Comment by atomicnumber3
5 months ago
"at least a collective incentive to lower wages."
???
In accordance with HN guidelines I am going to resist giving a snarky answer and will instead clearly articulate: Companies clearly have a strong collective incentive to lower wages.
"While companies could use the data to ensure their offers are always below average (pushing wages down), they could also use the data to ensure their offers are above average, pushing wages up."
They may do both. Collude to keep average wages low, so that when they offer outliers "above-average" it is still cheaper to cross that many standard deviations.
"Think about it: prices are transparent in most markets and that doesn't seem to generally lead to anti-competitive prices. In fact, it seems to encourage companies to compete."
The problem imo is less about transparency and more about information asymmetry. It's asymmetrical that companies have access to literally what every other company is offering, while the employee is sitting there trying to guess based on glassdoor (which is utter shit information) and levels.fyi (marginally less shit?).
> Companies clearly have a strong collective incentive to lower wages.
Of course they all have an incentive to pay the lowest wages they can. I did not think we needed to state that.
But what I don't see here is a synchronizing mechanism. That is, what here will push companies to *collectively offer below average salaries on average* vs above average salaries on average?
> ...Collude to keep average wages low, so that when they offer outliers "above-average" it is still cheaper to cross that many standard deviations.
Yes, companies could collude. CEOs and HR managers of a range of companies in an area or industry could start an email chain, or conference call, or slack channel and commit to keeping their average offers at 45th percentile or lower. That's collusion, and illegal.
But is that what Pave is offering? What's the communication channel or other synchronization signal they are providing? A chat channel? Bonuses for companies that keep their average offers below average? Penalties for companies don't? IDK, perhaps there is some collusion mechanism they provide, but we should not just imagine there's one without a reason.
> The problem imo is less about transparency and more about information asymmetry.
Sure, yes. But that's something different than collusion to fix wages. That's an argument that we want organizations like Pave, but ones that will provide the same data to job seekers.