Comment by elawler24
5 months ago
I got access to Pave through one of my investors. Seeing the data made us set salaries and contractor rates higher, not lower. It’s like salary banding at big companies. It’s a framework for how much other people are paid at the same level, not a contract. HR will make it seem like a rule, but if you do spectacular work - you can always negotiate.
Collusion requires an agreement between rivals that negatively disrupts market equilibrium. Is this company not actually making the market more efficient and transparent? That said - an efficient market is good for the collective, not necessarily the rogue / outlier individual.
The market might be more transparent for the people who have access to pave, but for those who dont, the information asymmetry becomes worse.
Ding ding ding. Improving information for only the already-more-powerful side of such an asymmetric relationship doesn’t help the weaker side.
I agree and as an employee I encourage everyone to take a second post their salaries on levels.fyi. We have our own compensation tool that is free & likely as good or better than Pave as long as people add their info.
> Collusion requires an agreement between rivals that negatively disrupts market equilibrium. Is this company not actually making the market more efficient and transparent? That said - an efficient market is good for the collective, not necessarily the rogue / outlier individual.
I'm sure you practice what you preach and tell all your employees what their coworkers earn?
I'm sure he means transparency in the market where employers are competing with each other, not the market where individual employees are choosing employers
With a few exceptions, I've found that companies that talk about transparency are transparent with everything but employee salary
> HR will make it seem like a rule, but if you do spectacular work - you can always negotiate.
Every single developer should take this to heart. The phrase I once used at the end of an annual review was, "you can't give me a review like that but a raise like this!"
Yes, my manager had to get permission to give me the % increase I wanted, but it was to his benefit to do it since he wanted me to stay.
> Is this company not actually making the market more efficient and transparent
No, not at all. Unless applicants/employees get full access to the same information.
Ok, so your company ended up raising salaries because you were underpaying. That certainly wouldn't be the case if you found out your salaries were ABOVE average. You'd keep it the same at best, but most likely lower it.
That's the point of these systems. If it's not illegal, then it should be.
Or at any rate, "as one member, we ended up spending more when we started participating in a thingy" isn't super-strong evidence that the thingy is OK.
__________
To illustrate this, imagine some kind of over-the-top incontrovertible conspiracy to depress wages. I'm talking a secret volcano-island base, a letterhead with a Et redigam operarios in servitutem in latin, members greeting each-other as "Hello, fellow conspirator!" while twirling deliberate Snidely Whiplash mustaches, etc.
Then a new company joins the cartel, and it turns out that company was one of the ones previously paying below the fixed-price.
The fact that some members pay more on joining doesn't change the core nature of the system, especially if there's "noise" in the organic prices.
anecdotes are not evidence