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Google is going to court for the first time over alleged pay discrimination
- wahnfrieden 3y agoWage theft is the largest category of theft by far
- YokoZar 3y agoWage theft has a different, specific meaning than what this case is about (pay discrimination).
- withinboredom 3y agoSo, I just want to say ... the US money system is whack. My wife is doing some contracting for a company in the US (as a US citizen). In order to actually receive her funds, she had to use some random-ish (Plaid?) company, and give them access to her entire financial history, just to receive a payment. It was sketchy af. She eventually convinced them to do a normal ACH payment ... but my impression was that people just randomly would give them full access to their banking history without even thinking about it. Now add in the lack of privacy laws, and I'd be more than willing to bet that a company like Google has some kind of profile on your entire financial life (because apparently in the US, money-in-the-bank and empty credit cards means you are trustworthy) to determine whether or not they can trust you with "the secret sauce." Is it really that dystopic these days or am I just really disconnected from it and it isn't that bad? Edit to add: we haven't lived in the US in over half a decade.
- anotherhue 3y agoPlaid = "Give me your bank login" and it is insane. It literally undoes 30 years of computer security advice for layfolk, all for their profit margin. OAuth exists, Plaid should not. Always use ACH.
- kibwen 3y agoSame reason I refuse to use Venmo. Yes, I know that Venmo is owned by the banks. No, that doesn't mean I'm going to type my bank account's credentials into your app.
- prepend 3y agoI use Venmo and have never entered my bank login. I just have my routing and account number.
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y agoSince when did you have to do this to use Venmo?
- kibwen 3y agoLast time I tried was years ago. I'd love to be wrong, because checks are a pain in the ass.
- Rietty 3y agoYou don't AFAIK. Mine just asked for a routing and account number.
- burkaman 3y agoYou don't, you can use Plaid but you can also just given them a routing and account number. https://help.venmo.com/hc/en-us/articles/221073067-Verifying-Your-Bank-Account https://help.venmo.com/hc/en-us/articles/221073067-Verifying...
- Terr_ 3y agoI mainly use it with some friends to re-balance "who's paying for the meal this time", so I just offer to pay the bill when my Venmo balance gets low. Granted, this gives Venmo a small amount of cash to theoretically make interest off-of, but to me it's worth not entangling it with the routing-numbers of any important accounts.
- nradov 3y ago
- compiler-guy 3y agoBackground checks are routine in the industry, and they often include a credit report. So it's not just Google, but at least all the big ones.
- k1t 3y agoThere is a huge difference between an employer looking at your credit report and an employer reading your bank statements.
- makeitdouble 3y agoWait, you could have a candidate refused because they have too much debt to repay ? That feels wild.
- compiler-guy 3y agoThat is a big step from what I said. Google does a background check, which includes a credit report. But there is no evidence that I know of that too much debt would be a reason to be refused. Things that can cause refusal that I know of include lying about your degree.
- makeitdouble 3y agoI understand you're not implying misuse by Google, I just have a hard time seeing what legit info a company that's supposed to pay you gets from a credit history check. Up until now I only ever heard of this kind of check for military and national security adjacent positions, not done as a routine for generic positions.
- PeterisP 3y agoIt would mostly be impacted not by having a large mortgage, but by having missing payments or insolvency; and that is considered to imply that the person is 'more risky' in other ways as well.
- withinboredom 3y ago
- Tommstein 3y agoA few months ago someone sent me like 5 or 10 dollars on Cash App. Imagine my great surprise upon learning that in order to transfer it to a bank account I had previously transferred money to, I now had to give my bank login details to some Plaid assholes I had never even heard of. Cash App support was 100% useless ("just follow these steps that are the exact way you're ending up with Plaid's demand for your bank login credentials!"), but I eventually found some workaround on the website or something. And that was the last time I will ever use Cash App, they and Plaid can both go die in all the fires.
- Gare 3y agoMaybe I'm missing something, but in EU you can just link your debit or credit card to similar apps. Why would they need a bank account?
