" of the 95th percentile only a few companies pay at that rate.


If you opened up a business selling water bottles, you'd probably check what price water sells at across brands, then decide in which segment to price it.

"I want to sell my water at the upper end and market it as a gourmet brand"


But in this case you're not selling, you're buying.


That’s how pricing works in a market?

In fact if every company did pay at 95th percentile then I’d say it’s a good outcome. There’s a 5 percentile slack which is not too bad?


>Company A can use the compensation data from Company B to try and compete better for talent.

My company has done this in the past sorta indirectly, we were losing a lot of people to competitors and data like this is how they justified paying a bunch of us better so we wouldn't leave. I agree that it could be used to fix wages, but companies will always have to pay their best talent more if they want to retain them, whether that means paying them above what the data says or if it means inventing new job titles for them to progress into.


Stochastic wage fixing is still wage fixing


Your honor, the algorithm made me do it!


https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2024/03/price-fix...


ChatGPT did it!


unless you collude with other companies, doesn't seem like it is.


That is the entire basis for the RealPage lawsuit. The point is that if the effect on pricing is indistinguishable from price fixing, it doesn't matter if the act of colluding is abstracted into and laundered through a 3rd party with an algorithmic system responsible for setting prices.


As this guy argues, that this is also price fixing by algorithm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFk8V7mU0Wo .

(Got the link from a comment on another recent HN post, IIRC.)


Honestly, I think it does still matter. The basis for the RealPage lawsuit seems to be that people inside and outside the company glibly considered it price-fixing, and said it out loud to each other. The didn't really seem to make the case that it was "algorithmic price-fixing" (Disclaimer: not a lawyer). You can only argue in court about existing laws, so until algorithmic price-fixing is written in the law books (or settled case law) you're gonna have a tough time bringing that up to a judge.


It seems you don't understand the lawsuit. Most of the claims are based on the actual mechanics of how algorithmic price fixing does violate existing laws.


unless disclosed to employees and applicants this seems like de facto colluding.

I always ask myself, as to the legality or ethics, would this survive review by a jury of my peers...


You think it is more ethical for wage data to be kept secret? Why? Rarely is requiring secrecy the more ethical option.


What would be the least ethical would be keeping it secret to one party and having the other party sharing data... Oh wait!


Glassdoor exists.


>Glassdoor exists.

you are not allowed to tell anyone how much you make so you might be in trouble if your found out but the companies share this info without your consent. From my POV make it all transparent.


I have had a career spanning over 30 years at this point. I've worked in businesses with 6 employees and F500 corporations. No one has ever told me that I can't tell anyone else how much I make.


So... Pave shouldn't exists as "Glassdoor exists" and is already providing data?


Eh? Glassdoor is for the other party, which you were implying was being kept in the dark.


If Glassdoor data are sufficient, why would employers pay for Pave?

It's not like Glassdoor is restricted to employees, they even offer specific services to employers.


I never said that.


> Company A can use the compensation data from Company B to try and compete better for talent.

Company A could make offers and negotiate with prospective hires based on the value they can get out of the hire. Rather than secretly leverage surveillance capitalism against the prospective hire, to base their offer on what the person is currently making (and, hey, if lots of employers do that by convention, you pretty much have collusion).


Hate it in concept (I can't speak to Pave specifically). Metrics are useful if the manager doesn't make hard targets, the data is good and the model is good. How do you model compensation packages? how does 20 days leave compare to unlimited leave? Are two companies with unlimited leave equivalent? When the managers have targets, they're incentivized to massage the data in their favor. So even if you're doing it right, that makes every other companies data suspect.

This also sounds like it will reinforce some negative behaviors. If the data shows that other companies are paying women 80% of their male peers, shouldn't this recommend I also pay women 80%? But I doubt the output will spell it out that way, will I even know it's influencing me this way?


No, you don't set salary bands based on race or sex. That sounds like it would be illegal. The way that bias creeps in is not from data gathering and setting salary ranges, it's from managers bias when they choose from the ranges for candidates.

Setting company wide salary bands actually HELPS fairness in pay by providing objective ways employees can argue that they are underpaid if that's the case.


> it's from managers bias when they choose from the ranges for candidates.

It also comes in from how / if they choose to promote. If they take too long or if they just don't put you up for promotion / reject you, overall earning potential is weakened.

Do this enough times and it becomes a substantial reduction in life-long earnings, life-long title, respect, etc.


Gratitude for the expose. I was(and assume most here were as well) completely unaware of Pave. I will, and hopefully other potentially impacted, look up if I am affected by this and if so - share experiences/info here.


The overwhelming question I have when reading these responses is "don't you guys read salary survey data when you're looking for a new job, or at annual review time?"


But then we're not sharing other people's personal information.


Are they actually sharing personal information? From the OP it sounds like they're sharing aggregate data. (I've never heard of Pave.)


Isn't levels.fyi or similar just the employee side of the coin?


See if you can figure out the difference between volunteering anonymized data with the exact level of granularity you choose vs. having all of that data and more involuntarily collected and sold in secret as a consequence of merely participating in the system we are all coerced into if we don't want to be homeless


But the salary data that’s available online to me as an employee is imperfect and extremely limited. This would be like if every employee of a major company sent their exact salary and demographic information to levels.fyi, which would never happen because it’s an insane sacrifice of privacy


I believe wage-fixing would require companies to agree to…fix wages. Having knowledge of average compensation is not inherently problematic. Firms are still able to decide to pay more or less than the prevailing wage.


RealPage also gave recommendations. Giving a salary range seems like the same thing.


By this logic, employees who share their salary publicly also contribute to wage fixing.


If it’s public there is no information asymmetry. There is no fixing.


How?

Information symmetry doesn't prevent fixing. E.g., rents are all public information.

If it is public, won't employers still have access to the salary ranges for free? The very thing Pave is giving them at a cost?


"I believe wage-fixing would require companies to agree to…fix wages"

They don't need to officially twirl their mustaches and laugh evilly while telling each other how they're definitely fixing wages. They just need to share data on wages with other companies in the same or a similar business with the intent of decreasing wages. That is already illegal, because they're colluding with competitors to keep wages low.


The whole point of getting such data is to ... fix wages.


Do you actually believe they will be doing this?


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

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


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

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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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

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


Sharing compensation ranges may not be enough to qualify as wage fixing.

It seems like there would have to be an agreement or at least a collective incentive to lower wages.

