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How Silicon Valley CEOs conspired to drive down tech engineer wages

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Re: How Silicon Valley CEOs conspired to drive down tech engineer wages

#11

Post by fidotron »

dasil003 wrote: post #7

As 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.

So the money that would have gone to the programmers goes to the upper executive layers instead. This merely moves things around slightly, and if anything further squeezes wealth into the top 1% as opposed to top 10%.

This whole story looks fairly damning, especially to Jobs and Schmidt, though that is probably the intent. Faced with a hiring war with 2005 era Jobs you'd have to have serious guts to refuse - like apparently the Palm CEO did.

Re: How Silicon Valley CEOs conspired to drive down tech engineer wages

#14

Post by aspensmonster »

Jobs' comments:

>OK, I’ll tell our recruiters they are free to approach any Adobe employee who is not a Sr. Director or VP. Am I understanding your position correctly?

>if you [Brin] hire a single one of these people that means war.

Chizen's comment:

>if I tell Steve [Jobs] it’s open season (other than senior managers), he will deliberately poach Adobe just to prove a point. Knowing Steve, he will go after some of our top Mac talent…

Jobs sounds like a Grade-A Asshole, along with every other player involved in this mess. Makes me even less likely to relocate to SV than I already was. Though now I'm curious to know whether these wage-theft pacts extend beyond SV, perhaps to Austin... Many of the same players have a significant presence here. Seriously. If you've got info, hit me up.

Re: How Silicon Valley CEOs conspired to drive down tech engineer wages

#15

Post by tdees40 »

gress wrote: post #8

It 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…

This is probably true. Competition is sometimes destructive. But these business practices are still completely illegal.

Re: How Silicon Valley CEOs conspired to drive down tech engineer wages

#16

Post by beachstartup »

pbreit wrote: post #13

Every time I read an article about this I fell like I'm at The Onion. Drive ++down++ engineer wages? Really? Does anyone on planet earth feel like engineer wages are/were artificially low?

YES.

based on anecdotal evidence, top engineer salaries start capping out at 150k, when in reality this should go into the 300, 400, 500k range like lawyers and finance people make.

it's already starting to turn, so i'm hopeful.

Re: How Silicon Valley CEOs conspired to drive down tech engineer wages

#17

Post by talmand »

gress wrote: post #8

It 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…

I would say that since the idea apparently started with Lucas and he specifically stated it was done to prevent bidding wars because they simply couldn't afford it at the time supports the thought.

I don't think it was the sole intention. But two things stand out to me that was part of the deal. The fact that the HR departments would inform each other if their employees were applying for a job at a company within the group; which by the way should be considered a huge privacy issue. Also that when an employee was made an offer, they only received a "final offer" to specifically avoid a bidding war. Those two things directly relate to wage suppression to me.

As for your example, that's quite true. But in the end it still stifles those employees' ability to increase their income because these companies directly conspired to not recruit from each other. It is not in the employee's interest to worry over if Company A wants to give them a pile of money to simply leave Company B but not work. Two companies coming to such an agreement for their benefit is a detriment to the employee, which is what the lawsuit is about.

Never mind the fact that the whole thing is clearly illegal under multiple federal and state laws. Therefore, their intentions are irrelevant.

Re: How Silicon Valley CEOs conspired to drive down tech engineer wages

#18

Post by [deleted] »

aspensmonster wrote: post #14

Jobs' comments: >OK, I’ll tell our recruiters they are free to approach any Adobe employee who is not a Sr. Director or VP. Am I understanding your position correctly? >if you [Brin] hire a single one of these people that means war. Chizen's comment: >if I tell Steve [Jobs] it’s open season (other than senior managers), he will deliberately poach Adobe just to prove a point. Knowing Steve, he will go after some of ou…

[deleted]

Re: How Silicon Valley CEOs conspired to drive down tech engineer wages

#20

Post by aspensmonster »

pbreit wrote: post #13

Every time I read an article about this I fell like I'm at The Onion. Drive ++down++ engineer wages? Really? Does anyone on planet earth feel like engineer wages are/were artificially low?

Every time I read a comment like this I know I'm at Hacker News. Did you read the article? These companies all held illegal discrimination pacts designed specifically to prevent them from needing to shell out a little bit more cash to keep their best employees from leaving for other employers that offered a better deal. The wages were, by definition, held artificially low.
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