6 ms·

Companies are culluding to suppress wages by algorithm, too. Look up a company called Aon, and their product called Radford Data & Analytics.

eldridgea 2y ago
~2019 I led a team of highly qualified security R&D folks inside Cisco (we were part of an acquisition), these folks were effectively highly specialized SWEs. But because the title was something like "security researcher" it was compared against the closet Radform ladder which was closer to to compliance officer. This meant the specialists were on a ladder with often lower pay than a standard SWE, and I couldn't shift the bureaucracy enough to change that. People left for all sorts of reasons but a big part was being able to get 2x-4x the total compensation at other companies.
- ndesaulniers 2y ago
  Sounds like first hand experience observing wages being suppressed as a result of Radford/Aon.
- HelloMcFly 2y ago
  If anyone else runs into this issue, typically the direct route for things like this is to get involved a discussion with someone in your Total Rewards / Global Compensation team. These are usually the people that confirm the mapping of internal positions to benchmarks, and there is huge between-organizations variability in the quality behind that process. Many times normal managers or more generalist HR Partners (especially if more junior) may not appreciate that this is a data error vs. a frustrated hiring manager trying to tell you their subjective feelings are more correct than policy. That having been said: I still think the whole thing stinks.
  - ndesaulniers 2y ago
    HR is not your friend. Corporate Confidential by Cynthia Shapiro is a recommended read. My advice; get a better offer elsewhere, then see if HR wants to pay you your worth.
    - lelanthran 2y ago
      > HR is not your friend. Most people don't get this. HR exists to protect the company from the employees, not protect the employees from the company.
      - Xeoncross 2y ago
        +1 It's called "Human" resources not "Company" resources for a reason.
        nequo 2y ago
        Or: it’s called human “resources” not human “beings” for a reason.
    - tfehring 2y ago
      The comment you replied to seems to be targeted at managers trying to advocate for their teams, not at individual contributors trying to advocate for themselves. I agree that reaching out to the compensation team as an IC is generally not going to be an appropriate or effective way to get a raise. But for managers, working with HR on issues like that is just part of the job.
      - HelloMcFly 2y ago
        Thank you, yes. This is not an uncommon managerial problem that is often resolved (not always; I've had both experiences), though perhaps not in a timely manner.
        Loughla 2y ago
        I'm currently fighting this. The benchmark for my team is 10-15% lower than just our area. And 30-40% lower than the nation. And it's because we get lumped in with lower skilled titles because of the title scheme on our campus. I can't get any traction with admin or HR, and we're both hemorrhaging people and can't bring in qualified new candidates. It's very frustrating.
- dboreham 2y ago
  I have some insight into this space (compensation analysis) through a family member. Either the VP was incompetent, or the mismatched job situation was used as cover for the outcome they intended (people leaving). "The bureaucracy" exists to serve businesses interests, and legal risks to same.
sithadmin 2y ago
Not just by algorithm. In the US, many large employers utilize 'The Work Number' by Equifax for employment verification services, and share details about individual employees as granular as individual paycheck disbursements. This information is visible to other employers that buy in to the scheme, and obviously favors the employer in salary negotiations with a candidate.
- ndesaulniers 2y ago
  Right, this indirection seems to give them a "throat to choke" the next time this goes to court. Opt out: https://employees.theworknumber.com/employee-data-freeze https://employees.theworknumber.com/employee-data-freeze
  - mjx0 2y ago
    I wish I could opt out. Unfortunately, my company refuses to provide such information except through The Work Number. So, the next time I apply to rent a home, I'd be out of luck with income or employment verification.
    - ndesaulniers 2y ago
      What I call opt out they call a freeze, a la a credit freeze. Perhaps it's possible to unfreeze/thaw/opt-in when you need the service? I think it should be illegal to be registered for this by employer without explicit consent from the employee, forcing employees to opt out.
      - mjx0 2y ago
        D'oh. In my tiredness, I misread it as freezing them receiving data, but now I see it's like the other firms, where they continue to receive and store data but stop honoring requests to share it.
- hoosieree 2y ago
  Data brokers are a scourge. They should be illegal, or at the very least regulated. For example, here's an idea for one such regulation: If the company purchases aggregated salary data, they must publish their own salaries for at least 1 year.
crowcroft 2y ago
Applying macro data to micro use cases without appropriate carve outs is one of the greatest sins in statistics, and yet it happens everywhere.
- datavirtue 2y ago
  You just sailed over managements and HRs heads.
perihelion_zero 2y ago
This is why I love jobs where you get paid based on a sales commission rather than in mystical dollar-hours. Get 10x the results, get 10x the pay.
- no_wizard 2y ago
  There is a ton of stuff businesses do to commission compensation too, like suddenly moving goals for bonus payouts, changing the commission formula etc. It can also be manipulated to suppress being paid fairly
natdempk 2y ago
Similarly companies like Pave also do data collection and sharing to create “benchmarks” around salary and report out salary ranges for comparable companies and locations. I was wondering where the line is drawn between something like this and Realpage? Or even if you do some detailed survey about compensation and distribute it, at what point does this become anticompetitive? All of this does seem to rapidly be becoming the norm with regards to how companies set compensation levels. Curious if anyone with more expertise knows the answer.
- vaxman 2y ago
  Don't forget FunnelLeasing.com which funnels its victims into Finicity.com which is "consent based" financial surveillance where landlords can monitor the cash, credit and asset accounts of their customers using a pretty dashboard and receive alerts in advance of upcoming trouble (such as layoff by Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc. that facilitated the consumer mindset to "consent" to such madness). It allows the landlords to eject tenants before they default by proving that the tenants are already insolvent according to industry norms.
- leplen 2y ago
  I think one of the biggest differences between comp benchmarking providers and RealPage is that two companies given access to the same benchmarks often make very different compensation decisions. Some companies decide to pay at the 90th percentile of the market and some decide to pay at the 50th. RealPage was much more proscriptive which is part of what tips the balance over into collusion vs just providing market statistics. Zillow provides a zestimate for rents, which serves a similar market summary purpose but without the mechanism to enforce compliance and therefore is totally fine.
null0pointer 2y ago
Genuine question: How do people on HN reconcile the idea that tech salaries are suppressed with advocating for remote work and opening employment to the global market where employees are often paid much much less than in the US?
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  Remote work and offshore work aren't inherently the same thing. If you're a company with offices in New York City and San Francisco and you hire someone in San Diego or Rochester, you're still dealing with the laws of the same states and federal government. Even someone in Massachusetts or Texas is probably not a big deal. But if you want to hire someone in Poland or Korea, do you even know what their laws are? How much do lawyers cost there, and are they any good? Is the government adversarial, or could it become adversarial? Do they discriminate against foreign employers? Employees there are probably going to want to be paid in a different currency; are you interested in dealing with issues if the value of that currency changes? International banking rules? If the cheapest hires are in seven different countries, do you want to go through all this seven different times? The team you're managing now sees daylight in the part of the day when you're asleep, is that going to be any trouble? Are you ready to deal with reports being poorly written because their native language is different than yours? The reasons companies are willing to pay more to avoid dealing with all of this have very little to do with whether you work in an office or in your house which is in the same jurisdiction and hemisphere as the office.
  - suslik 2y ago
    All these issues (except, perhaps, the need to switch to asynchronous way of working due to time zones) are these days solved by specialized services for a flat, and not too high, fee; honestly, if there’s a will to hire internationally, there is a way.
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      How is a third party service going to solve language barriers or prevent a random foreign government from having or passing new laws that cause problems for you?