While companies could use the data to ensure their offers are always below average (pushing wages down), they could also use the data to ensure their offers are above average, pushing wages up.

Think about it: prices are transparent in most markets and that doesn't seem to generally lead to anti-competitive prices. In fact, it seems to encourage companies to compete.


"at least a collective incentive to lower wages."

???

In accordance with HN guidelines I am going to resist giving a snarky answer and will instead clearly articulate: Companies clearly have a strong collective incentive to lower wages.

"While companies could use the data to ensure their offers are always below average (pushing wages down), they could also use the data to ensure their offers are above average, pushing wages up."

They may do both. Collude to keep average wages low, so that when they offer outliers "above-average" it is still cheaper to cross that many standard deviations.

"Think about it: prices are transparent in most markets and that doesn't seem to generally lead to anti-competitive prices. In fact, it seems to encourage companies to compete."

The problem imo is less about transparency and more about information asymmetry. It's asymmetrical that companies have access to literally what every other company is offering, while the employee is sitting there trying to guess based on glassdoor (which is utter shit information) and levels.fyi (marginally less shit?).


> Companies clearly have a strong collective incentive to lower wages.

Of course they all have an incentive to pay the lowest wages they can. I did not think we needed to state that.

But what I don't see here is a synchronizing mechanism. That is, what here will push companies to *collectively offer below average salaries on average* vs above average salaries on average?

> ...Collude to keep average wages low, so that when they offer outliers "above-average" it is still cheaper to cross that many standard deviations.

Yes, companies could collude. CEOs and HR managers of a range of companies in an area or industry could start an email chain, or conference call, or slack channel and commit to keeping their average offers at 45th percentile or lower. That's collusion, and illegal.

But is that what Pave is offering? What's the communication channel or other synchronization signal they are providing? A chat channel? Bonuses for companies that keep their average offers below average? Penalties for companies don't? IDK, perhaps there is some collusion mechanism they provide, but we should not just imagine there's one without a reason.

> The problem imo is less about transparency and more about information asymmetry.

Sure, yes. But that's something different than collusion to fix wages. That's an argument that we want organizations like Pave, but ones that will provide the same data to job seekers.


You're assuming that it would depress wages, which is not necessarily true. A more likely scenario is that such a thing can slightly depress wages in low-skill, low in-demand jobs but is more likely to slightly increase wages in high-skill, high in-demand jobs. Companies that are growing and want to be the best and are flush with cash will happily pay premium wages to premium employees based on salary data. Other companies won't. So that's the big difference between the two companies. The "collusion" doesn't necessarily cause lower wages, that's just a big assumption that some people are making. Whereas RealPage was specifically touting and actively encouraging increasing rents.


It’s new so the government hasn’t caught on yet. They probably also need a larger market share to be considered fixing.


ADP has a product called compensation benchmarking which is very similar to how this is described.

They’ve had that product (with various names) for years.


Experian also sells a similar product


No, this is not new. There are many many many companies selling compensation metrics. This is also not salary fixing. These companies typically do not offer recommendations. It's up to each individual company to decide how to structure their salary bands and how they want to stack up to the market.


I actually run a product in this space in Europe as part of my portfolio. To echo your recommendation point; How we do it is pretty much the industry works. We give the low, mid, and high points in our data set based on what variables you input. We get the data from salary surveys and government data sets.

It’s all very boring and above board.

If companies choose to talk to each other to suppress salaries, they’re not using our tooling to do it.

There are also firms that will do all this work for you especially if you lack enough people in your own offices for an internal benchmark. If you’re building a CAD tool you can tell them (paraphrasing) to pretend you’re just like Autodesk and ask how much you should pay a UI designer.


What is the name of your European product, and is that data solely available to employers?


I found that salary data for some of my employees was being leaked and very accurately reported by a now defunct company called Paysa. We determined that the employees who had their data leaked had recently applied for mortgages and auto loans. Your bank could be selling your data.


> helps startups with compensation

It's not only startups - I know decades-old, listed firms that use it too.


Well, I wouldn't mind getting my wage fixed, if that works both ways, down _and up_, because then I would be guaranteed to never earn less than average for my skill and experience. Assuming, that those things of course factor into the averaging. Person X with experience Y in position Z. However, something tells me, that there is a tendency towards the downwards direction and none towards wage increase.

(Background: In Germany not so many companies pay competitive wages for their software engineers, especially not, once you worked for some years and are no longer a bloody junior. So I calculate it would result in a wage increase for me, since everyone says I am underpaid for my experience.)


Genuine question: What makes you believe that an employer would decide to pay you more when they notice that they're paying you less than other companies would? Why wouldn't they just think "Oh, neat, we got such a bargain!"


That's the reason I wrote, that I wouldn't mind, if (and only if) the upwards direction also happens and why I wrote, that "something tells me" that that wouldn't be the case ; )


If they cannot fill positions or are shedding talent.


What stops senior devs in Germany from remote contracting for foreign companies that pay better?


Not everyone wants to be self-employed is at least one factor.


Not to mention being self-employed here is a lot more complicated and expensive than in most jurisdictions. Things like having to meet strict professional definitions before being allowed to freelance (not usually an issue for engineers, but I know folks who've got into trouble because of the lack of a bachelors degree).


That's a significant factor here in Taiwan, also.


If you're truly underpaid for your experience and location then you should be able to get a new higher paying job easily. And if you can't easily get one well maybe you aren't underpaid.


> My question is, isn't this specifically anti-competitive wage fixing? This seems exactly like RealPage but for employee compensation. As far as I know, colluding on wages like this is illegal.

As long as Pave just helps employers look backward in time so to speak I’m not sure I’d call it collusion. But if they enable some kind of coordination between future potential employers, then yes, maybe it is.

In the RealPage case the coordination aspect consisted of providing a recommended rent for the property if I understand it correctly. I guess the equivalent for Pave would be if they gave a recommendation on what compensation to offer.


Companies compare pricing all the time even if it doesn't involve smoke-filled rooms with execs doing tit-for-tat. You don't think your local grocery store knows what the other local chain is charging (or what they're paying their employees)?


Sure. And as I said there’s nothing illegal about that, as long as it’s about historical and current prices. But if your local grocer walks over to their competitor and has a conversation about what the prices (or salaries) should be tomorrow, then that’s illegal in many jurisdictions. The same rules should apply if they use software.


