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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

#41

Post by pille »

auctiontheory wrote: post #28
raganwald wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 impossi…

It's US culture - people are easily and often fired. Very different other places, even in tech, e.g. Israel, Germany.

And in Germany I'd be hard-pressed to find you a non-management tech job that makes north of 90k USD/year.

It would be great if someone could prove me wrong.

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

#42

Post by steveklabnik »

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…

For more "Steve Jobs does shady things via email," you might enjoy http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/05/the-stev...

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

#43

Post by hkmurakami »

talmand wrote: post #31
benihana wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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%. Citation needed. Where do you see that it went to the people at the top and wasn't invested back into the company?

Even re-investment back into the company could lead to increased revenues for the people at the top. Regardless, I find it doubtful you could possibly prove such a thing, even if it were true. One just has to assume that such things helps the company, which in turn helps the people who profit from the company doing well.

>Even re-investment back into the company could lead to increased revenues for the people at the top.

I think the best comparison is Wall Street firms, where a disprportionate chunk of revenues are paid out as compensation to employees. There's longstanding criticism by shareholders that this outsized compensation should be reduced in favor of giving back that value to shareholders.

"re-investment" back into Google likely benefits such shareholders (the majority of whom are not employees of the company) than employees.

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

#44

Post by steveklabnik »

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…

> However does anyone think that this was the intention behind these agreements?

From the article:

> George Lucas believed that companies should not compete against each other for employees, because ‘[i]t’s not normal industrial competitive situation.’ As George Lucas explained, ‘I always — the rule we had, or the rule that I put down for everybody,’ was that ‘we cannot get into a bidding war with other companies because we don’t have the margins for that sort of thing.’

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

#45

Post by leoc »

raganwald wrote: post #5
wouldprefernot wrote: post #3

I'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 impossi…

Note that of the fairly sizable group of high-profile, well-informed SV people who frequent this site, you never see one of them comment on a post related to this scandal.

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

#46

Post by sbisker »

nostrademons wrote: post #23
sbisker wrote: post #2

Now 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…

Anecdotally salaries at the major tech companies just shot up in early 2011, which was soon after the DOJ started its investigation. It's hard to infer causation though, as this could have been because of rising competition from Facebook for employees, or it could have been because of the large amount of seed capital sloshing around in the startup world then, or it could have been because of the Fed's easy-money poli…

I agree it would be a mistake for the layperson to infer strong causation, especially in the middle of the issue - I was more musing that this is the sort of opportunity where a student in law or economics could someday get a Ph.D attempting to answer it properly with data. (It doesn't seem impossible to normalize for the impact of fed policies across industries, for instance.) I hope someone does it and shares the paper with me. :)

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

#47

Post by talmand »

What astounds me by all this is the idea that the HR people in all these companies seemed to have no issues with going along with these highly illegal schemes. Must make for an interesting work environment to know that your HR people were willing to screw you over for little or no personal gain.

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

#48

Post by a8da6b0c91d »

msoad wrote: post #26

Engineers should make more money than what they are making now. The largest number I heard lately is $240k for a data scientist from Apple. That's too low! That person can make Siri better and make millions for Apple. Why aren't we getting paid like lawyers? If they win $20M they will get paid at least $2M. But if we make a product that generates $20M profit, at best we get $20K bonus. This has to change!

The lawyers and doctors who get paid a whole lot are partners in a firm. It's not much different than founding a tech company.

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

#49

Post by sounds »

[deleted] wrote: post #12

[deleted]

To anyone just starting their tech career in the US, pay attention to the parent comment.

Edit: parent deleted the comment, so here it is: (I sincerely hope the parent is not getting hauled off in handcuffs as we speak.)

  As a former Intel engineer the only thing that surprised me
  is how high up these abuses went. These companies and their
  leaders are scum to the highest degree. Between refusing to
  consider american candidates, mandatority never ending
  "crunch" time and suppressed wages I can only warn others
  to stay as far away from the companies listed in this
  article as possible, especially if you have an engineering
  degree.

  If you don't actually do anything its can be a pretty
  rewarding career assuming you have a knack for abusing
  others... such actions are highly rewarded at these
  companies. The number of H1-B visas I saw pleading for
  relief would astound even the Foxconn taskmasters.
H1-B visas are one of the major motivations behind the "immigration reform" being talked about in Washington DC. The purpose is to drive down tech salaries.

Don't believe them when they claim they are trying to improve labor conditions for minorities or something. To truly help non-US-citizens they would be requesting more green cards and US citizenship. H1-B leaves a person in a limbo world where they are essentially an indentured servant of the company. And the result is lower wages for everyone.

Intel's hiring and HR fiasco has been a running joke in the industry for decades now.

Read iWoz (by Steve Wozniak) to find out about Jobs' behavior at Apple.

Intuit appears to be at the center of this class action suit.

The real surprise is that Google joined them. Good thing Facebook didn't!

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

#50

Post by firstOrder »

The typical response I hear to the idea of more widespread labor unions or AMA-like professional associations for programmers and network/systems/storage/database administrators is that if someone is really talented, they can negotiate a good salary, and that labor organizing together would just protect the lazy and the slackers.

You hear this same thing when someone is lowballed a salary number, or has to put up with some other annoying workplace condition, it's said the person should negotiate this all up front with the employer, and that the person's lawyer should get involved in the negotiation.

As if one person has any chance negotiating against a Fortune 500 company's HR department, legal department etc. (or the equivalent forms coming from some venture backed firm whose VC's lawyer's help with the HR legal forms). Especially when the heads of tech companies are united ( http://www.fwd.us ) to trying to flood the Valley with low-paid workers chained to the H1-B visa, driving down wages and shortening the careers of programmers ( http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/h1b.html ).

Now on top of that, we see that the companies are united in trying to drive down wages. It's not just one Fortune 500 company doing this, it's the management of all of them doing it together. Yet the idea of programmers and admins organizing to defend their interests? Well only complainers do that. Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt organize for their collective interests, but any tech who did that must have something wrong with him - he's a complainer, lazy, whatever. We shouldn't be organized to have our interests defended.

It's a zero-sum issue with two potential beneficiary sides. There are those of us who work, and create wealth being screwed by this. There are those on this board who benefit from this exploitation and thus will pick at points in this article, in this post and so on. Why wouldn't they, they're the ones who parasitically benefit from this expropriation and exploitation.

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