eldridgea 2y ago

~2019 I led a team of highly qualified security R&D folks inside Cisco (we were part of an acquisition), these folks were effectively highly specialized SWEs. But because the title was something like "security researcher" it was compared against the closet Radform ladder which was closer to to compliance officer. This meant the specialists were on a ladder with often lower pay than a standard SWE, and I couldn't shift the bureaucracy enough to change that. People left for all sorts of reasons but a big part was being able to get 2x-4x the total compensation at other companies.

ndesaulniers 2y ago
Sounds like first hand experience observing wages being suppressed as a result of Radford/Aon.
HelloMcFly 2y ago
If anyone else runs into this issue, typically the direct route for things like this is to get involved a discussion with someone in your Total Rewards / Global Compensation team. These are usually the people that confirm the mapping of internal positions to benchmarks, and there is huge between-organizations variability in the quality behind that process. Many times normal managers or more generalist HR Partners (especially if more junior) may not appreciate that this is a data error vs. a frustrated hiring manager trying to tell you their subjective feelings are more correct than policy. That having been said: I still think the whole thing stinks.
- ndesaulniers 2y ago
  HR is not your friend. Corporate Confidential by Cynthia Shapiro is a recommended read. My advice; get a better offer elsewhere, then see if HR wants to pay you your worth.
  - lelanthran 2y ago
    > HR is not your friend. Most people don't get this. HR exists to protect the company from the employees, not protect the employees from the company.
    - Xeoncross 2y ago
      +1 It's called "Human" resources not "Company" resources for a reason.
      - nequo 2y ago
        Or: it’s called human “resources” not human “beings” for a reason.
  - tfehring 2y ago
    The comment you replied to seems to be targeted at managers trying to advocate for their teams, not at individual contributors trying to advocate for themselves. I agree that reaching out to the compensation team as an IC is generally not going to be an appropriate or effective way to get a raise. But for managers, working with HR on issues like that is just part of the job.
    - HelloMcFly 2y ago
      Thank you, yes. This is not an uncommon managerial problem that is often resolved (not always; I've had both experiences), though perhaps not in a timely manner.
      - Loughla 2y ago
        I'm currently fighting this. The benchmark for my team is 10-15% lower than just our area. And 30-40% lower than the nation. And it's because we get lumped in with lower skilled titles because of the title scheme on our campus. I can't get any traction with admin or HR, and we're both hemorrhaging people and can't bring in qualified new candidates. It's very frustrating.
dboreham 2y ago
I have some insight into this space (compensation analysis) through a family member. Either the VP was incompetent, or the mismatched job situation was used as cover for the outcome they intended (people leaving). "The bureaucracy" exists to serve businesses interests, and legal risks to same.