I don't actually know what the letter of the law is in US, much less other countries and depending on public sector vs. private. But, yeah, there's a lot of information sharing both direct and (often) indirect on existing and past pricing on at least the aggregate level and sometimes at a more specific level.

As you say, the boundary is often about what pricing should be next year. But there's often a lot of nudge-nudge-wink-wink given good information about what prices and salaries are today.


> As you say, the boundary is often about what pricing should be next year. But there's often a lot of nudge-nudge-wink-wink given good information about what prices and salaries are today.

Sure. Just like a lot of people steal office supplies from their employers or trade small scale on insider information. But that doesn’t mean you could or should build a website to enable that on an industrial scale. Same applies here IMHO.


So, I'm sure the format and medium is different, but companies HR depts have been sharing notes and checking on what the market compensation is (for any given job and experience level) since forever. IANAL, but this is not a new thing.

I've even known co-workers who said "I deserve more $$, I'm underpaid for my experience and job" and supervisor repeats this to HR, then HR checks on it, and a few days later says "true, here's a raise". This was in the 90's, btw. Not a new thing.


“I’m not punching you in the face, I’m just putting my fist on a movement vector that happens to intersect your face.” I hope these guys get their shit rocked in court. I’m tired of a world run by cartels.


"Alright, pie, I'm just gonna do this...and if you get eaten, it's your own fault!"


FWIW, I believe that Pave works to raise engineering salaries. Every company wants to say, "We pay above the 50% mark", thereby steadily raising it over time.


FWIW, I believe RealPage works to lower rent. Every landlord wants to say, “We charge below the 50% mark”, thereby steadily lowering it over time.


> Every company wants to say, "We pay above the 50% mark"

This is a true thing I've heard several company representatives say.

> Every landlord wants to say, “We charge below the 50% mark”

This is not a thing I have ever heard any landlord say.


That's the point. It was a sarcastic response to point out how ridiculous it sounds.


I hear the complaint but it's a bit of a trap to just seek protection.

Yes, the law on point is permissive. That goes with the evolution of law.

But assuming for the moment that we want not just avoid injury to ourselves but to create the world now and to come, what are we called to do?

- What exactly do you, or employees, want in this situation?

- What would Pave do if they wanted to take the high ground? Could that be a business differentiator?

- What law could you write and enforce, to protect what interest, without also damaging other interests that are socially beneficial?

I think the organizational evolution towards having loose laws with tightening enforcement, or tight laws with lax enforcement, give way too much latitude to policing/enforcement and create a corrupting political franchise of affected stakeholders taxed with managing regulators.

My hope would be that internet-scalable transactions have similarly scalable regulatory solutions: dead-simple to detect and assess, finely-tuned to the balance of interests, and so patent as to be indisputable. Then people can get stuff done without dealing with the shadows and forces of ambiguity.

Is something like that possible here? Could Pave be a champion of it?


This already existed for decades. It's called "Radford".


Sharing data about wages, I think, is not wage-fixing. Agreeing not to go higher than a particular wage is. What got RealPage into trouble was the fact that, in order to use the system, you HAD to use their algorithm for selecting rental prices. You entered into a legal agreement not to compete on the prices that RealPage provided.


I had the same concern where I work. They told me data are aggregated anonymously, so no risks, in any case it's useful to compare yourself with others when your salary is below average, so you can ask for a raise (which I will do next salary-review cycle) :)


"data are aggregated anonymously".. that's what almost every data broker with a security breach also said at one point in the past.


Realpage does the same thing with rental market data but they are clearly at risk.


You may also be interested in the Work Number product: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29834753


if y'all think that being in the dark about market wages is going to result in employers offering higher salaries then I don't know what to tell you


From a US perspective, if Pave existed in a market where salaries weren't transparent, I would say yes, it's veering into being an anti-competitive/wage-fixing tool.

However, more and more states every year are introducing laws that require salary ranges on job listings. What that means is that Pave is basically just organizing the data that's already becoming public for job applicants and employers alike.


VERY similar to the situation in the rental market where large landlords are being investigated for using software to enable collusion and price fixing.

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/12/justice-department-...


My guess is that they would argue that most of the data they use is public, just go on LinkedIn and look at 10 job listings to have a range.


Pave's data is _incredibly_ revealing. First of all it covers historical data for every single employee, secondly it includes stock as well. It also relates the compensation to performance.


Job listings is very different kind of data than compensation actually paid to employees.


It's almost certainly illegal, but it benefits the capital class, so it's going to get a pass for a long time.

That said, it's exactly the same thing that landlords were doing with that pricing software and the government is coming after them, so maybe pave will get hit with a big lawsuit sometime soon.

Here's hoping this sort of thing gets regulated down into the earth.


I'm not sure about the legal aspects in your jurisdiction but in many others it is common for unions to aggregate this information and there are usually companies that do this or hook into the books and compare what different companies are paying for services and material they use that then sell back information about whether they could cut costs.


There's a lot of technically legal anti-competitive behavior. We need our legislators to get off their asses and legislate.


Salary surveys are not new. Robert Half does this already, and has for decades.

What RealPage does is sell a pricing algorithm using that data, which is the bit DoJ and Congress has an issue with.


Carta has a similar product, and Radford is a popular one as well. These things have been around for decades. Nothing new.


Isn't this just salary benchmarking. It's been happening for ages. As far as I know they submit the data anonymously with only your job title. so that companies can benchmark their pay ranges against others for the same role. It forces upward pressure on wages for some companies too.


Huh, looks like they've pivoted (or is that a different Pave?).

> Pave: We turn your Google Analytics data in actionable insights + reports with our data science AI algorithm.

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/pave


https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/pave-2


That proud phrase "HR Tech" in that link, gives me the heebie-jeebies.

I'd say "if you work in a company like this you're a bad person", but sociopaths, sorry, Wharton graduates won't give a shit anyway.


It seems like the term Wharton graduates is now a wart on graduates' resumes.


There's an unfortunate lack of fear.


Yep,this sounds like something that will be judged to be illegal once the right people see it.


If this were illegal, so should the KornFerry Hay system be, and that system has existed for decades.


This is exactly what Pixar/Disney and Ed Catmull got sued for. Apple, Google and FB as well.


Didn't they agree not to hire each other's employees? Which would serve to suppress salaries, even without sharing what anyone was getting paid.


