thisislife2Employers use your personal data to figure out the lowest salary you'll accept
One (more) thing to opt out of:
Freeze Your Data - The Work Number
https://employees.theworknumber.com/employee-data-freeze
As I understand it, payroll whores your salary out to Equifax*, who then pimps it to others
* Yeah, that one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Equifax_data_breach
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.
No they sell it directly: https://theworknumber.com/solutions/industries/pre-employmen...
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.
How does that work with multiple credit agencies?
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.
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.
> the overlap between lowest salary employees will work for and the highest salary employers will offer
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.
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.
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.
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 exactly what happened 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.
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?
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.
I wonder if the winning game becomes your own boss and tiny companies.
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.
I've considered it myself; I don't want to make a business doing contract work again, because I did not enjoy that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes there are exceptions. No pointing out exceptions won't help you, though it might make you temporarily feel better about yourself.
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.