One (more) thing to opt out of:<p>Freeze Your Data - The Work Number
<a href="https://employees.theworknumber.com/employee-data-freeze" rel="nofollow">https://employees.theworknumber.com/employee-data-freeze</a><p>As I understand it, payroll whores your salary out to Equifax*, who then pimps it to others<p>* Yeah, that one: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Equifax_data_breach" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Equifax_data_breach</a>
No they sell it directly: <a href="https://theworknumber.com/solutions/industries/pre-employment-verification" rel="nofollow">https://theworknumber.com/solutions/industries/pre-employmen...</a><p>The Work Number is in fact Equifax.
I worked for Equifax many moons ago. They had a problem with people taking jobs there that no one else wanted, solely to gain access to their systems and reset their own credit scores. And, for some reason, they couldn’t roll it back once found out. Great company.
Thank you for the link. I tried to opt out. They sent me this email:<p>Equifax Workforce Solutions (provider of The Work Number) has received your employee request communication, but additional information described below is required to fulfill this request.<p>We will be following up with a secure email to obtain the below requested documents:<p>Proof of Identity:<p>Provide a copy of one of the following (must include current/legal name):<p>- Driver's License (must be current)
- Paystubs (must be dated within 60 days)
- State or Government Identification Card (must be current)
- Social Security Card
- Military Identification Card
- Passport (must be issued from U.S.A. and be current)
- W-2 or 1099 Form (most current year)
- Birth Certificate<p>Proof of Address:<p>If you are requesting an Employment Data Report (EDR) or selected ‘Mail’ as your preferred method of contact,provide a copy of one of the following (must include current mailing address and be issued within the past 60 days)<p>- Driver's License (must be current)
- Paystub
- W-2 or 1099 Form (most current year)
- Utility Bill (phone, water, gas, electric, trash or sewer, etc.)
- Housing Rental Agreement or Mortgage document - your name must be listed on the document<p>For Identity Theft Block Requests, along with Proof of Identity and Proof of Address (if applicable), please provide your identity theft report and designation of items to be blocked:<p>- Identity Theft Report (police report, FTC Identity Theft Report, Police report, or United States Postal Inspection Service)<p>For Human Trafficking Victim Block Requests ONLY, along with Proof of Identity and Proof of Address (if applicable), please provide victim determination documentation (as described below), and designation of items to be blocked.<p>Victim Determination Documentation:<p>Provide a copy of one of the following victim determination documentation confirming that you were a victim of human trafficking, such as:<p>- Determinations made by federal, state, tribal, or local governments, government agencies, or law enforcement
- Determinations by non-governmental entities or task forces authorized by a governmental agency to make such a determination
- Self-attestation signed or certified by such governmental agency or non-governmental entity
- Determination by court in a case where a central issue is whether you are a victim of human trafficking. (Court documents can be made up of several documents from the court case that together show that the court accepted as true or finding no genuine dispute that you were a victim of human trafficking.)<p>We will be following up with a secure email to obtain the requested documents.<p>Data Investigation Team
Equifax Workforce Solutions
I'm filling out the form there. I genuinely don't know why I would ever generate a salary key so I can let someone know how much money I made.<p>Also, to prevent them from sharing the information, you need to give them even more information. Disgusting that this is allowed.
I hate that I have to opt out of this stuff that I never signed up for and never would have. I filed the request to freeze, and see that it will require me uploading many more pieces of data to prove identity and address. Disgusting.
I wonder if the winning game becomes your own boss and tiny companies.<p>I want to do the jump, but lack of courage, good ideas, sales skills and a very good salary still holding me back (open for suggestions).
But if the very good salary would go away, the scales tip instantly.
That was always the "winning game". Only problem is that's a lot of work. The more things change, the more they stay the same; if you want more money, work harder. People who don't want to work harder complain that other people make more money because they either don't understand or are in denial about the amount of work the people they envy put in.<p>Yes there are exceptions. No pointing out exceptions won't help you, though it might make you temporarily feel better about yourself.
What you describe is the reason the web site you posted it on exists.
