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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

#101

Post by cpprototypes »

acslater00 wrote: post #84

Yeah hate to spoil the party, but this is not 'wage theft'. Wage theft is very specifically the act of withholding wages that an employee is entitled to according to the terms of his or her employment agreement. What happened here is not even 'price-fixing', it's a fairly weak attempt at 'collusion'. Yes, it seems improper at first blush and the email exchanges are almost comically incriminating, but my guess is that…

From the article,

"a) never cold call each other’s employees; b) notify each other if making an offer to an employee of the other company, even if that employee applied for the job on his or her own without being recruited; c) any offer made would be “final” so as to avoid a costly bidding war that would drive up not just the employee’s salary, but also drive up the pay scale of every other employee in the firm."

I think it's clear how this would affect wages.

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

#102

Post by jobu »

acslater00 wrote: post #84

Yeah hate to spoil the party, but this is not 'wage theft'. Wage theft is very specifically the act of withholding wages that an employee is entitled to according to the terms of his or her employment agreement. What happened here is not even 'price-fixing', it's a fairly weak attempt at 'collusion'. Yes, it seems improper at first blush and the email exchanges are almost comically incriminating, but my guess is that…

"Wage-fixing" is probably more accurate than "wage theft", but it is most certainly illegal under antitrust law.

The key issues I see in the case:

1) they agreed not to do counteroffers

2) some of them shared salary data

3) they agreed to disallow active recruiting (cold-calling)

4) they agreed notify each other when hiring from each other

The third seems a little weak, but it definitely crosses the line when you combine it with the fourth (and emails between CEOs to stop hires that were already in the works).

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

#103

Post by trysomething »

worldsoup wrote: post #88
trysomething wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could be , it's all relative of course. The most affected engineers in this case were likely the cream of the crop. It's in a way analogous to professional sports, where (if salaries were truly unrestricted) the very top players could easily demand a multiple of their already astronomical salaries. To combat this, some leagues like the NBA have 'salary caps' and 'maximum contracts'. You won't see the government…

these teams also have minimums they must spend on players and minimum salaries per player. in the MLB and NBA the player's unions are very powerful and salaries would likely fall without them (NFL is a different story)

> salaries would likely fall without them

The median salary would likely fall, the mean would likely rise (or stay around the same) but the very top salaries would rise dramatically, in line with what these same players make on the free market as brand ambassadors.

This brings to light an uncomfortable truth: incentives are not really aligned for the very top talent and the majority of workers. To extend the sports analogy, Roger Federer recently opposed spreading prize money more equally in the grand slams, saying essentially that players should win more to get more money. (right now tennis prize money is essentially a power law distribution).

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

#104

Post by tomphoolery »

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…

It's hard to say, from just this snippet. You forgot to mention that Chizen tried to slime his way out of the problem by claiming he was only hiring junior-level staff. So Steve responded, rather sarcastically, "Okay, so everyone is open game then?", and then Chizen goes "No I was just kidding! Let's just be friends! Tee hee!".

I mean, Steve was a douche for a lot of other reasons. But this is savvy business right here. He had Chizen by the balls. Considering there's no mention of Apple intentionally trying to recruit from other companies in this article, I have to assume (until other evidence is provided, of course) that Apple was not doing such things.

To me it sounds like Steve knew he had the advantage, and he exploited that to keep his top talent where they were.

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

#105

Post by leoc »

sounds wrote: post #51
leoc wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I assume you're aware of who raganwald is, the person you're replying to? Not technically Silicon Valley, but close enough. I've deliberately kept my account "low-profile" for exactly this reason. I'm in SV and frequently rub shoulders with these people. Trust me, they're not ignorant. They've picked a side already. But it's so much easier to play hardball with a new hire who doesn't know anything; thus this kind of…

Yes, I know a fair bit about who raganwald is; I was thinking of the guys who are even more prominent and more SV-centred than him. All due respect to raganwald's willingness to stick his head above the parapet on sensitive topics like this, though.

> But it's so much easier to play hardball with a new hire who doesn't know anything; thus this kind of thing is "ignored."

I don't know about that though: if I was, say for instance, in a line of business which benefited from skilled developers going into startups rather than established tech companies this kind of news would look like the perfect advertising to me—but I'd still want to keep my head down while it was being discussed.

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

#106

Post by wonderzombie »

ryandrake wrote: post #52
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.

I strongly disagree that the average tech worker is on the "beneficiary side" of the inequality gap. This is a case of people looking around themselves and seeing they seem to be above average, and concluding that they are on the rich side. Reminds me of a ten-year-old article [1] that presented the remarkable finding that 39% of Americans believe they are or will one day be among the top 1%. It's certainly in the in…

There's that possibly-apocryphal quote about socialism in the US never having taken hold because Americans all believe themselves to be temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

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

#107

Post by sjg007 »

ryandrake wrote: post #60
a8da6b0c91d wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The difference being that you don't necessarily have to take the enormous risk of founding a company in order to become a partner in a law firm. Is there a similar career path for engineers in any tech company that is the equivalent of "making partner" in a law firm? Genuinely curious.

Sure, make partner in a boutique software consulting firm.

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

#108

Post by rfnslyr »

rhizome wrote: post #100
acslater00 wrote: post #84

Yeah hate to spoil the party, but this is not 'wage theft'. Wage theft is very specifically the act of withholding wages that an employee is entitled to according to the terms of his or her employment agreement. What happened here is not even 'price-fixing', it's a fairly weak attempt at 'collusion'. Yes, it seems improper at first blush and the email exchanges are almost comically incriminating, but my guess is that…

it's a fairly weak attempt at 'collusion'. What form of success here qualifies as "weak?" If big tech companies are colluding to depress engineer wages, they're pretty obviously failing. You're going to have to show your work here.

The fact that I'm a 21 year old drop out making nearly 100k because I sat in my mom's basement for a few years and studied software that interested me is pretty crazy.

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

#109

Post by MarkPNeyer »

rfnslyr wrote: post #108
rhizome wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's a fairly weak attempt at 'collusion'. What form of success here qualifies as "weak?" If big tech companies are colluding to depress engineer wages, they're pretty obviously failing. You're going to have to show your work here.

The fact that I'm a 21 year old drop out making nearly 100k because I sat in my mom's basement for a few years and studied software that interested me is pretty crazy.

why?

what makes you think you aren't worth 10 times that?

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

#110

Post by OnyeaboAduba »

zaidf wrote: post #24
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…

This is where he crosses the asshole line over to scumbag and crook territory. I say this as someone who respects Jobs deeply for his product vision.

I don’t want to sound like I am excusing this behavior but this type of thing happens all the time in various other industries all over the country. This is not an isolated sv disease. And as much as it is about money in regards to salaries it’s also about employee retention which is also about money haha.
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