Compensation data and the hiring grind stay opaque

Resurfaced threads cover the lopsided information game in tech hiring. One person was accepted and then ghosted while interviewing for a leadership role at Stripe. Another warns that salary data is for sale through Equifax's The Work Number, so a lie about your old pay could be checked. A question about Pave asks why it isn't wage-fixing, with a link to the DOJ's RealPage suit. The best answer is that Radford has done this for decades and it is not agreement between firms. An Ask HN thread about what people make at Amazon welcomes sharing numbers, with a note that policies prohibiting this may violate federal law.

The pattern: companies have shared pay data among themselves for years, while candidates get ghosted and often can't see the numbers. Candidates now check numbers back, and they distrust the middlemen.

A separate thread asks who is firing and what job gets away with the least work, which shows how anxious the market feels beneath the surface.