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nowyoudont commented on Ask HN: Why is Pave legal?    · Posted by u/nowyoudont
tensor · 2 years ago
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.

nowyoudont · 2 years ago
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

nowyoudont commented on Ask HN: Why is Pave legal?    · Posted by u/nowyoudont
HeyLaughingBoy · 2 years ago
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?"
nowyoudont · 2 years ago
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
nowyoudont commented on Ask HN: Why is Pave legal?    · Posted by u/nowyoudont
jasode · 2 years ago
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.

nowyoudont · 2 years ago
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.

nowyoudont commented on Ask HN: Why is Pave legal?    · Posted by u/nowyoudont
nowyoudont · 2 years ago
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

nowyoudont commented on Ask HN: Why is Pave legal?    · Posted by u/nowyoudont
mcntsh · 2 years ago
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.

nowyoudont · 2 years ago
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.

u/nowyoudont

KarmaCake day116September 11, 2024View Original