sithadmin 2y ago

Not just by algorithm. In the US, many large employers utilize 'The Work Number' by Equifax for employment verification services, and share details about individual employees as granular as individual paycheck disbursements. This information is visible to other employers that buy in to the scheme, and obviously favors the employer in salary negotiations with a candidate.

ndesaulniers 2y ago
Right, this indirection seems to give them a "throat to choke" the next time this goes to court. Opt out: https://employees.theworknumber.com/employee-data-freeze https://employees.theworknumber.com/employee-data-freeze
- mjx0 2y ago
  I wish I could opt out. Unfortunately, my company refuses to provide such information except through The Work Number. So, the next time I apply to rent a home, I'd be out of luck with income or employment verification.
  - ndesaulniers 2y ago
    What I call opt out they call a freeze, a la a credit freeze. Perhaps it's possible to unfreeze/thaw/opt-in when you need the service? I think it should be illegal to be registered for this by employer without explicit consent from the employee, forcing employees to opt out.
    - mjx0 2y ago
      D'oh. In my tiredness, I misread it as freezing them receiving data, but now I see it's like the other firms, where they continue to receive and store data but stop honoring requests to share it.
hoosieree 2y ago
Data brokers are a scourge. They should be illegal, or at the very least regulated. For example, here's an idea for one such regulation: If the company purchases aggregated salary data, they must publish their own salaries for at least 1 year.

crowcroft 2y ago

Applying macro data to micro use cases without appropriate carve outs is one of the greatest sins in statistics, and yet it happens everywhere.

datavirtue 2y ago
You just sailed over managements and HRs heads.

perihelion_zero 2y ago

This is why I love jobs where you get paid based on a sales commission rather than in mystical dollar-hours. Get 10x the results, get 10x the pay.

no_wizard 2y ago
There is a ton of stuff businesses do to commission compensation too, like suddenly moving goals for bonus payouts, changing the commission formula etc. It can also be manipulated to suppress being paid fairly

natdempk 2y ago

Similarly companies like Pave also do data collection and sharing to create “benchmarks” around salary and report out salary ranges for comparable companies and locations. I was wondering where the line is drawn between something like this and Realpage? Or even if you do some detailed survey about compensation and distribute it, at what point does this become anticompetitive? All of this does seem to rapidly be becoming the norm with regards to how companies set compensation levels. Curious if anyone with more expertise knows the answer.

vaxman 2y ago
Don't forget FunnelLeasing.com which funnels its victims into Finicity.com which is "consent based" financial surveillance where landlords can monitor the cash, credit and asset accounts of their customers using a pretty dashboard and receive alerts in advance of upcoming trouble (such as layoff by Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc. that facilitated the consumer mindset to "consent" to such madness). It allows the landlords to eject tenants before they default by proving that the tenants are already insolvent according to industry norms.
leplen 2y ago
I think one of the biggest differences between comp benchmarking providers and RealPage is that two companies given access to the same benchmarks often make very different compensation decisions. Some companies decide to pay at the 90th percentile of the market and some decide to pay at the 50th. RealPage was much more proscriptive which is part of what tips the balance over into collusion vs just providing market statistics. Zillow provides a zestimate for rents, which serves a similar market summary purpose but without the mechanism to enforce compliance and therefore is totally fine.

null0pointer 2y ago

Genuine question: How do people on HN reconcile the idea that tech salaries are suppressed with advocating for remote work and opening employment to the global market where employees are often paid much much less than in the US?

AnthonyMouse 2y ago
Remote work and offshore work aren't inherently the same thing. If you're a company with offices in New York City and San Francisco and you hire someone in San Diego or Rochester, you're still dealing with the laws of the same states and federal government. Even someone in Massachusetts or Texas is probably not a big deal. But if you want to hire someone in Poland or Korea, do you even know what their laws are? How much do lawyers cost there, and are they any good? Is the government adversarial, or could it become adversarial? Do they discriminate against foreign employers? Employees there are probably going to want to be paid in a different currency; are you interested in dealing with issues if the value of that currency changes? International banking rules? If the cheapest hires are in seven different countries, do you want to go through all this seven different times? The team you're managing now sees daylight in the part of the day when you're asleep, is that going to be any trouble? Are you ready to deal with reports being poorly written because their native language is different than yours? The reasons companies are willing to pay more to avoid dealing with all of this have very little to do with whether you work in an office or in your house which is in the same jurisdiction and hemisphere as the office.
- suslik 2y ago
  All these issues (except, perhaps, the need to switch to asynchronous way of working due to time zones) are these days solved by specialized services for a flat, and not too high, fee; honestly, if there’s a will to hire internationally, there is a way.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    How is a third party service going to solve language barriers or prevent a random foreign government from having or passing new laws that cause problems for you?