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Googling crowdsourced data like levels.fyi or Glassdoor has way more noise and sampling bias than the data companies can buy from places like TWN by Equifax. Ev

Googling crowdsourced data like levels.fyi or Glassdoor has way more noise and sampling bias than the data companies can buy from places like TWN by Equifax. Even if you had access to the same data, you don't have access to their business information so you have no good way of understanding what you would be worth or the value you are expected to generate.

WalterBright 5y ago
> you don't have access to their business information And they don't have access to accurate information on what value you can generate, either. It's a crapshoot for both parties.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  It is far more of a crapshoot for one party than the other.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    Not at all. Consider the perennial topic on HN on how to accurately evaluate a candidate's suitability for a particular job. It's impossible.
    - pessimizer 5y ago
      An applicant has as much job-related gambling when they take a job as the employer, especially when the job can just fire you. When applying, you have no idea if the management is terrible, if your particular manager is terrible, if the projects you're going to work on are terrible, if the procedures and standards for working on a project within the organization are stupid or will penalize your style of work, if the job will have high expectations and skimp on resources, whether your new company sucks at hiring and all your coworkers are going to be terrible... Calling it a crapshoot on both sides is a pretty empty statement. When it comes specifically to compensation, the applicant is David and the company is Goliath.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      If this was true, then labor prices would not have severely stagnated over the past 5 decades, relative to the wealth increases for the equity owners.
      - WalterBright 5y ago
        Employee compensation is based on the value they provide to the company. Equity owners are compensated for the risk they take. I don't see any essential correlation between the two. For example, if you pay Bob $10 to go to the store and buy a lottery ticket for you, and you win the $1m jackpot, do you owe anything more to Bob than $10 worth of value he provided? Let's say the ticket was a dud. Do you therefore owe Bob less than the $10 you promised him?
        lotsofpulp 5y ago
        Prices are a function of supply and demand, not “value”. I pay very little for very “valuable” life sustaining food because I can get it cheaper from multiple sellers.
        WalterBright 5y ago
        > Prices are a function of supply and demand, not “value”. There are multiple definitions of the word value. The value of something in a free market is what someone is willing to freely pay for it.
        lotsofpulp 5y ago
        Sure, and in order to correctly value something, you need to know the relatively real time price history to infer how supply and demand curves are moving. Not having that information means you will ascribe the wrong value, which means society is not allocating resources properly.
        lotsofpulp 5y ago
        Your example is not relevant to this conversation because we are not talking about retroactively changing negotiated prices. Labor prices stagnating relative to equity owners’ gains has to do with supply of labor vastly increasing due to globalization, and simultaneously, automation reducing demand for many types of labor. Having transparent prices will help better inform labor sellers which labor markets have excess supply and which need more labor, in a timely fashion.
Zaheer 5y ago
Zaheer from Levels.fyi here. Note that companies struggle with data as well. There's dozens of companies that solely exist to provide better data to companies around salaries (Radford, OptionImpact, etc.). All of these have limitations as well (title matching, recency of data, etc.) and generally companies subscribe to multiple providers to get a better picture of what the market pays. Companies in fact purchase data from us as well (the same data you see on site but formatted in a way that's easier for comp analysts to use). The reality is that there is tons of nuance that goes into pricing a job / candidate effectively. Each candidate has unique skills even if two candidates have the same title, level, etc. That's why it's almost never a fixed number and often a range.
- mattnewton 5y ago
  Thank you for the context! I recently discovered that many employers share exact salary and level information with Equifax and assumed that those kinds of solutions were commonplace.

WalterBright 5y ago

> you don't have access to their business information And they don't have access to accurate information on what value you can generate, either. It's a crapshoot for both parties.

lotsofpulp 5y ago
It is far more of a crapshoot for one party than the other.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  Not at all. Consider the perennial topic on HN on how to accurately evaluate a candidate's suitability for a particular job. It's impossible.
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    An applicant has as much job-related gambling when they take a job as the employer, especially when the job can just fire you. When applying, you have no idea if the management is terrible, if your particular manager is terrible, if the projects you're going to work on are terrible, if the procedures and standards for working on a project within the organization are stupid or will penalize your style of work, if the job will have high expectations and skimp on resources, whether your new company sucks at hiring and all your coworkers are going to be terrible... Calling it a crapshoot on both sides is a pretty empty statement. When it comes specifically to compensation, the applicant is David and the company is Goliath.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    If this was true, then labor prices would not have severely stagnated over the past 5 decades, relative to the wealth increases for the equity owners.
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      Employee compensation is based on the value they provide to the company. Equity owners are compensated for the risk they take. I don't see any essential correlation between the two. For example, if you pay Bob $10 to go to the store and buy a lottery ticket for you, and you win the $1m jackpot, do you owe anything more to Bob than $10 worth of value he provided? Let's say the ticket was a dud. Do you therefore owe Bob less than the $10 you promised him?
      - lotsofpulp 5y ago
        Prices are a function of supply and demand, not “value”. I pay very little for very “valuable” life sustaining food because I can get it cheaper from multiple sellers.
        WalterBright 5y ago
        > Prices are a function of supply and demand, not “value”. There are multiple definitions of the word value. The value of something in a free market is what someone is willing to freely pay for it.
        lotsofpulp 5y ago
        Sure, and in order to correctly value something, you need to know the relatively real time price history to infer how supply and demand curves are moving. Not having that information means you will ascribe the wrong value, which means society is not allocating resources properly.
      - lotsofpulp 5y ago
        Your example is not relevant to this conversation because we are not talking about retroactively changing negotiated prices. Labor prices stagnating relative to equity owners’ gains has to do with supply of labor vastly increasing due to globalization, and simultaneously, automation reducing demand for many types of labor. Having transparent prices will help better inform labor sellers which labor markets have excess supply and which need more labor, in a timely fashion.

Zaheer 5y ago

Zaheer from Levels.fyi here. Note that companies struggle with data as well. There's dozens of companies that solely exist to provide better data to companies around salaries (Radford, OptionImpact, etc.). All of these have limitations as well (title matching, recency of data, etc.) and generally companies subscribe to multiple providers to get a better picture of what the market pays. Companies in fact purchase data from us as well (the same data you see on site but formatted in a way that's easier for comp analysts to use). The reality is that there is tons of nuance that goes into pricing a job / candidate effectively. Each candidate has unique skills even if two candidates have the same title, level, etc. That's why it's almost never a fixed number and often a range.

mattnewton 5y ago
Thank you for the context! I recently discovered that many employers share exact salary and level information with Equifax and assumed that those kinds of solutions were commonplace.