Apple and Google got sued and lost because they were colluding, strange to see that a YC would get into that business because discovery seems pretty much "let's see how you run" then the prosecutors can sue you out of existence


The funniest thing about all this is that everyone around knows about the employees’ salaries, except the employees themselves, and at the policy level it is often written that you do not have the right to disclose this information.


Because it's not wage fixing?

To be competitive you need to be paying more than others not the same as them. This is why FAANG got themselves into a fix of paying 500k for people they would have paid 200k for a year or so beforehand.


The "funny" thing really is the fact that most company forbid you from discussing your wages with your coworkers, but this seems like an automated way for companies to discuss the salaries they pay with other companies.


> most companies forbid you from discussing your wages ....

Yes, but this interdiction might not be legal. Companies typically add such clauses to achieve a chilling effect. (Ie, you abide because you fear running a risk if you don't). Consult your legal representative.


1) Salary surveys for local or national startup scenes have been a staple for decades. Here in Waterloo (Canada), there was a dominant local survey that all tech companies participated in annually with results being shared. Then, as you get bigger, you come across larger versions of the same thing.

2) VCs are often the vector by which this all happens. They ask their portfolio companies to pull together the info for their employees, presumably submit it into the companies aggregating everything, and then the startup gets a copy of the recent data.

3) Even done the old way (Excel), the data was incredibly detailed. You can slice and dice by startup stage (series A vs series B vs seed), employee count, region, sector, etc to determine if you're paying market rates or not. This is particularly useful for growing startups, where the founders have no idea what to pay, say, a VP Marketing at their pre-revenue mobile gaming startup in Helsinki.

4) Obviously whether or not this is bad for employees themselves is debatable, but I think people are missing the point that these surveys are ALWAYS skewed UPWARDS due to the much higher volume of data from the large tech companies (because they have far more employees and tend to be offering significantly higher comp). So in practice, the impact is likely to RAISE wages at earlier stage startups who are competing for the same talent as later stage tech.


An interesting artifact of the information disparity between the startup executives (who have access to this benchmark data) and the employees (who don't) is that the employee is often wildly off the mark in their expectations, either too low or too high.

There are so many variables at play too that it turns into a negotiation like everything else. Say an employee wants a big raise because they are having their first child are heading towards a higher cost base at home. Say the employer simply says "the salary data shows that your current pay is at the market average".

Well, is the employee truly "average"? Perhaps they're a high performer. Does the average number take into account not only the company dynamics (stage, domain, funding, revenue level, etc)? Not perfectly.

But then on the other side, just because an employee wants a higher salary due to a higher cost structure at home doesn't mean they are automatically entitled to it, right?

Then on the startup side again, the manager is looking at the data and thinking about all the time and cost of replacing this person and realizing it's likely more than the cost of just granting the raise.

Then the HR person comes in and says the salary grid -- whose whole purpose is to provide in theory tight constraints on these conversations -- rules this all out, there's no budget or wiggle room. When the Manager suggests the grid hasn't been updated in a few years, HR takes it personally and tells the person to take it up with the CEO.

So then the CEO gets involved. She knows the employee has a unique view on the technology and market direction and considers them Tier 1 can't-lose-them. She knows the grid is out of date. She looks at the data and thinks that she can justify to herself and the financial plan that it'll be OK to do it, with fingers crossed that this doesn't happen across the board because then their runway will shorten considerably.

So the raise happens.

My point is just that the salary information asymmetry is just one relatively minor aspect to this whole negotiation and in the end I'm not sure it advantages the company all that much.


Hm, sounds like the recent rent fixing collusion. Which was ruled illegal.


They already expect people to work for next to nothing simply because they're "startups". Instead, maybe they should focus on hiring decent people AND paying them industry-fair wages.


This sounds very obviously illegal. Where is the local DA on this?


The fundamental difference between something like Pave or Radford is that, AFAIK, they are simply providing companies with information.

I am not a lawyer, but I believe the fundamental issue with RealPage is that by entering into a service agreement with them, you agree not to violate their price “recommendation” and so you are centralizing actual pricing power into a single entity.

I believe RealPage has some way to negotiate out of this standard deal but it’s not common.

Companies likely insist on staying within certain pay bands for a whole host of legal and HR reasons but they aren’t getting a specific salary from Pave that they are contractually obligated to use in their offer.


I can recite at least five situations where "simply providing X with information" is considered a crime. One of them is company A providing planned price to company B in order to agree on it, and it is called price fixing. Other are insider trading, pump and dump, etc.


Collecting and sharing data is in itself not illegal. RealPage was also using the data to algorithmically generate a rent number and encouraging landlords to automatically use that number with no room for negotiation. It literally branded itself as a service that would prevent landlords from bidding against each other. That part is what pushed it into collusion.

And regardless of whether it is legal or not, the problem has to go beyond a handful of small startups for the DoJ to get involved. RealPage is used in 80%+ of multifamily rental buildings in the US. What is Pave's market share? How many employees are affected by their practices?


No. DoJ is suing RealPage because they used non-public, sensitive data to set rental prices in a way that reduces competition. Literally what these guys are doing.

Complaint: https://www.justice.gov/opa/media/1364976/dl?inline=&utm_med...

more readable Press release for DoJ on RealPage: https://www.justice.gov/usao-mdnc/pr/justice-department-sues...


I've been hired to a startup that uses Pave - they mentioned that they paid at the 75% percentile, and my offer ended up being more competitive than others I was getting. I think that while obviously some companies can use this data to pay less, the more likely outcome is that they pay MORE. You forget that companies are competing with each other for talent, they are not in the business of colluding together. So if I can see that other companies are paying X, I am more inclined to pay X + Y


This could get interesting in light of recent changes to California law. A similar program designed to "normalize" rent. Is now illegal. Even the FTC has agreed that price fixing by algorithm is still price fixing. https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2024/03/price-fix....


They provide benchmarks, before them was Radford. They’re just taking a tech-first approach of an age old product.


IANAL so i don't know the actual legality, but it certainly seems like it should be. Definitely immoral.


I have to say I am pretty surprised to see the negative sentiments toward Pave and salary benchmarking data in general here. Why is the assumption that salaries would always be lower given this data? It seems just as likely to inform companies that what they had in mind is below market or that they are under-compensating someone in light of market changes.


A company doesn't need to know they are under compensating for a role from a third party. They'll find out by the quality and number of applicants pretty fast. I've seen this in practice directly when we couldn't hire for certain roles, raised the range, filled the spots.

