The data breach should have been reason enough to ban Equifax and force them to destroy their data. But that can only be done when the government works for the people, instead of money.

The Work Number is in fact Equifax.

I am now a partner in a consultancy. Despite my prior comments, we have still not yet gotten off Gusto. Pasted from a July 2024 e-mail Gusto sent me:

  We are making updates to our Payroll Terms of Service to address relevant laws and regulations and include information about new products and features, including our new employment and income verification feature. The updated terms will go into effect for current customers on July 31, 2024. 

  You can review the full updated terms here.

  The new employment and income verification feature

  When your employees apply for loans, credit cards, or public aid they may be required to provide proof of employment and income and, as the employer, you often need to manually provide verifications during the approval process. With this update, you can save time and help your employees get faster access by automating employment and income verifications through our new partnership with The Work Number®. 

  No action is needed from you. This benefit is included in your current Gusto payroll subscription and there are no additional fees. As the employer, you can choose to turn off this new feature in the Settings tab at any time. The feature will be available on July 31, 2024. Learn more >

  Thank you for choosing Gusto!

I (angrily) opted my company out, but I'm probably the only partner in the company who would have gone out of their way to do that.

So, theoretically some employees have a requirement upon them to fill this in.

Equifax Workforce Solutions (provider of The Work Number) has received your employee request communication, but additional information described below is required to fulfill this request.

We will be following up with a secure email to obtain the below requested documents:

Proof of Identity:

Provide a copy of one of the following (must include current/legal name):

- Driver's License (must be current) - Paystubs (must be dated within 60 days) - State or Government Identification Card (must be current) - Social Security Card - Military Identification Card - Passport (must be issued from U.S.A. and be current) - W-2 or 1099 Form (most current year) - Birth Certificate

Proof of Address:

If you are requesting an Employment Data Report (EDR) or selected ‘Mail’ as your preferred method of contact,provide a copy of one of the following (must include current mailing address and be issued within the past 60 days)

- Driver's License (must be current) - Paystub - W-2 or 1099 Form (most current year) - Utility Bill (phone, water, gas, electric, trash or sewer, etc.) - Housing Rental Agreement or Mortgage document - your name must be listed on the document

For Identity Theft Block Requests, along with Proof of Identity and Proof of Address (if applicable), please provide your identity theft report and designation of items to be blocked:

- Identity Theft Report (police report, FTC Identity Theft Report, Police report, or United States Postal Inspection Service)

For Human Trafficking Victim Block Requests ONLY, along with Proof of Identity and Proof of Address (if applicable), please provide victim determination documentation (as described below), and designation of items to be blocked.

Victim Determination Documentation:

Provide a copy of one of the following victim determination documentation confirming that you were a victim of human trafficking, such as:

- Determinations made by federal, state, tribal, or local governments, government agencies, or law enforcement - Determinations by non-governmental entities or task forces authorized by a governmental agency to make such a determination - Self-attestation signed or certified by such governmental agency or non-governmental entity - Determination by court in a case where a central issue is whether you are a victim of human trafficking. (Court documents can be made up of several documents from the court case that together show that the court accepted as true or finding no genuine dispute that you were a victim of human trafficking.)

We will be following up with a secure email to obtain the requested documents.

Data Investigation Team Equifax Workforce Solutions

Also, to prevent them from sharing the information, you need to give them even more information. Disgusting that this is allowed.

If by doing this, can employers legally discriminate against you?

The correct answer is: ALWAYS lie about your past compensation. It's the only way to get forward, one way or the other.

It seems like base salary would be easy to track, but other benefits would be much harder.

There are data sources for this info but I don’t think it’s technically a credit report.

This is why you shouldn't trust anyone who sells you on the idea that the ability to negotiate your own deals against large corporations is a feature and not a bug.

The information asymmetry, plus the difference in legal fire power & wherewithal to withstand a drawn out negotiation, will always put you at a disadvantage.

Now I am her part-time personal assistant which has taken a big load off her plate and reduced her stress significantly. A lot of this work is clerical: writing emails, grants, curriculum/lessons (she's a teacher), ordering supplies, working with spreadsheets, doing misc. graphic design and other office work. I also take care of the household, finances (mostly) and pets. In my spare time I pursue my lifelong passions (writing, game design, and programming), but with each of these my focus has been channeling those passions into generating income. This is not a requirement of my soft-retirement, but rather a choice I made to create balance between us.

Overall, we are much happier and fulfilled and have managed to carve out a life where we work meaner and leaner without huge sacrifices. In reality, it feels like we are financially better off than we were before.

Yes there are exceptions. No pointing out exceptions won't help you, though it might make you temporarily feel better about yourself.

