Comment by hayst4ck | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hayst4ck | Hacker News Reader

Glassdoor is a completely flawed premise. Employers have almost complete compensation data and because we value anonymity more than ability to negotiate, our data is flawed. Employers might well directly know what you got paid at your previous company.

Many companies are able to purchase previous employment salary data, which I believe Equifax sells directly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29834753

Here is a great read about the tools companies have to suppress your wage for anyone who wants to be a little angry: https://www.pave.com/blog-posts/acquiring-option-impact-and-...

> At Pave, we spent the last two years building out a suite of 40+ integrations with HRIS, payroll, and equity management systems that connect directly with the source of truth for compensation data. We are thrilled to bring this technology to the Option Impact customer base and ensure that our combined customers will never have to fill out a manual survey again while gaining access to a persistent real-time network of compensation data.

[pdf] https://advisor.morganstanley.com/the-hamilton-retirement-pl...

> Option Impact is free to eligible and participating companies through our give-to-get model.

So if I understand correctly, almost all of our employers are providing our real time compensation data to an entity that then allows all other participant companies to graph and query.

I find it outrageous that my employer could tell my compensation data to other companies, while simultaneously we live in a culture of "we shouldn't talk about compensation."

In Norway you can lookup anyone's tax information. You can see who looks up your tax information, though, it is publicly available as long as you log on to government sites.

So basically everyone's salary from two years back is public information. It is often used by the press to check how much the richest people pay in taxes (or rather how badly they contribute by dodging taxes).

I've never heard of employers using it to check candidates' salaries, though. They usually just ask as part of the interview process.

Norwegian tech salaries are relatively standardised and skew low (sometimes very low) by US standards, so certainly in a decent to good market there isn’t that much burning incentive for a company to volunteer themselves to the front page of VG just to save a handful of crowns.

> I've never heard of employers using it to check candidates' salaries, though. They usually just ask as part of the interview process.

As a Scandinavian employer, I can tell you that the tax records are very useful. Especially for higher-end roles it is very nice being able to check how much people have been earning from a reliable data source. I'm pretty sure many are using that a lot.

It looks like net worth is also public information in Norway. Fascinating!

See “What the tax lists contain?” at https://www.skatteetaten.no/en/forms/search-the-tax-lists/

Isn’t it illegal in the US for an employer to share your compensation data with third parties? Or do they skirt the rules by “anonymizing” it?

> we live in a culture of "we shouldn't talk about compensation."

Yeah especially now that the cat is out of the bag, but restricted to employers. Such a data set should absolutely be made available to workers. Information symmetry is critical for a functioning market. And capitalists love markets, right?

Whether it’s anonymized or not, if this is real, it’s fucking dystopian.

Yes, but merely a reflection and reminder of a dystopian reality that already permeated society long ago. It’s obvious that if they are allowed they would. The faster people drop the illusion that corporations[1] have emotions and “care” and such, the better people can protect themselves, organize and rebalance the scales I guess.

[1]: A generalization. There are more amoral, faceless self-perpetuating machines than just corporations, and there are many small- and medium sized companies that may be incorporated while maintaining human decency.

If I think I get paid more than you in the same role it's absolutely in my interest to keep that information from you. With departmental budgets in mind, you receiving a raise may limit the total compensation available to me when I negotiate my own.

Ever heard of the allegory “I capponi di Renzo” from the Promessi Sposi novel by Alessandro Manzoni? Look it up

> “i capponi di Renzo”, has become a proverbial admonition in Italian culture

> Renzo is carrying these poor capons (castrated male chicken) as his only means of payment to a well-off city lawyer, whom Renzo intends to hire... Manzoni (the author) notes that, had the capons been a little more intelligent, they would have started picking the hand that kept them captive, therefore regaining their freedom. Instead, the capons fought among themselves and ended up being delivered with great ease to their recipient.

Don't be daft, my employer is not my adversary.

Are you for real?

You think you are in a zero sum relationship with your co-workers, but not your boss/company?

The word negotiation indicates two parties with conflicting interests reaching an agreement. You don't negotiate with your co-worker, you negotiate with an HR department. You are literally in conflict with your employer. Your employer benefits by paying you the minimum possible, and you benefit by being paid the maximum possible.

You and your co-worker benefit by breaking open the companies books and knowing how much they could be paying you but aren't.

It's legal everywhere except in New York.

It isn’t just your employers that are selling your compensation. Many give copies of W-2 and paystubs to companies that loan them money (e.g., for mortgages and auto loans). Some of these companies then sell this data to aggregators.

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