On the other hand, to know that other companies are paying lower and still able to deliver roughly the same work is harder unless you know how much they are paying.


I have to disagree. If you're not getting quality applicants, how do you know if that's because of your salary range, the default applicant pool, or something idiosyncratic to your company?

If you're a new startup founder, you don't always have a good sense of what the default applicant pool should look like. You might have a sense of what quality looks like but how would you know without recruiting experience what the mix of quality to non-quality applicants is supposed to be? There are many reasons why you might not be getting the number of quality applicants you want, and compensation is just one of them. Salary benchmarking data helps eliminate that as a possible cause.


Because when we raised the range it fixed the problem.


I'm not talking about you, I'm talking about people in general.


You have a strange view of the world. People have limited hours to sell for money, so other than undifferentiated work (where you don't get recognized for performance), workers compete for the best jobs, and so more skilled workers will on average make more money. Another factor is that people do lots of shitty things if the money is enough. Salary is the most effective way to attract and retain people, other than if the company has dystopian practices (and even then...).

How do you explain people moving to the USA for better salaries and crap on European salaries when Europe affords workers more vacation time, more social nets, healthcare, etc? Because the USA pays more money.


I think there’s a pretty big gap between “salary is the most effective way to attract and retain people” and “the only possible reason you’re not getting as many quality applicants as you might hope for is salary”. As a very basic example, your standards for quality may simply be unrealistic.


There's a big gap between those two statements but I made neither of them.


Uh, go back and read your post. You certainly made the first one :)


I think it's a pretty safe assumption that a company paying to gain information that gives them an advantage in negotiation isn't going to freely give up that advantage.


You're assuming that the only reason to pay for Pave is to get a negotiation advantage. My point is that there are other reasons, for example, to make sure that you're not below market.


I've never run a company and probably have a chip on my shoulder, but I also think that it's a reasonable assumption that most employers want to pay as little as possible.


I guess my point is that without some sort of sense of the market, whether through Pave or something else, the motivation to pay as little as possible may lead some employers to have lower salary ranges than they would otherwise.


Obviously, this sort of information would always be used for good.


Because information has to be used for good or bad and never both?


Yep all of these compensation intermediary are basically supporting illegal collusion


I'm guessing that this practice is not possible in the European Union?


Extremely common practice.


All tax data should be public. Then we would know exactly what everyone makes.


Probably not, but it doesn't matter until there is a complaint (lawsuit)


It shouldn't be, and neither should The Work Number.


Uber and AirBnb are essentially illegal taxi and illegal hotel services. Remember taxi medallions? Remember zoning laws? Being illegal is not a showstopper for a startup because they are under a radar, being illegal is not a problem for a large business because they have enough power to not get prosecuted.


Anybody else remember that time YC funded an international smuggling operation?

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/backpack

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8199286


Hell you could write off all of web3 with that sentence


You say that like writing them off would be a bad thing


because web3 was a smuggling/laundering operation and those are illegal. basically, all cryptocurrency activity is immediately a suspicious activity.


Reminder that until recently, most cannabis patients relied on smugglers to treat their illnesses.


reminder that cannabis has been distributed quite successfully and broadly for hundreds if not thousands of years, all without blockchain.

blockchain is the solution to exactly nothing. zero things are better with blockchain. zero. in the case of hiding cannabis use, the problem is that it is illegal despite having valid medicinal uses.


It wasn’t widely distributed over the internet until Bitcoin. Bitcoin solved the problem of irreversible payments over a communications channel without an intermediary.


Reminder that a minority of cases does not justify smuggling for recreational use.


I disagree. I’m fine with millions of recreational users supporting smugglers so that a single patient can get the medicine they need. It was the black market the safeguarded this plant for generations until we came to our senses again.


Their website is "backpack bang"? What a strange name, the last thing I want is for my backpack to "bang" when moving unknown goods across international borders!


Looks like they are still active!


Anyone else remember when HackerNews had an adventurous libertarian ethos before the school marms infested the place with irrelevant and low vibrational commentary?


“Is it legal?” should be a question adventurous libertarian should ask himself. Something being illegal never stopped hackers, being it exploiting vulnerabilities for profit or not complying with outdated regulation. That is just good strategy. I don’t expect libertarians to ask a question “is it ethical” the more anarchist wing of the hacker community might ask themselves.


>Anyone else remember when HackerNews had an adventurous libertarian ethos before the school marms infested the place with irrelevant and low vibrational commentary?

Boy will you not like the "high vibrational" commentary people would have for that adventurous™ libertarianism©* of yours.

The "medium vibrational" ones merely wish its pursuers behind bars, the more energetic ones are discussing optimal guillotine blade shape profiles.

* * * * * * *

Question to you.

Would a startup that maintains a public database of names, addresses, and approximate locations of people with net worth over $1B be libertariously adventurous enough by your standards?

You know, like Page, but crowdsourced, and with wage workers as the users (not as product). Purely opt-in. Give it a higher-energy vibe name, like, say, 'rage (as in "average" - for the average people).

Anyone who sees Elon Musk could anonymously report his location to 'rage, giving wage workers an option to avoid providing services to him - just like Pave gives employers an option to avoid getting services from undesirable workers.

Are you a pastry seller who'd rather call in sick the day Peter Thiel or his buddy JD Vance are in town again? Get 'rage, and avoid the awkward interaction.

Anyone who gets a wind of someone fitting the wealth profile will have an option to anonymously contribute this data to 'rage's Wealth Accumulator Registry (Rage WAR™).

They may be breaking their NDA's while doing so, but that won't be 'rage's problem, of course. 'rage will not be in the business of policing individual actions and limiting users' personal freedoms.

The user identity will be e2e encrypted, guaranteeing anonymity. It will be impossible to prove that someone has a 'rage account against their will, or find out they have one.

The app, however, will also allow users to confirm that they have a 'rage account if they choose to do so. This way, wage workers who are concerned about their peers could ask them to privately confirm their account status and contribution karma to avoid sharing a workplace with a scab.

Registration will require entering your own personal wealth data into 'rage WAR™.

While tax returns can be faked, someone uploading a copy of their W-2 paystub will practically ensure that one does not fit the target wealth profile for the B-status.

Those could be faked too, of course - and one could see large employers not wanting to collaborate with 'rage for whatever reasons.

That's exactly where startups like Pave come into play to verify the correctness of the data.

