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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

#301

Post by Patrick_Devine »

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.

Sure, but you can only renew the H1-B once (although you can get extensions). Also, most companies make it a policy to not sponsor you for a green card unless you've put in a year or two, and then once you apply for it they've got you by the balls. So every time you switch companies, you're starting the clock over again.

This is even worse if a company brings you in through some other visa like a TN-1 or L1 (NAFTA and Intracompany transfer visa respectively), and then make you convert to an H1-B before they will sponsor you.

A word of advice: Always use your own immigration attourney and not the one being paid for by your company. If the company is paying for it, the attourney represents the company, and not you.

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

#302

Post by godzilla82 »

daemin wrote: post #231
lotu wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing with and H1-B is if they lose their job they have to leave the country the same day. That is a big incentive to work very hard and accept low compensation.

Is it actually the same day? That would be quite harsh. E3 Visa holders get 2 weeks IIRC.

Yes, right, 2 weeks and that makes it so less harsh!

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

#303

Post by textminer »

tsunamifury wrote: post #282
snappy173 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I do it every day.

Me too. Forty minute drive from Oakland to Menlo Park.

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

#304

Post by akbar501 »

judk wrote: post #228
akbar501 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But we're talking about the tech employee's relative share of the company's own profits, right? Not exactly. The key issue is not whether anyone made more or less money. What is at issue is violation of US law. As of today, conspiracy is illegal.

Collusion to manipulate the market is illegal. Conspiracy means something else.

conspiracy: a secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful.

collusion: secret or illegal cooperation or conspiracy, esp. in order to cheat or deceive others.

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

#305

Post by blueskin_ »

kirubakaran wrote: post #58
zaidf wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

...and this is why, even as a major Apple hater * , I like and respect Wozniak.

* Although, to be fair to myself, Apple only turned into its current form after he left.

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

#306

Post by bjourne »

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…

Of course they do. They extend everywhere in the world. That's why sensible people form wage-stealing-back pacts, also known as "unions."

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

#307

Post by sillysaurus2 »

textminer wrote: post #303
tsunamifury wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do it every day.

Me too. Forty minute drive from Oakland to Menlo Park.

I would be troubled by the thought of spending 80 minutes each day trapped in a steel cage. That's 400 minutes per week, or about 300 hours per year just sitting in traffic.

Even if SV were the best place to be an engineer, it's hard to imagine it being worth sacrificing 300 hours per year.

A 10 minute commute is 25% of that, which is 75 hours per year, which is still a lot. But for me, there is a huge psychological difference between a 10 minute commute vs 40.

Is it worth it? What are the benefits?

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

#309

Post by nerfhammer »

judk wrote: post #236
accountoftheday wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article does not support this claim. My reading is that GOOG's HR department kept/keeps the salary curve artificially flat (over-rewarding low performers) to manage pay within a narrow band and thereby prevent having to negotiate with top performers.

I don't understand how employee A's salary is a factor in whether Employee B gets negotiated with.

From the article:

> Google, like the others, used a “salary algorithm” to ensure salaries remained within a tight band across like jobs. Although tech companies like to claim that talent and hard work are rewarded, in private, 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.

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

#310

Post by tricolon »

enraged_camel wrote: post #296
turar wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You are wrong. It needs to be approved, which can take months unless you pay extra for "premium processing."

You are wrong. It only needs to be filed. See the underlined word "filing": http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/FactSheet62/whdfs62W....
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