I've considered it myself; I don't want to make a business doing contract work again, because I did not enjoy that.<p>If I were to start my own business it would have to be a product. I have plenty of interesting projects that I work on in my free time, but I'm not sure any of them are monetizable, or at least not monetizable enough for a venture capitalist to throw money at me (especially since most of them do not involve AI). I could probably think of something that could be monetizable if I really tried but if I don't actually enjoy the work I'm doing on the side for fun then I'm probably not going to do a particularly good job on it.<p>Though even if I did have some brilliant project that I could sell, I have no idea how to go about finding VC investors. And even if I knew how to find these investors, I think I would ultimately be too afraid to actually commit to it.<p>Increasingly it's seeming that I will probably not be worth billions of dollars in my lifetime, for no other reasons than I'm too much of a coward and I'm too discriminating with what I actually work on. Sometimes it depresses me to think about it, but hard to feel too sad for myself when I still have a high salary job that involves me staring at a computer screen all day.
Wait til you find out what customers do to figure out the lowest. There’s a little more accountability.
I'm not seeing how this matters, they were already doing that - the market is a big auction to work out the overlap between lowest salary employees will work for and the highest salary employers will offer. In that process employees also use data to figure out the highest salary that will be offered. The thing forcing employers to pay the salary they do is that if they offer less someone else will gazump them for the employee's time. It has nothing to do with the circumstances of the employees lifestyle. The lifestyle adjusts to the salary.
> the overlap between lowest salary employees will work for and the highest salary employers will offer<p>There is still an element of unknown because both parties do not know each others numbers, which allows employees to still negotiate. You are now talking about information asymmetry where the party with the information will now have all the bargaining power.<p>When I went from working a $150K job to getting offers from Meta at $300K, the initial number they offered was $250K, and we worked upwards. I absolutely would’ve taken the job even if they offered $200K and not negotiated. But they did, based on information asymmetry. Now imagine a world where meta knows exactly how much I make and all the other information about me. I’d probably get a minor bump over my previous salary.<p>Edit: I ended up taking a different offer. I don’t work for and have never worked for Meta.
You might want to rethink your example if the counterparty offers you 50% more than you wanted then you reject the deal; it makes adding the framing a bit pointless because it is clear you weren't ever going to accept the job for $200k.<p>And you're underestimating how much of an impact the broader market is having on Meta's thinking in this scenario. If your silver tongue or secret number was a factor here then everyone would end up being overpaid because they wouldn't reveal that they were happy to work for a reasonable amount. It doesn't matter how much or little Meta knows, they're only going to offer $300k if they have a reasonable belief that you can find a job for $300k somewhere else; informed by a pretty detailed analysis of the employment market. And in fact that appears to be <i>exactly what happened</i> in your story. Nothing about that dynamic has anything to do with your salary history or spending habits and them getting better information on those things doesn't change your negotiating position. Since a key factor is the future, even if they know you'd say yes to $200k, they'd still be best served offering you more money. I've had that happen to me 2 or 3 times because I'm a sloppy negotiator and don't try very hard to optimise salary.
> You might want to rethink your example if the counterparty offers you 50% more than you wanted then you reject the deal<p>I rejected the deal because I got even more elsewhere. My framing still stands. In a case when only one employer has the information, sure they’re better served by offering me more money. But in an environment where all of them have the information, this no longer is a problem. At a system level, this is a problem for employees.
This allows all sorts of normally illegal discrimination via ai pass through. Never hire pregnant women, sick people or employees over 30 again. Target for race and religion whatever you want. Basically everything that’s scary about chinas social credit score except private run with zero accountability.
If that’s true and this has a null effect, why would a business pay for it? There must be some utility for them. Like others already pointed out: information asymmetry undermines worker’s ability to negotiate, resulting in lower wages for everyone.
And our AIs can give us insight into what is the highest salary that the given company can offer.
"Our AIs"?
The AI models belong to giant corporations (Google, Microsoft) or are receiving millions of dollars serving giant corporations. How are they yours?<p>A better solution is passing laws on wage transparency. For most jobs, the company has a range in mind. Make them post that range in the job offer itself. Short of robust labor unions bargaining for better wages, transparency in the job posting is the next best thing.
It is not up to employer to tell me what to accept. If they lowball me, odds are high that I will just not accept it, or if I do, I will be sure to leave them as soon as I get a more reasonable offer, preferably in the middle of a project with no notice beyond what any prior agreement calls for. I will treat them the way they treat me.
