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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

#361

Post by MagicWishMonkey »

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 would definitely depress wages throughout the industry, SV doesn't exist in a vacuum.

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

#362

Post by talmand »

wutbrodo wrote: post #80
talmand wrote: post #47

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.

There's a couple of examples of them getting fired for not going along with it. I don't think "following instructions so as to keep your job" is as bad as "willing to screw you over".

If you are threatened with firing or fired for not going along with an illegal activity I would think the proper thing to do would be to report the illegal activity. If the law was structured in a slightly different way they could have been dragged into the court case for going along with the scheme.

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

#363

Post by josho »

morgante wrote: post #242
josho wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or given the startup context of this site, I'd phrase it as software development has no Barriers to Entry, which as startups (and yourself) have learned is great for getting into the market, but can be really bad once you establish a foothold and gain experience and realize that competition from new entries into the market severely undercut you on price. So, for those in the industry we need to find ways to add barri…

> So, for those in the industry we need to find ways to add barriers to entry so that our salaries are protected. This argument for professionalization is fundamentally flawed because salaries are not suppressed by an excess of supply. Just look at all the companies who constantly have open headcount. If wage suppression in our industry were caused by an excess of supply, you'd expect there to be lots of unemployed s…

I understand your point, and agree, to an extent.

However, there is value in operating more as a collective. Employees are uniquely disadvantaged when negotiating for salary. Employers have experienced negotiators, they know their salary ranges as well as the industry. While the employee has only the knowledge of perhaps a few of his peers, if that.

A professional organization could aid employees in their negotiations. That would be a nice way to start. I'm not entirely convinced that a 'bar exam' for developers is the right path. But, clearly as this article states we are being taken advantage of. In my experience the problem is larger than SV.

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

#364

Post by josho »

jasonkester wrote: post #333
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!

$240k is not the upper bound though. Granted, it's a good salary for an employee , but that's really just an indicator that maybe you don't want to be an employee. In reality, your salary as a developer is unbounded. There are plenty of examples here of engineers who have built their own software product businesses that bring in orders of magnitude more than the number you quote. If you're good at what you do, there'…

Salaries are very much bounded. Income is not.

Employer's have salary ranges they will pay. If you want above that range you need to be incredibly special for an employer to consider, ie. a public figure in the industry.

If you are willing to take considerably more risk than an employee and are the 20% or so of entrepreneur's that succeed then your income can be unbounded as you say. But, that's substantially different than salary, and not what the article and this thread is about.

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

#365

Post by cma »

ghshephard wrote: post #178
akbar501 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In cases of conspiracy, I believe the illegal act is the very act of meeting to plan criminal activity. The effectiveness of such planning is not the deciding factor as to whether or not the people involved have behaved criminally. As a parallel, planning to distribute illegal drugs is illegal (conspiracy to distribute). While actually distributing is an additional charge. Something similar is going to happen here, w…

pg wasn't questioning whether this was illegal or not, he was interested in what the impact was.

> he was interested in what the impact was

No he wasn't; comparing tech salary growth to other salary growth in the presence of a tech boom was completely disingenuous. Wages can increase relative to other industries, and still be being slowed by collusion.

It would be just as disingenuous if someone said we should measure it by whether tech companies' profit per-employee increased during the time relative to other fields, which would give the exact opposite conclusion.

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

#367

Post by hatred »

underwater wrote: post #272
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.

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.

Well it isn't that easy too if you bring in ethics to the table. This happened with my friend and it was done by a well known "online retail" company. So this guy got an offer from another "search engine" company. He went to his manager in the best interests of his present employer to tell them that he might be leaving in a few weeks and to hire a probable replacement for him. The next thing what this * company does is pass on a request for his H1B to be cancelled immediately. Thankfully , it all worked out for him in the end since his LCA luckily had already been filed by then. But this does bring into the question of how H1B is readily exploited by most employers.

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

#368

Post by chflamplighter »

lhnz wrote: post #185
yapcguy wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, but it's worse. There are programmers who love calling themselves "geeks", "nerds", "code monkeys" and promote boot camp style schools as well as myths such as "anybody can code" such that people think any homeless person off the street is a coder. You don't get doctors and lawyers talking down their own skills or saying it's easy.

This is the unfortunate truth. So much for being smart and logical, most will never apply this to anything outside of a computer. And most will turn their noses up at the ethics which would have them converting their technical ability and wealth into long-term power. (To see how this could be done, look at the relationships and rent-seeking behaviour around startup incubators. Others are deftly stealing your lunch.)…

Nailed it right there "A hustler is just a social hacker; a hacker is just a technical hustler. But a human being, they are neither: they are whatever they wish to be."

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

#369

Post by outside1234 »

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…

Jobs was an asshole. He was a sociopath, like many of the folks in this article.

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

#370

Post by kriro »

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.

Well if you care for privacy and data protection I'd recommend not moving to SV. Most places are not a lot better but many places at least try harder/care at all.
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