'rage and Pave would not only complement each other in the financial data ecosystem, they would form a natural symbiosis, giving wage workers incentives to ask their employers to use Pave. As for Pave, 'rage would merely be one of its clients, consuming W-2 data just like everyone else.

I hope you will find this proposal sufficiently adventurous and relevant; and I would love to hear your thoughts on this matter.


he flagged your post, too adventurous for him :(


[flagged]


I think the critique was directed towards the attitude of being overtly scared of doing something illegal or breaking rules (which does not equal being unethical!). Backbag is simply a way to transport stuff in a backbag, which isn't illegal.


>If that actually is libertarian ethos, then it sucks.

It is.

Also, when I asked whether they would have the same libertarian attitude regarding a crowd-sourced app to keep tabs on people with net worth over $1B, my modest proposal[1] got flagged and hidden -

- unlike the insulting comment that called the users who have an issue with Pave "schoolmarms" that "infest" the place, like pests to be exterminated.

Go figure.

Hypocrisy is OK on HN, calling it out is not.

[1] as in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal


> When people say that libertarians are just right-wingers kidding themselves

I thought libertarians are right-wingers kidding with us /s

> I don't think it's in a "libertarian ethos" to do wildly unethical and immoral things on a large scale

I personally conflate libertarianism with wanting all regulations removed and whining about Big-Government, and then crying to Big-Government to bail you out when you crashed the economy with less-than-informed gambling.

> If that actually is libertarian ethos, then it sucks.

Astute observation!


No, it is simply an idea to live and let live. Sane people escape California or New York where one must be insanely wealthy to live a decent life. In most of the US, you can do your thing and no one will bother you. Most hellishly expensive places would become affordable and fun if they implemented Texas-style zoning.

Now, obnoxious white people in Silicon Valley would be upset that multifamily housing had allowed displeasing minorities in, but man would that make life better for everyone. I lived in East Asia, and it is really nice when cities are not too expensive for regular people to live in. Furthermore, I have no sympathy for rich @holes who complain about losing their expensive view.

Freedom helps all, but especially the poor. The leftists have tricked people in California and NYC into thinking the system fails the poor, when in reality it is their stupid regulations that made these places expensive.


Yeah, this is why all the homeless people in Cali and New York move to Texas and Mississippi. It's all those darn regulations hurting poor people. Not the rich people who are always whining about regulation and taxes. No, the poor people.

Btw anyone else seen that bear rummaging around? Any idea how to get rid of it?


Eric Schmidt echoed similar sentiment in his recent interview. Basically do it, if startup fails then it doesn’t matter. If it succeeds then lawyers can sort it out.


He would know. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/04/24/306592297...


Also in these "gig" type companies, the people who are actually breaking the laws are the workers, e.g. the drivers or the homeowners in the case of Uber and AirBnB. The startup is the enabler, yes, but they will try to throw their workers under the bus before they take responsibility themselves. They don't own the cars, they don't own the properties, and they are most likely in a far-away jurisdiction.


SBF and Elizabeth Holmes would like a word.

And hopefully everyone else "successful" having the morals of a greedy chimpanzee follows the same fate as those swindlers. Whatever happened to doing good by people and society (or at least pretending to)?


Should inciting others to commit crimes be in itself a crime? Certainly, if somebody influential enough does it, it has the potential to destabilize our society with catastrophic results.


Didn't work for Elizabeth Holmes


There's a difference between "doing an illegal thing as a product" and "lying to investors about your product"


This is true, although it's also true that many startups lie to, or mislead, investors about the state of their products. If things work out, then the investors don't care, and if they don't its usually at scale and messy enough the government isn't going to prosecute.


Which makes total sense for consumers as well. If the startup succeeds is because consumers are finding value in it. Uber is the best example. Uber is ilegal only in countries with deep corruption where taxi unions can make legislators ignore their constituents. Uber (and any other car sharing app) is the best solution for me as a consumer compared to the traditional old school taxi service.


> Which makes total sense for consumers as well.

Kinda. Often this casual law breaking isn’t entirely victimless even if it benefits both consumer and the startup. I think Schmidt was talking about using content to train models. So artists getting short end of stick. Or Airbnb causing locals getting prices out or whatever.

There is certainly some dodgy protectionism happening of the sort you describe but there are also externalities borne by society for this break laws startup style.


As a user of GenAI, I get to create and save drawings in the style of any artist I like, without having to pay the artist $$$$. This is important to me because I like certain styles, but do not care for an original drawing nor have the money to pay for such.

And the externalities introduced here are not borne by all of society, but only by a small number of people (How many important artists are there? 10,000? 100,000?). Just like horse-and-buggy drivers were affected by automobiles, while the vast majority of people benefited from automobiles.


Right so externalities are fine as long as they don’t hit you and it fucks over less than 100k people…

That is…quite a stance. Not quite sure what to even say here.


Uber is objectively worse for every single party involved. Driver makes less, customer pays more, Uber has to coordinate a huge system.

Uber "won" because they cheated. They operated at a loss for almost 15 years, on the welfare of investors. Guess what, mom and pop running a taxi can't live on a negative wage.


> Uber is objectively worse for every single party involved.

Wrong on at least one count. I've never been refused service while black from Uber. The taxi industry was brought out of the dark ages of discrimination by Uber et al. Taxis (around the world) have tried to rip me off almost half the time I've used them, with no accountability.


I prefer Uber everywhere I go. Even if I pay more, I know it upfront. I have their safety in place, etc.


Okay. Objectively you're paying easily 2x more and, objectively, you're not safer in developed countries.


Totally. I propose we start a brothelBnB next door to your home. Home owner wins, customer wins, worker wins, startup wins! Score! Market has spoken!

I also recommend HoboSleepinCar Driveway as a service next to your home. The consumer has spoken!


Really good argument, congrats


Ironically for a question about antitrust price fixing you just named two incumbent government-sanctioned cartels (zoning and taxi medallions) that restrict supply and keep prices high. They would be illegal if private companies made them.


> They would be illegal if private companies made them.

A lot of things governments do would be illegal if private companies did them. Are you arguing that governments shouldn't have special abilities that companies can't have? Should every road be owned by a company? Should the police report to Amazon instead of the local municipality where you may actually have a say in how they are run?

We give governments additional powers because they, at least nominally, answer to citizens and society. Companies have no such responsibility.


I’m saying that government regulations that fix prices should be scrutinized and repealed if they reduce opportunity for ordinary people. Such as zoning codes that price out the poor.


