[pbalcer]

On a tangentially related note, big companies often say that they perform pay benchmarking by contributing compensation data to third-parties to then determine the market rate for employees. After reading the article, it strikes me as a very similar process, just for a different type of market (housing vs labor).

Did anyone try to challenge pay benchmarking in court?

[foxyv]

It seems like a lot of tech is used to launder normally illegal activities.

Want to create an illegal taxi company? Just make it an app. Want to discriminate based on race? Hide it behind facial recognition and predictive policing. Collude for wage suppression? Create a wages database and "suggested wage" for HR. Want to copy other people's art but need to file off the serial numbers? Dali has your back. Copy other people's code without a license? AI is on it.

[culi]

The facial recognition one is particularly concerning and explicit. Police stations regularly reapprove contracts with systems that can be as high as 96% false positives. It gives police a scapegoat to do what they wanna do

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/detroit-police-c...

[cyanydeez]

sentencing guidelines are automated in some jurisdictions. they recommend based on historical data. so if you had a racist sheriff, guess who's getting longer sentences.

this stuff has been simmering before AI got branded.

it's definitely AI washing.

[foxyv]

Who cares if it has a 96% false positive if it looks good in front of the honorable Grant A. Warrant.

[alanbernstein]

Yes, it seems our legal infrastructure is not capable of keeping up with tech developments. Probably need to replace government with an app...

[paulmd]

Systems of government that bias towards inaction and stalemate, via excessive amounts of checks and balances and other deadlock-inducing mechanisms, are going to be less and less able to keep up with technology that is growing at an exponential rate. A system that biases towards zero change can’t keep up with a world in which the rate of change is rapidly accelerating.

You can even view the climate catastrophe etc and environmental contamination issues and other things as a manifestation of this. Our industrial scale has outpaced our system’s willingness to regulate, and agile corporate structures using this tech advance at a decidedly linear or exponential pace while the government agility trends towards zero.

It is better to have systems that bias towards someone being able to rule, and then we can work on making sure the system decides that someone in a fair way, rather than biasing towards gridlock unless every possible dimensionality of the population (as represented by the various branches and chambers of government) all absolutely 100% concur. Obviously it would be silly to require 100% concurrence, but if you require that five different dimensions of society all agree at 70% threshold then you have effectively required that level of agreement anyway. At some point this leads to social collapse.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberum_veto

Since the US has a unique geographic position which makes it effectively invulnerable this will take the form of internal rot, stagnation, and gridlock until a sufficient crisis pushes us over.

And really those are both just two sides of the same coin anyway, it is pretty obvious to me that over-biasing to inaction is just as dangerous as over-biasing to action in general, and especially inaction may be particularly dangerous as we move into a century where things are ever faster and the consequences are going to be very very real.

> Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire.

> But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate, To say that for destruction ice Is also great. And would suffice.

[foxyv]

It's only a matter of time. We already have had judges writing rulings using ChatGPT... DOOM I SAY!

[mschuster91]

> Want to discriminate based on race? Hide it behind facial recognition and predictive policing.

Or gate employment on requiring college/high level academic degrees.

[nerpderp82]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_preferences

[supportengineer]

I often see newly-posted job descriptions for exactly what I am doing now, and they state that a master's degree is required (which I don't have).

[csa]

> and they state that a master's degree is required

This most likely means that they have a surfeit of applicants and want to cull the herd, or that they aren’t serious about hiring (or at least about hiring someone who is actually qualified).

Very few jobs actually require the knowledge gained during an undergraduate degree, much less what is learned during a master's.

[foxyv]

Sorry, I'm going to need you to go back for your Post-Doc before you can write that login page.

[sdfghswe]

This is not a conceptually new thing. People want to enrich themselves, new tech is just new tools to do that. Has happened since the beginning of time.

[iancmceachern]

Totally, so many examples, the ones you already listed plus theranos, enron, all thr crypto stuff, on and on

[IG_Semmelweiss]

There is a related (linked) article that talks about replacing the word algorith, with "a guy named Bob" and seeing if the result is illegal.

https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-r...

Separately, I find it sad that CEOs are thinking topline only and not thinking about their bottom line. The CAC for all new renters is not fixed costs, its variable, and increasing CAC vs leaving it close to 0 (and reducing related payroll) would be a viable strategy for a lot of buildings.

CEO just haven't done the hard work/math

[alistairSH]

From what I'm reading, the key distinction is RealPage pressures landlords to adhere to the pricing suggestions. That's what puts them over the line (not simply "because algorithms" as the headlines and teasers state).