Hyperindividualism is a mental health disorder that needs to be studied.<p>I say this because any time you bring up the idea of collective action, collective bargaining or, well, collective <i>anything</i>, you'll get a bunch of comments from Ameribrains who say "I don't want my salary dragged down by other people" or "I can negotiate my own salary" even though there is a *massive power imbalance.<p>If the company doesn't employ you or has to pay even 10% more it doesn't really matter either way for 99% of people. You are replaceable. Even if you think you aren't, you are.<p>But if you don't have a job in the US, that's your house, school for your children, food, health insurance and your car. All of those things depend on you having that job.<p>For you this is literally life or death. For the company not only is it not, but they have every resource in the book. They can pit you against other candidates. They can suppress your wages with layoffs or even just the threat of layoffs. They're going to do things like this to algorithmically lower your salary.<p>And you think you can compete with that? You can't. You may think you can but you can't. They're using the hybris of the human psyche against you. Everybody thinks they're above average. Everybody thinks they can text and drive. At least 95% of people can't.<p>In a weird way this is kind of the same thing as dynamic pricing. Dyanamic pricing is using algorithms to see how much you'll pay. Well I guess this is the other side of the coin: let's see how little you'll take. The goal of all these systems, and probably the true "value" of AI, is to suppress your real wages.
100% agree and this will be impossible to explain to the largely “ameribrained” crowd on HN, we are facing pathological capitalism. It’s consolidated, it’s expensive, it’s immoral. We need to stop this temporarlily embarassed billionare crap and band together to beat these companies back down to a competitive, costumer serving, world enhancing not destroying size.
Is it so bad if different countries can have different values?
Well said. Disregard the Philistines. Clearly not worth the effort to reach anyway. Greatly appreciated the insight. Even the Ameribrain comment was actually warranted. Since the 70's, there's been a concerted effort by employers to do everything possible to discredit Unionization in the United States, in spite of the fact that during it's heyday, unionization was responsible for netting workers a much greater share of the pie than has been the case post '71. If people would group up, they'd find themselves in a far less disadvantaged position at the negotiating table.
>Ameribrains.<p>If you want someone to read everything you have to write, abstain from triteness like namecalling.
Toughen up a bit, he’s right.
you're being a bit much.
It saved me the trouble of reading the rest of their comment, so there’s that.
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When I apply for a job, I use data to figure out the highest salary the company will accept.
When I've applied for jobs and done salary negotiations, I try pretty hard to find out the max I can get using as many variables that I think are relevant (e.g. years of experience, previous companies I've worked for, projects I've contributed to, etc). No one is writing an article trying to expose me for this.<p>I think the concern is how invasive they can be when doing this. It's one thing to quickly search your name on Google or something, but they can do creepier stuff. They can look at many, many more variables that I can, and it's a little creepy. It seems a little wrong to use peoples' credit scores in order to squeeze down a lower salary. I don't think there's anything even remotely comparable that a prospective employee can do.
The internet has information on what salaries a company pays. One would be foolish to not look it up before negotiating compensation.
People tend to think that income taxes lower your salary. While in practice employers know exactly for how little money (in hand) you are willing to work and in absence of income taxes would just pay this much less so that your money in hand is the same.<p>As an employee you should fight for income taxes to be as high as possible since they are neutral for you and might fund useful things for all. When left in the pocket of your employer they just become their takeaway. Employers won't spend it on improving the company if they don't have to. And the only things that force them to spend money in a predictable manner is regulation and markey opportunity to earn more. When they have those needs they mostly do it with credit anyways.<p>Conversely as an employer you should advocate for lowest income taxes possible for your workers.
You're suggesting that 100% of the income tax burden is shifted from employees to employers.<p>The incidence of taxation (which party bears the burden of the tax, irrespective of who 'pays' it) is widely studied. As it relates to payroll taxes (paid by the employer) and income taxes (paid by the employee) most research finds that <i>employees</i> bear most (but not all) of the burden. This is the opposite of your claim.
It has to be Sunday, because I don't that kinda of argument on a regular work day. It is almost 4chan level argument that simply does not make sense, but is somehow presented as if it was a simple matter of fact. Please tell me that you were joking and I was simply not in on it.
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