I believe the argument here is that the way to do that isn't by establishing a private business that flaunts and undermines those government regulations, but by changing the policies through government process.

Obviously that's easier said than done, and SV has a track record of "ask forgiveness not permission" as a successful tactic for effecting policy change. But many times it results in indefinite undermining of government which leads to selective enforcement and cartels, which is worthy of criticism (of both government and VC-powered undermining of government).


> I believe the argument here is that the way to do that isn't by establishing a private business that flaunts and undermines those government regulations, but by changing the policies through government process.

And to make those who interfaced with the prior system in good faith whole again; eg: drivers who bought taxi medallions for six figures USD, only to have the value of the medallion plummet with the arrive of "rideshare" services.


To make beneficiaries whole is perhaps the worst reason to keep a monopolistic system. In the case of taxi medallions in San Francisco, they are technically still owned by the city and the medallion should never have had any private value to begin with; Mayor Gavin Newsom should have leased them to the drivers instead of creating a $250,000 transfer program to give windfalls to retirees. In the case of zoning, ideally we would tax much of the land rent to reduce the incentive to exclude and increase the incentive to create capital. Rents from a government-created monopoly should not be anyone’s ticket to retirement.


> They would be illegal if private companies made them.

Yes, that's kind of the main difference between government functions and private companies. Are you saying the very idea of zoning strikes you as a problem? Or are you trying to call out the bad implementations which strangle urban prosperity in the US?


> Yes, that's kind of the main difference between government functions and private companies

Perhaps that should change. Or at least it’s a reason to scrutinize and repeal laws that are used for price fixing.

> Are you saying the very idea of zoning strikes you as a problem? Or are you trying to call out the bad implementations which strangle urban prosperity in the US?

Zoning Rules! by William Fischel gives good a history of zoning. Zoning was originally for segregation within the city but to the question of prices, no it was not inherently problematic. It was not until the 1970s that zoning was used for growth control to make entire cities unaffordable.


Unless it's pollution-based zoning, I agree that the idea of zoning is a problem.


That's not ironic. Governments and private companies are not the same kind of entities. They have different roles, different roots of legitimacy, different forms of accountability, different operational objectives, and carry different expectations.


It’s ironic that in response to a question about price fixing, failuser brought up other companies that were formed to circumvent government price fixing, and in his examples the governments doing the price fixing were supposedly the good guys!

In the case of Uber, they successfully broke up the taxi cartel since the state PUC ruled that ride hail is a separate category.

In the case of Airbnb, according to their founding story they were created to help economize on space because rents were high in San Francisco due to zoning. Although they made a useful service, they did not succeed in reducing rents because the underlying zoning is still the constraint that keeps rents high.


I did not say those were even good laws. Many people go to jail for breaking bad laws though.

And the government can establish monopolies on many things, my private nuclear weapons startup did not get much traction either.


Zoning, ok, but yellow cabs are now often cheaper than Uber. Last time I took a ride from the airport the difference was not small, like 50%.


compete or die


The problem with that is thanks to many years of below cost pricing Uber has become synonymous with taxi now, and most people don’t even realize (or care) that taxis are often cheaper.


Uber is not seen as synonymous to taxi, its seen as better; more convenient (one app for any city), less fraudulent, and more safe. Uber more readily kicks drivers off the platform (for better or for worse)


Many things a government does would be illegal if private companies did them. For example, prison, the draft, and taxes. The government is allowed to do it because we (as a society) believe it's better for the government to do these things than private individuals or companies.


Can you give examples of the topic at hand, price fixing, that are justified? There are a handful of progressive forms of price fixing (e.g. minimum wage laws), but many others should be added to the Niskanen Center’s list of bad regulations in the Captured Economy.


Utilities that trend towards natural monopolies due to high barriers to entry like water and electricity infrastructure are often run by the government or heavily regulated because pricing would be extortionate if the market were allowed to set prices.


Fair enough, utility regulations fix prices except in the opposite direction. Without zoning, landowners could not act as a cartel since that would violate antitrust laws, whereas without utility regulation, a natural monopoly could set prices as high as the market will bear.


Yep, basic human rights are priceless, and by capitalist mechanics, their pricing will always converge at "how much can we get away with in the current economy?" Government oversight is the only way we currently have to manage this somewhat.

As an example in support of this, healthcare is barely price-regulated and hardly run by the government in America, and is thus extortionate.


> As an example in support of this, healthcare is barely price-regulated and hardly run by the government in America, and is thus extortionate.

They are supply-regulated by governments. According to Niskanen Center, the high cost of health care is due to the American Medical Association limiting new accredited medical schools and certificate-of-need laws limiting new hospitals. https://www.niskanencenter.org/faster_fairer/liberating_the_...


"Named after William A. Niskanen, an economic adviser to Ronald Reagan, it states that its "main audience is Washington insiders", and characterizes itself as moderate."

Barf. These seem like very erudite reasons when really the issue is running healthcare as a balkanized private system with opaque pricing information that patients often don't see until after they receive care is fundamentally an inefficient system. The government could run a single payer system at a loss and it would be cheaper than what we have now.


Sure, zoning and taxi medallions are two examples of justified "price fixing."


You have heard of the Prison Indistrial Complex right? Our Prisons have been For-Profit for a long time now. Totally legal, government sanctioned privatized penitentiaries.


Yes, I have. Perhaps I should have made clear that putting people in prison was the thing that was illegal for private companies, not operating a prison.


> essentially illegal taxi and illegal hotel services

I don't know about Uber, but Airbnb deflects this by saying they are not in fact a hotel service. Rather hosts are hotel services, and Airbnb is simply a discovery platform matching buyers and sellers. It's up to an individual host to make sure they are complying with local laws including whether their city or district allows an individual to rent out their house or a room in it without a hotel license (this varies from city to city). In this way Airbnb (fairly or unfairly) pushes the burden and liability onto the hosts.

I believe this is also a huge reason why Uber doesn't want to classify drivers as employees because then it is the taxi service, whereas it could argue that the drivers are each operating their own taxi service and Uber is just a discovery and payment platform.


I’m pretty sure an assassination marketplace would not fly under the same legal pretense. The platform won’t do the killing, right?

If hotel or taxi lobby was more powerful or caught the threat early on AirBnB and Uber would have been destroyed.


