How Silicon Valley CEOs conspired to drive down tech engineer wages
1–10 of 488 posts
Re: How Silicon Valley CEOs conspired to drive down tech engineer wages
#2Now that this is exposed and (presumably) not as present, has anyone done any work to see if salaries at Apple, Google, etc have since risen higher than salaries at companies who weren't involved with such activity?
This sort of shenanigans went on 100 years ago, but we couldn't study the consequences so tightly back then...it seems that Glassdoor's data, H1B data, etc provides a unique opportunity to study the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of such federal intervention.
Re: How Silicon Valley CEOs conspired to drive down tech engineer wages
#3I'm curious. Are the executives who make these illegal agreements to restrain trade ever personally held liable?
It seems that would be more effective than fining the companies, or the usual "We don't admit to doing anything wrong, but here's some money anyways."
Apologies for the green account, but I would prefer not to have my real name attached to such a discussion.
Re: How Silicon Valley CEOs conspired to drive down tech engineer wages
#4This seems like it takes some basic facts and then jumps to a lot of conclusions without any data (like sbisker mentions) - I'm not suggesting it's BS, but it's not clear their obvious conclusions are so obvious. I'd love to see actual wage data.
Re: How Silicon Valley CEOs conspired to drive down tech engineer wages
#5I'm curious. Are the executives who make these illegal agreements to restrain trade ever personally held liable? It seems that would be more effective than fining the companies, or the usual "We don't admit to doing anything wrong, but here's some money anyways." Apologies for the green account, but I would prefer not to have my real name attached to such a discussion.
And therein lies the problem. Although these companies are being prosecuted, nobody wants to run afoul of them or anybody else. I'm not saying that any one individual or company is presently a bullying wrongdoer, but what I am saying is that there is an culture of fear around speaking out or rubbing people the wrong way.
This atmosphere--along with the kind of proprietary shenanigans that make it difficult or impossible to truly own your own hardware and software stack--is the very opposite of the hacker ethos that created much of the value these barons robbed from the economy.
Re: How Silicon Valley CEOs conspired to drive down tech engineer wages
#6I'm curious. Are the executives who make these illegal agreements to restrain trade ever personally held liable? It seems that would be more effective than fining the companies, or the usual "We don't admit to doing anything wrong, but here's some money anyways." Apologies for the green account, but I would prefer not to have my real name attached to such a discussion.
[deleted]
Re: How Silicon Valley CEOs conspired to drive down tech engineer wages
#7As a programmer sure this annoys me, but I find it a bit disingenuous to tie it to growing societal inequality. Tech workers are definitely on the beneficiary side of the inequality gap, so I don't see how these conspiracies to indirectly keep tech workers salaries down to 2x to 5x of median American household income is really germane.
Re: How Silicon Valley CEOs conspired to drive down tech engineer wages
#8It may be that the consequences of the 'conspiracy' was to depress wages, and it should clearly be prosecuted if the legal case can be made.
However does anyone think that this was the intention behind these agreements? Isn't it more likely that they wanted to stop an insane war on one another's businesses by buying off key employees to disrupt one another's operations? It would seem as though companies with a giant stockpile of cash - I.e. MS, Google, and Apple, could stifle competitors by just taking out key employees of their opponents with large signing bonuses, regardless of whether they intend to put them to work or not. The result would be a destruction of value.
Re: How Silicon Valley CEOs conspired to drive down tech engineer wages
#9Now that this is exposed and (presumably) not as present, has anyone done any work to see if salaries at Apple, Google, etc have since risen higher than salaries at companies who weren't involved with such activity? This sort of shenanigans went on 100 years ago, but we couldn't study the consequences so tightly back then...it seems that Glassdoor's data, H1B data, etc provides a unique opportunity to study the effec…
Hard to say since the hiring boom has mostly passed. There's still demand for tech talent but you don't have multiple companies trying to hire thousands of engineers at once anymore.
We'll have to wait for another "boom" to see.
Re: How Silicon Valley CEOs conspired to drive down tech engineer wages
#10I was at Yahoo during the years in question and must have been approached 50+ times by Google recruiters. I wonder if Yahoo refused to play along or perhaps they were never invited.