Compensation data and tax rules keep tilting against workers and builders

The Pave thread asks why a company that pools compensation data across employers is legal, and commenters compared it to the Justice Department suit against RealPage's algorithmic pricing. Defenders said it's no different from long-standing Radford surveys and that sharing data isn't wage fixing unless companies agree to set pay. A related older thread says employers sell salary data to Equifax through The Work Number, which can be frozen by employees. The Stripe interview thread, accepted and then ghosted, shows how poorly candidates are treated.

For founders, there's the Section 174 effort to restore the software development tax deduction. One commenter said you could spend millions on salaries, sell 200k of software and owe taxes anyway. Others want it conditioned on excluding H-1B and foreign worker costs, and one said the real startup problem is the tax on employee equity.

The common thread is information asymmetry. Companies know what everyone else pays, and candidates and small startups mostly don't.