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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

#271

Post by nostrademons »

defen wrote: post #255
nostrademons wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you have a certain narrative about how the world works that you'd like the facts to fit into, but the facts - at least in Silicon Valley - don't actually fit into them. I doubt I'll be able to change your mind, but for bystanders' benefit: The reason that programmers don't dress to impress is that their work product - the value that they add to other people - has nothing to do with their appearance. A program…

> Certainly in the one metric shared across all professions - money - engineers at top tech companies are not being taken advantage of by management, nor are they "cheap grunts". A senior Google engineer makes more than all than about 2 of the salaries listed on the first page of a GlassDoor CEO search That's completely irrelevant. The point is not whether Google engineers make enough money to be comfortable, or an a…

I'm responding only to the parent poster, not to original article. The view put forth in this particular comment thread is that programmers are underpaid because they don't dress well, which I find ridiculous. The article has a more reasonable explanation that programmers are underpaid because their employers collude, but plenty of others have already responded to that.

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

#272

Post by underwater »

rgovind wrote: post #237
dredmorbius wrote: post #226

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.

On the E3 visa - and AFAIK the H1B - you can't be out of work for more than 10 days. If you're not confident you can find a similar salary (and have an approved LCA) within that time then that makes the idea of rocking the boat a little more scary.

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

#273

Post by xtrumanx »

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.

If I'm not mistaken, Jason Fried made DHH partner at 37Signals.

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

#274

Post by robyates »

debt wrote: post #95
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…

If you are a student, I would still recommend moving to SV. It's probably the best place in the world right now to be a software developer. This wage-theft stuff is for very experienced echelons of engineers.

Agreed, there many good positions for new college grads. I don't think there is any better location than SV when starting a software engineering career.

While housing prices are quite high, working in technology you are certainly able to afford the higher rents. The problem is when you don't work in tech and live here.

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

#275

Post by marme »

dredmorbius wrote: post #261
rgovind wrote: post #237

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.

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 u…

real changes that need to be made to h1b are the fact that they need to prioritize the h1bs to foreigners who graduate from US universities. Every year thousands of foreign PhD students graduate and go back to their home country not because they want to but because they could not get an H1B visa mostly because they wont work at the cut rate a person fresh from their home country would work for. These PhDs are trained with public funds because no PhD student pays their own way through school they receive public grants from the schools or other public entities that fund their research and their study. Americans just dont want to enter graduate school in the same numbers that chinese and indians want to and there is no problem with that as long as these people are not being trained just to go back to their country. They use US public funds to be trained so it is beneficial for them to stay in the US and boost the US work force

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

#276

Post by deepGem »

So what if Google/Apple/Intel and everyone under the sun poached each other's talent. How high can the salaries go and how high can the money drain affect. After a certain number of years, things are bound to normalise isn't it ? Why fret over 5 - 10 billion when all of these companies put together have something like $500 billion collectively in cash. I seriously do not get this.

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

#277

Post by chipotle_coyote »

argonaut wrote: post #222
nerfhammer wrote: post #210

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.

I'm from Santa Clara, and "affordable" is an extremely relative notion. Silicon Valley itself isn't much cheaper than San Francisco. Berkeley, Oakland and East Palo Alto are not in Silicon Valley. And frankly, they're not as cheap now as they were even 18 months ago. It's still possible to get a one-bedroom apartment for $1000 a month if you look around hard enough, but it's almost certainly going to be small and old.

The big issue is that right now, $1200, even $1300 a month for a one-bedroom apartment in this area would seem quite reasonable, even a bargain. That's banana crazypants. In Sacramento you could get a two-bedroom, one-bath place with all the amenities for under $900 a month without looking too hard. That means that if you were able to telecommute three days a week -- maybe even just two -- it would cost you less to live in Sacramento and take the Capitol Corridor train in to San Francisco on your office days than it would to live pretty much anywhere in the Bay Area.

I'm not advocating that (the thought has clearly occurred to me, but I have too many friends here in SV to want to make getting to them that difficult), but I think it points to a genuine problem with the local economy. The median housing costs across the Bay Area show an implicit assumption that everybody is making Big Tech Money, but they're not -- and some areas are starting to get too expensive even for the people who are making top dollar. This just isn't a sustainable mix.

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

#278

Post by RuCrazy »

dba7dba wrote: post #265
Natsu wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

i know the mofo Woz!

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

#279

Post by OldSchool »

Steve Jobs said it well, "this means war." The engineering profession as a whole needs to play "war" like adults. This is going to cost money like anything. A permanent PR company that at least gets the engineering profession a louder voice than Marissa Mayer would be a start. A permanent lobbying budget to slowly but continually chip away at domestic and international threats to the buying power of your talent with changes in law is the other half of how grown ups play "war." No need to act like laborers and form a union or have strikes. Real change today happens via PR and lobbying. A well-funded and run professional organization formed with this as its sole agenda would do wonders for all of us.

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

#280

Post by codeonfire »

scrabble wrote: post #168

Google’s “People Ops” department kept overall compensation essentially equitable by making sure that lower-paid employees who performed well got higher salary increases than higher-paid employees who also performed well. Serious question, is this generally considered a bad thing? Every company I've worked for has had salary bands that work like this. They don't make it a secret. Generally you know which band you're i…

Salary is unimportant. Its like allowance from your parents. "Here's a little cash so you don't starve or freeze during wage slavery" It does not matter if its $50k or $102.5k, the goal is going to be the same for me.
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