Taxi medallions were (and AFAIK still are) required to respond to people hailing a taxi from the street. It is not required to book a ride via phone or internet. Uber and Lyft drivers never needed taxi medallions.


uber: mostly not technically because the key thing is that they are not soliciting rides from the street, was my understanding.

airbnb had a much more legally tenuous start


Uber even had a whole program to thwart law enforcement attempts to investigate them called “greyball”. They knew what they are doing. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-greyball-...


Yeah this is borderline. It probably won't fly in California. In the past big tech companies (like Symantec) used to require you to submit your last W2 or tax return for a job offer. Credit card companies also sell your salary information etc...


I cannot fathom how any organization would willingly allow such a trojan-horse operation to see internal data like this. What possible value is there to add such an enormous vulnerability surface for such laughably tiny, if any, benefits. That this company raised $100M+ at a $1.6bn valuation is...bizarre.

This feels like one of those things where VCs (including YC and A16z) force this nonsense on their other startups in a circle-jerk sort of pyramid scheme fashion. There is no universe where this makes sense as a product.


Legal or not, Pave is unethical.


How so?


In the UK and EU it would be outright illegal on GDPR grounds (unless you consented to it, which would be unlikely without coercion — also illegal)


Pave (and many other comp platforms) are prolifically used in the UK and across the EU because no individuals personal data is being shared. Pave doesn't get told 'louthy is a software engineer and gets paid £50k a year' - they get a list of job titles, seniority, and salaries but no identifiable data.


In the EU there are definitely companies providing aggregated salary band norms, in fact utilizing them is nearly required by upcoming EU directives as salaries must be justified by HR. In the Netherlands I know Bureau Baarda is gathering and selling data.


Sounds very illegal.


This sounds like levels.fyi for companies? As long as they are selling aggregate data and not data specific to an individual (e.g. for determining an offer for a particular person) it seems reasonable.


I assume that as a European our GDPR laws would make this highly illegal if it were operating inside the EU?


a lot of companies already do this - in the UK they call it benchmarking. they get data from companies they compete with for talent, from data-brockers i.e people who buy compensation data from companies. then set your pay based on what those companies are paying.

collusion in another name if you ask me.


Wow first we got our rents fixed, now we're getting our wages fixed. Awesome


Been going on for a while:

High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation is a 2010 United States Department of Justice (DOJ) antitrust action and a 2013 civil class action against several Silicon Valley companies for alleged "no cold call" agreements which restrained the recruitment of high-tech employees.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...>


Using a rent estimate would be a brilliant way to double-check if you are overpaying salaries. /s


Lol try this here in EU.


It exists, many companies are using wage benchmarks to fix salary in EU.

Companies assume they don't need your approval to collect data on salary range for your position as aggregates are not directly pointing at you.


It smells awfully close to: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-realp...


The OP specifically mentions that.


Soon you need to waive your class-action rights when applying for a job.


Real pages is such a gross business


This was the exact thing that popped into my mind when I read the poster’s description.


Reading that, seems like RealPage could protect itself from similar problems if they simply avoid using the same sales rhetoric, and don't do explicit recommendations. "You are paying way more for this position than others... hmmmm."

Surely they are aware of the similarities and are strategizing.


Anything that keeps the code monkeys in line is legal.


> Pave is a YC-backed startup

This thread is getting removed from the front-page in 3... 2...


I understand why people assume we do that, but actually we do the opposite—that is, we moderate less when YC or a YC startup is part of a story. There is plenty of past explanation at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....

Note: we still moderate such threads. We just do it less than we otherwise would.


I thought this was a joke comment but I went back after reading the comments and it’s now on the second page already.


It was at #3 for me and then suddenly demoted to the second page. It's pretty common for these touchy-YC threads.


It's less common than it would be for comparable threads on other topics. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41511529 for more explanation.


Page 3 now.


211 points in an hour, and now page 4.


#10 on the front page now


I really, really hope they don't.


Aaaaand it's gone.


This makes me sad.

@dang, can you comment on that? I appreciate your integrity.


We didn't see it or demote it—it set off the flamewar detector. I've turned that off now, in keeping with the principle described here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41511529.

p.s. @dang is a no-op - I only saw this thread because I was doing our standard review of the flamewar detector. If you want guaranteed* message delivery, hn@ycombinator.com is the only way.

* Well, mostly guaranteed. I assume there are a few that fail to get noticed in the spam bin, though we check that pretty carefully.


That's awfully convenient. You don't moderate the content, your flame war detector goes off, and the algorithm removes it for you.


HN, as with virtually all user-generated content sites, leverages both member actions and automation heavily.

Annually HN sees about 150k active users, 400k stories, and 4m comments:

<https://whaly.io/posts/hacker-news-2021-retrospective> (2021 retrespective by Whaly.io).

It has one public-facing moderator (and apparently a few others who don't post publicly on the site). HN's own mods see very little of the total site content. Automation and member votes, flags, and vouches, as well as emails to the mods, are what keep HN humming. Not perfectly, but quite frankly one of the better-run online discussion sites, and one whose quality has remained remarkably steady over nearly 20 years.

If you see something you think isn't right (bad content not flagged, good content flagged, whatever, email the mods, and they'll take a look. I do this a lot myself, usually with positive results.


It's legal the same way Airbnb and Uber are legal.


If you've ever worked for a YC or Sequoia company, you're in a secret database with who you worked and how much you made that is accessible to other founders. The additional context is critical for startups to make competitive offers to startup employees. I don't see what the big deal is. If a worker is working at a company A making $80k, and they try to get a job a company B making $90k, the owner of company B needs to know they were only making $80k at their last firm, so they can make a good offer of $85k. $10k would be too much.


> If a worker is working at a company A making $80k, and they try to get a job a company B making $90k, the owner of company B needs to know they were only making $80k at their last firm, so they can make a good offer of $85k. $10k would be too much.

I disagree wholeheartedly with this.


> secret database

> I don't see what the big deal is

Pick one... If there is no big deal, why would they want to keep the database secret? Also, do you have any source on that?


It doesn't really matter so much. Company B needs to know whether to beat an offer from company C for $95k or only $80k. Your salary history only affects employers that aren't trying to compete effectively, because what you made then isn't what you could make now.

And the end of the ZIRP-driven shortage is telling us that what we used to make is not locked in forever.


I am not a Lawyer, or a US resident but I highly suspect this behavior is completely illegal in Europe (and rightfully so in my mind).




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