~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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I just went through this last week and the trick was getting my finance director to tell HR that she approved the higher amount I wanted to offer. HR will play games with your budget until you take the excuse away.

The problem is the Dean for that area (is a college by the way) is a cowardly little chicken shit bitch who will not rock the boat for any reason.

We have history if you couldn't tell.

My company just googles the position title and slaps that number in the job description. Not going well.

> 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.

+1 It's called "Human" resources not "Company" resources for a reason.

Or: it’s called human “resources” not human “beings” for a reason.

Idk how people can even work in hr. Like how dead does your soul need to be to have such a old job.

Because it is a job that needs to be done and someone is willing to pay for it. For some people it may be the best job they can get.

I understand why no one likes human resources. They are there to protect the interests of the business and it is in the best interest of the employee to interact with them as little as possible. On the other hand, they are a useful resource for managers. HR frees them up from many of the administrative tasks for recruitment. They are a resource for management when they need to know something about compliance with labour regulations. Whether it is a compliance issue or the desire to retain an employee, they may just save your behind. That isn't to say that you should approach them directly. You need an advocate, otherwise they will probably view you as a liability. If you don't have that advocate (e.g. a manager or a union representative), then good luck!

i mean if hr was just doing those things no one would complain. I get there's some nuance to the responsibilities of an HR department but interactions usually seem to be biased towards protect the company, not make peoples lives easier. So i think it takes a certain kind of person to actually be able to do that effectively.

The HR depts are usually pretty sizeable. It's a combined effort, for sure.

You do realize “HR” encompasses a wide variety of positions, right? They aren’t all stereotypically evil minions.

Somebody has to be a comp & benefits analyst.

Somebody has to be a recruiter.

Somebody has to manage the PIPs.

Somebody has to have knowledge of the legal obligations of both sides of the employment agreement.

Thanks for the interesting recommendation.

The book you referenced is from 2005, has the game evolved in the past 20 years? My friends who work in HR seem to think so.

The problem is, it can change rapidly on the ground. We actully had a good HR team in a previous role, that really did work to support the employees, would push back against the org etc where approripiate (including on things like salary).

Financials in our parent company dipped, and rather than address their issues they went to war with the acquisitions they had picked up over the last five years or so to try and squeeze blood from a stone.

Step 1 was to immediately replace local HR teams with a US based team who proceeded to weaponise the data that had been held by the local team.

So even if you think HR today is "pretty good", it could change from underneath you very quickly.

The change was actually wild, one of the first things they did was try to get us all to sign new employment contracts that calculated how benefits defined in law in my country apply in the hopes that nobody would notice. It was effectively a paycut they were trying to hide.

It would have reduced my salary by close to 20k had I signed it, some people did. They refused to acknowledge this sneaky change until a few employees took up legal representation and then magically we all had new contracts the very next day with the issue suddenly resolved. Prior to this they just spent weeks gaslighting people and threatening termination for anyone that didn't re-sign the new contracts.

Sounds like one or two startups I've worked for prior. Yikes.

the best way to see how companies respond to things is to see what happens during the bad times.

it's easy to be good when things are going easy. it's hard to be good when times are hard.

"HR" stands for "Human Resources".

Resources are exploited by companies.

QED.

The most profitable thing in all of human history has always been and will always be information disparity. Create systems to share information on your salary with other people in your field.

Sounds like first hand experience observing wages being suppressed as a result of Radford/Aon.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Possession of the data should be illegal. It can be enforced through statutory damages, similar to the damages paid for sharing copyrighted music recordings and movies.

Just make PII copyright of the person it identifies, similar to how a "likeness" is owned by a person.

Then sue for copyright infringement.

Then all the five page long boilerplate contracts for every service you use are just going to add another clause saying that they get an irrevocable, transferable license to the data they collect. Probably without telling you because there's already a clause saying they're allowed to change the contract without notice.

Regulations can and often do supersede contract clauses.

Sure, but unless the data is given some special new kind of copyright that can't be licensed or whatever, that wouldn't. Copyright just isn't the right tool for this job.

Honestly what you describe is less likely to run afoul of antitrust law than hiring some firm who has all that data to tell you what salary to offer. At least you are looking at data and competing, not just paying some consultant to tell you and every other company to lower salaries.

> This information is visible to other employers that buy in to the scheme, and obviously favors the employer in salary negotiations with a candidate.

Meanwhile, it is an employee-rights win that the employer can't ask for your prior salary. Which of course they now already know.

We need strong laws that protect people from companies using data. Similar to credit-data usage for loans, companies should be limited to information on an application and in an interview when it comes to making employment decisions. They shouldn't be allowed to use social-media or past employment salary, or similar. At least not without explicit legal requirements and laws governing usage.

Not just individual paycheck disbursements -- scans of the entire paycheck, any routing and account numbers, tax withholdings, medical deductions, ....

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

You just sailed over managements and HRs heads.

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.

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

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.

[delayed]

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.

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?

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.

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.

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?