[happytiger]

We dig the coal out of the ground, refine it, ship it to where it’s to be used, but we don’t encourage you to use it so that makes what we do ok.

Not an attack, but isn’t that almost the same logic they’re using?

[alistairSH]

Not sure what coal mining has to do with price fixing?

My very simplistic take on this...

- offering a sampling of current rents in the area for $50/month [not price fixing]

- offering a sampling of current rents in the area for $50/month, and then facilitating collusion between land-lords, and also pressuring landlords to adhere to rent rates [price fixing]

Obviously, there's a lot more nuance there, and I'm not a lawyer, but seems to be the gist of it.

[krainboltgreene]

> Not sure what coal mining has to do with price fixing?

You don't recognize an analogy?

[alistairSH]

Not that one, apparently.

[happytiger]

Just… thank you.

[deelowe]

Not at all.

The issue at hand is that the company required at least 80% compliance with their pricing suggestions as a stipulation of using the service. This gave them the ability to influence the market. If you didn't accept their listing recommendation 80% of the time, they kicked you off the platform.

[happytiger]

Good point.

[scarby2]

maybe. But the thing here as well is not just that they suggest pricing but that it's not necessarily prioritizing occupancy. If you have the ability to pressure more than one party into allowing lower occupancy you can set an artificial floor on pricing or slow the amounts rents should fall during a downturn.

[happytiger]

It’s a simple case of conspiracy price fixing. It’s just our laws haven’t caught up to the distributed nature of the collusion.

[lispisok]

RealPage wasnt suggesting rent prices based on local market conditions, they were telling you what to set your rent at and if you did not comply you got kicked. It was a cartel you joined and you got booted if you didnt go along with the rest.

[s1artibartfast]

Read up on the Cravath system for determining lawyer salary[1]. Every top "biglaw" firm in the US pays the same salary and publishes them. This has been found not be collusion because there is no agreement or requirement they stick to the price.

Every once in a while, one law firm will defect and raise salary, and every other law firm will update theirs within a week to the new rate.

https://www.biglawinvestor.com/biglaw-salary-scale/

[fsckboy]

the law firms in that category have their pick when it comes to hiring new graduates; those are coveted jobs and coveted salaries. Students who want to work at a corporate firm who don't get those offers wish they did. So it's difficult to argue that this aspect of the system is oppressing anybody.

after this initial hire, your salary growth (and segue to lucrative partnership) will be based on your performance and how much they want to keep you, again, undermining the notion that you are somehow locked into an oppressive system.

[s1artibartfast]

Who said anything about oppression? I'm talking about the definition of illegal collusion and price fixing. There is nothing illegal about squeezing poor people for every penny they have.

[fsckboy]

does your point hinge on that one word, or do you really think I didn't say anything of value that you could address more broadly?

[s1artibartfast]

Not really. I was responding to a question about price fixing with respect to employment law.

It seems like you want to have some unrelated debate about what group is more oppressed than other groups.

>after this initial hire, your salary growth (and segue to lucrative partnership) will be based on your performance and how much they want to keep you, again, undermining the notion that you are somehow locked into an oppressive system.

as a point of clarification, Biglaw salaries is fixed for associates up to 8th year. Yes they can still be fired, yes they can be made partner. Yes they make more than an Afghani dirt farmer.

[ghaff]

Companies use third-party services all the time to benchmark prices of all sorts of things--including compensation and other benefits. And it's not even clear why this is a problem. The extreme opposite position is to have the minimum amount of pricing transparency which would make it hard to have a meaningful market.

[berniedurfee]

Market benchmarks are used to set minimums or maximums for compensation or pricing that workers or consumers will just barely tolerate. That’s the threshold these benchmarks measure.

[m463]

We should get fine amounts and sentencing guidelines to adopt the same sorts of algorithms.

[feedsmgmt]

The practice of pay benchmarking using private data is egregious because of the very detailed publicly available data from BLS.

[sokoloff]

I went to BLS site (as well as Googling with site:bls.gov) to see what very detailed data I could find to help me benchmark software engineer compensation.

I didn’t find anything usable. Could you send a URL for data for a company who wants to understand cash plus equity competitive positioning relative to the top 10 highest-paying large SWE employers?

[feedsmgmt]

Navigaton on the site isn't great and that's a fair criticism. Software jobs salary data is here and you can drill down to state level etc https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151252.htm