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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

#261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The H1B issue is absolutely about providing cheap, endentured labour: visa holders are tied to their sponsoring employer and must appeal to be allowed to seek other employment. Norm Matloff of UC Davis has literally been trying to expose this for decades, with little luck: http://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~matloff/h1b.html http://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~matloff/h1b10min.html Moreover: this is entirely consistent with behavior o…

>The H1B issue is absolutely about providing cheap, endentured labour: visa holders are tied to their sponsoring employer and must appeal to be allowed to seek other employment This is plain wrong. You can very easily shift and people do shift. You just interview with a different company, just like a citizen would.

H1B throws all that much more friction into an already unequal relationship, tossing power further to employers.

My preferred reform would be for H1B to be fully unrestricted. If you're going to allow labor into the country, let it compete on fully equal footing with domestic labor. For the reasons Smith articulates and you've either failed to read or are intentionally choosing to ignore, employers already have the upper hand.

A better balance of power would be to repeal anti-unionization laws such as the Orwellian (100th anniversary of his death by the way) doublespeak "right to work" (really: "right to fire, and disrupt organization attempts") and ensure that labor has the same access to collusive collective action and mobility as capital and finance.

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

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At many companies, both startups and established, if you're a top performer and/or joined early enough, stock grants can easily propel you into this range (and beyond).

the figures he referenced are straight salary. A typical 30 year old investment banker at top firms will make 400k salary, but could easily be over 7 figures with bonus. Startup equity is rarely, if ever, worth that much on a risk-adjusted basis.

Not just startups, but even big companies like Google and Facebook have seen significant stock growth that have resulted in 2-3x compensation increases -- even if you joined post-IPO.

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

#263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you are a student, I would still recommend moving to SV. My advice would be to make sure you could find a place to live there first

Are you from SV? There are plenty of affordable places to live in SV. Just because everyone is talking about how SF is sooo expensive, does not mean you can't live in Berkeley/Oakland/East Palo Alto/other areas.

SV != SF. East Bay -> SF, especially near BART is easy enough. East Bay -> SV is ... may as well be Portland ... Maine.

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

#264
post #148

It seems like we should be able to measure whatever effect there was. There must be sources of data about salaries in the Bay Area. Has anyone tried looking to see if there is a depression in tech workers' salaries, relative to people in other fields, during the time this agreement was in force?

>> It seems like we should be able to measure whatever effect there was. Against what litmus test? All the players (Apple, Google, Intuit, etc) were blazing new trails in a whole new economic model - and localized to an economy in the SV. That is why the whole scheme wasn't apparent at the time.

It's not a new economic model, it's ephemeralization, advertising, Veblen goods, and especially disaggregation of previously existing models largely involving breaking down existing toll-collection interfaces in transactions of physical goods.

And the scheme was apparent, to those who were paying attention. It simply wasn't being discussed in polite society.

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

#265
post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He has always been there. "Jobs told him that Atari gave them only $700 (instead of the offered $5,000), and that Wozniak's share was thus $350. Wozniak did not learn about the actual bonus until ten years later, but said that if Jobs had told him about it and had said he needed the money, Wozniak would have given it to him." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Wozniak

No matter what I hear about him, it seems like I always end up respecting Steve Wozniak more.

Unfortunately most people only know/worship Jobs. Few non-geeks know about Wozniak. Sad.

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

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The H1B issue is absolutely about providing cheap, endentured labour: visa holders are tied to their sponsoring employer and must appeal to be allowed to seek other employment This is plain wrong. You can very easily shift and people do shift. You just interview with a different company, just like a citizen would.

No, its not that simple. The new company still has to file a petition for H1B, its just not subject to quota like a first time H1B. its not hard but no way is it as simple as being a citizen.

Yes, but I don't think they need to wait for it to get approved. It's a formality.

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

#267
post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you from SV? There are plenty of affordable places to live in SV. Just because everyone is talking about how SF is sooo expensive, does not mean you can't live in Berkeley/Oakland/East Palo Alto/other areas.

east palo alto ? are. you. serious ?

East Palo Alto Struggles to Remain Affordable for Low-Income Residents [http://www.kqed.org/a/forum/R201401171000]

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

#268
One thing that strikes me as curious is why none of the companies involved broke the story at the time or reported the situation to the Feds. I can think of numerous reasons why, none of them particularly reassuring:

⚫ They all thought they could get away with it. The idea that there were no defectors on this basis makes me question the integrity of the entire tech industry leadership.

⚫ Nobody had faith in the DoJ's ability to to investigate, or a court's ability to place injuctions, on this behavior and/or retaliatory actions.

⚫ Everyone had dirt on everyone else, at least in iteration. It was an n-way Mexican Standoff. Every player felt at least one other had the drop on them. http://fixyt.com/watch?v=HzF_TbmDH5s http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Mexican%20sta... As with the first instance, this does little for establishing trust with the industry.

⚫ The threat of encroaching action was too great. Any defector would be destroyed before the practice could be halted. There's one slim glimmer of hope here: It suggests that the threat of union action would be similarly disruptive and that a concerted action on the part of employees would in fact tend to succeed. The Achilles heel of the tech industry is that its capital walks out the door every night. If it realizes it can not come back, or merely threaten to not come back, it will have gained a great deal of leverage.

⚫ They simply didn't care. Arrogance, psychopathy, delusion. It doesn't particularly matter. Again, trust and reassurance are not promoted.

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

#270
post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a H1-B myself, I think I'm pretty much a modern-day slave without the physical shackles. I hate going back to my home country and I love the intellectual, rational environment here. But I'm stuck with my current company until I get a green card which isn't bound to happen in the foreseeable future. I read his book on this and I agree with one of Matloff's points that H1-B should be solely for talent and I also agr…

> Most people in the operations group running our service for instance are on H1-B and frankly, the work they do can be done by any average American working at a BK/McDonalds. That doesn't make sense. If they can be easily replaced, then why aren't they? Wouldn't it directly benefit the company hiring them to not hire them? Also, I don't like your characterization of people based on where they work. A person may choo…

Hmm, why don't manager replace H1-B's with skill-less people at fast food wages? Managers do not necessarily do things that benefit the company. Managers need to maintain the appearance that their project is important and relevant. Their goal is having as many people as possible to manage. Actually accomplishing important work is not important. Yes, other people should notice that nothing is getting done and all these people are sitting around doing work that could be done by a fast food worker. What are you going to do, go tell the guy that approved the project that his project sucks and he and the entire management chain are failures?
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