Hacker News: nowyoudont

New comment by nowyoudont in "Ask HN: Why is Pave legal?"

nowyoudont — Wed, 11 Sep 2024 18:38:13 +0000

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

New comment by nowyoudont in "Ask HN: Why is Pave legal?"

nowyoudont — Wed, 11 Sep 2024 18:34:29 +0000

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

New comment by nowyoudont in "Ask HN: Why is Pave legal?"

nowyoudont — Wed, 11 Sep 2024 18:32:00 +0000

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.

New comment by nowyoudont in "Ask HN: Why is Pave legal?"

nowyoudont — Wed, 11 Sep 2024 14:32:43 +0000

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

New comment by nowyoudont in "Ask HN: Why is Pave legal?"

nowyoudont — Wed, 11 Sep 2024 11:05:25 +0000

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.

Ask HN: Why is Pave legal?

nowyoudont — Wed, 11 Sep 2024 10:50:55 +0000

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?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41510103

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