- withinboredom 3y agoUnlike here in the EU, those costs are capped by the government (sending money through a card) and are nearly free (if not actually free). In the US, only slow (~1-2 day bank transfers) are free, and sending money via a card actually costs quite a bit of money (2-5% of the amount). Also, unlike the EU, if someone has your routing number + account number, they can literally just take money out of your account without your consent (with only a 1-2 days in which you can 'stop payment' on it -- once it is complete, you can never get the money back). At least with my EU bank (Bunq), if someone were to do that, I'd have 5 days to decide whether to approve or deny the transaction.
- extraduder_ire 3y ago> Now add in the lack of privacy laws, and I'd be more than willing to bet that a company like Google has some kind of profile on your entire financial life (because apparently in the US, money-in-the-bank and empty credit cards means you are trustworthy) to determine whether or not they can trust you with "the secret sauce." Is that not illegal? That seems like something that would have been made illegal back in the company-town days. Or at least for other reasons if it's not silo'd off. Also, IIRC not having credit card debt makes you less trustworthy in the US credit system.
- dudul 3y agoHow is this story representative of the US money system?
- VirusNewbie 3y agoGoogle has a separate compensation team/committee as well as separate hiring commitee, so the hiring manager doesn't have a say in this. What I don't know is how much the hiring is 'blind', if they're aware of the resume or if they just get the candidates' interview performance. This seems like a good case to make all of it blind. Once a candidate interviews they'd just be given an ID, and the aforementioned committees wouldn't know their gender/race/age/experience level at all. It would likely prevent some bias, as well as protect the company in lawsuits.
- withinboredom 3y agoThe thing is, you can make a pretty good guess on gender just from word-choice in a resume[1]. It would need to be 'sanitized' or 'summarized' by a neutral 3rd party before given to the committee. Edit: this is probably a bad idea. A cursory search on 'gender effects on translations' shows that this would make it even worse (assuming that this is effectively translation).
- burnished 3y agoYou forgot to include the link implied by [1] Was it that study done on words known/unknown by gender? Interesting stuff
- calderwoodra 3y agoGoogle used to do this - they worked very hard to remove all gender signals, and as a result, pay discrimination against women got worse. So now they no longer try to hide gender.
- nostromo 3y agoI'm reminded of the story in 2019 when Google researched pay discrepancies internally and found it was actually underpaying more men than women for doing similar jobs: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/04/google-found-its-underpaying-some-men-as-it-studies-wage-equity.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/04/google-found-its-underpaying...
- bsimpson 3y agoUnderleveling and barriers to promotion are rife at Google. I wonder what doors get opened if someone successfully sues for being underleveled.
- GreedClarifies 3y agoUnder leveling compared to what?
- jonny_eh 3y agoFellow employees who do similar work at similar levels of quality.
- helloooooooo 3y agoQualitative measures are not quantifiable. Good luck in court.
- slavboj 3y agoIt's not much of a caricature to say American courts discovered numbers circa the 1940s (cf Learned Hand's introduction of the concept in antritrust and negligence cases); before that they did just fine.
- throw3823423 3y agoIt's a common problem in many large companies that have significant barriers to handing out promotions, like google's need to work on promotion packets, and passing past review processes. Often you will find that output and level have little to do with each other, including within a team. Where I am working, my lowest level teammate is clearly among the most competent by most standards. The one person I'd delegate a task to and expect it to not just get marked as done, but actually get done. I have coworkers in the team multiple levels higher that might produce basically nothing in any 2 week sprint, and it's not because they are spending time in meetings and coordination: They just have minimal productivity. But getting rid of the worst is a major hassle, and the middling ones aren't worth getting a PIP. Other teams are in better positions to ask for uplevels, because they do more important things. Therefore, the only sensible approaches are to either take it very easy, lowering the performance curve, or changing teams/jobs to places where one can be upleveled properly. It's not as if making it easy to fire and promote is a panacea: I've seen managers laying off their best workers because they were politically threatening, and teams getting little done that had everyone marked as a staff engineers. Ultimately performance is hard, and being bad at it, like keeping people underleveled for years, makes the organization degrade. Top paying companies like Google aren't immune.