If I were to start my own business it would have to be a product. I have plenty of interesting projects that I work on in my free time, but I'm not sure any of them are monetizable, or at least not monetizable enough for a venture capitalist to throw money at me (especially since most of them do not involve AI). I could probably think of something that could be monetizable if I really tried but if I don't actually enjoy the work I'm doing on the side for fun then I'm probably not going to do a particularly good job on it.

Though even if I did have some brilliant project that I could sell, I have no idea how to go about finding VC investors. And even if I knew how to find these investors, I think I would ultimately be too afraid to actually commit to it.

Increasingly it's seeming that I will probably not be worth billions of dollars in my lifetime, for no other reasons than I'm too much of a coward and I'm too discriminating with what I actually work on. Sometimes it depresses me to think about it, but hard to feel too sad for myself when I still have a high salary job that involves me staring at a computer screen all day.

Building a successful set of tiny companies is very hard. Unless you get lucky with the exact right idea, execution, and market timing it’s really hard to build a single business that pays as well as our tech jobs do. Building multiple companies is even harder.

I think everyone sees the survivorship bias examples like the levels.io guy or a few of the app developers who got rich and thinks it must be easy because their businesses were simple. The indie hacker communities are filled with people trying to follow in their footsteps and not getting anywhere despite years of hard work. The levels.io success story is not something that is easily replicated because his signups depend so heavily on his huge Twitter presence, where he pushes his sites under the guise of friendly information sharing. People without Twitter audiences try all the time to replicate his success and then wonder why they’re not getting signups like he does.

Most countries used to be hereditary dictatorships ("kingdoms") just a few hundred years ago, then people picked up rifles (and guillotines) and changed that. Now, since we already have some semblance of democracy at the top layer of power, maybe we could revolutionize the lower layers without the risks inherent to picking up rifles.

I don't see why we should be controlled by sociopaths[0] 8 hours a day, quite often against our interests.

---

The other part of the solution is automatically and continuously redistributing ownership of the company according to hours worked and skill level. This of course has to be required by law, otherwise those sociopaths at the top have so much leverage that if you ask for anything other than money during negotiation, you'll get laughed out of the room.

[0]: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

Truly, between this and feudalism, our ancestors have already figured out everything that's going to happen to us in this century.

I assume such situations occur often in Sweden where it's really awkward if you want to hang out with a crowd from lower social class because they know your earnings.

There is still an element of unknown because both parties do not know each others numbers, which allows employees to still negotiate. You are now talking about information asymmetry where the party with the information will now have all the bargaining power.

When I went from working a $150K job to getting offers from Meta at $300K, the initial number they offered was $250K, and we worked upwards. I absolutely would’ve taken the job even if they offered $200K and not negotiated. But they did, based on information asymmetry. Now imagine a world where meta knows exactly how much I make and all the other information about me. I’d probably get a minor bump over my previous salary.

Edit: I ended up taking a different offer. I don’t work for and have never worked for Meta.

Same. This is how any market works. I think one of the problems (US only maybe?) is that talking about salary is generally taboo. The first thing you should do with all your friends is be open about how much you make, and then go online and look for more data. That way you start with some good data points. Next is talk about negotiating. I was taught growing up that everything is negotiable, but later in life I learned that not everyone knows that.

The incidence of taxation (which party bears the burden of the tax, irrespective of who 'pays' it) is widely studied. As it relates to payroll taxes (paid by the employer) and income taxes (paid by the employee) most research finds that employees bear most (but not all) of the burden. This is the opposite of your claim.

I think the concern is how invasive they can be when doing this. It's one thing to quickly search your name on Google or something, but they can do creepier stuff. They can look at many, many more variables that I can, and it's a little creepy. It seems a little wrong to use peoples' credit scores in order to squeeze down a lower salary. I don't think there's anything even remotely comparable that a prospective employee can do.

A better solution is passing laws on wage transparency. For most jobs, the company has a range in mind. Make them post that range in the job offer itself. Short of robust labor unions bargaining for better wages, transparency in the job posting is the next best thing.

What sort of both-sides nonsense is this? The power imbalance is the reason this is noteworthy. They aren't the same.

If you want someone to read everything you have to write, abstain from triteness like namecalling.

You paint this bleak picture of someone agreeing to scraps to avoid starvation but the numbers are quite clear that working in software puts you way ahead of any of these countries with software labor unions.

You’ll rightly need pretty significant evidence to get people on board with a system that appears to have worse outcomes.

It’s not “literally life or death”. We have unemployment benefits, we have quite low unemployment rates and people can go work in other industries if they want to get paid like a software developer anywhere else in the world.