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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

#431

Post by nazka »

001sky wrote: post #234
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…

This is the dirtly little secret. Even if you hire at "market wages" there are all sorts of ways to exploit the relationship going forward. The power-assymetry this puts the H1B holder in is the opposite of 'negotiating leverage', and one can rest assure that this will not go un-noticed.

I am French, my GF is in San Francisco, and I am trying to get a decent company to avoid that. And it's hard... :/

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

#432

Post by ufmace »

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…

I'd agree that using the term 'wage theft' roughly 500 times in the article seems way over the top, and makes the whole article sound like left-wing propaganda.

Yeah, it's illegal, and I don't have much sympathy for them getting whatever happens as a result of the collusion investigation, but it does seem pretty weak. The best proof I can think of that they were or were not effective is to look at engineer wages at companies that were not subject to these agreements, like startups. Most of them are probably too small to benefit from tech giants agreeing not to try to recruit their people, or at least stand to gain much more from paying excessively high salaries to recruit from those tech giants. So are there a bunch of startups routinely paying much more than normal salaries to hire top talent quickly?

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

#433

Post by joshAg »

nazka wrote: post #431
001sky wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the dirtly little secret. Even if you hire at "market wages" there are all sorts of ways to exploit the relationship going forward. The power-assymetry this puts the H1B holder in is the opposite of 'negotiating leverage', and one can rest assure that this will not go un-noticed.

I am French, my GF is in San Francisco, and I am trying to get a decent company to avoid that. And it's hard... :/

check out riverbed. i'm not h1b, but i had many coworkers there who were and said it was great for h1b workers.

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

#434

Post by spinlock »

firstOrder wrote: post #50

The typical response I hear to the idea of more widespread labor unions or AMA-like professional associations for programmers and network/systems/storage/database administrators is that if someone is really talented, they can negotiate a good salary, and that labor organizing together would just protect the lazy and the slackers. You hear this same thing when someone is lowballed a salary number, or has to put up wit…

The thing that turns me off to unions are the work rules. Could you imagine if you couldn't use git because that work was reserved for source-code engineers? Work rules are the reason that you've never heard of an intellectually stimulating union job.

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

#435

Post by MarkPNeyer »

rfnslyr wrote: post #152
jimbokun wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're almost there... Now apply this to the implication that these sv companies did not depress engineer wages.

You're absolutely right. I'm demanding a 500k bonus from my boss tomorrow or I'm GONE!

why does that make sense?

you aren't paid in proportion to your worth; you are only paid in proportion to your negotiating power. if 50 other people can produce the same worth for your employer, you're going to be paid a lot less than if you are the only one who can produce the same amount of worth.

don't take this as an argument that you are being paid "unfairly" - you're not. just see it this way - you are worth much more than that. set your career sights a lot higher because you deserve it.

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

#436

Post by argonaut »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #277
argonaut wrote: post #222

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.

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…

SV = technology region. SV != actual valley.

Just like Wall Street != actual street.

This is how the media and public use the term SV.

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

#437

Post by argonaut »

snappy173 wrote: post #263
argonaut wrote: post #222

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.

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

SV = technology region. SV != actual valley.

Just like Wall Street != actual street.

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

#438

Post by consz »

rfnslyr wrote: post #152
jimbokun wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're almost there... Now apply this to the implication that these sv companies did not depress engineer wages.

You're absolutely right. I'm demanding a 500k bonus from my boss tomorrow or I'm GONE!

You should. I write code in another industry (HFT) and most people coming out of college are getting 400-500k bonuses or more after a year. We joke about how raw of a deal the average developer in SV is getting -- Google has roughly the same net profit/employee that we do (maybe even more), and all they're getting is chump change.

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

#439

Post by jgh »

hpagey wrote: post #411
Patrick_Devine wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

Your statement " So every time you switch companies, you're starting the clock over again." is incorrect. After your i-140 is cleared and you have received your priority date you can port your i-140 and retain your priority date. Your clock doesn't reset per se.

Good information. "Port your I-140" though?

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

#440

Post by Fasebook »

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.

What vision? The idea to make technology easy to use? What a mind blowing idea. I'm sure nobody thought of that before, in 10,000 years of human history. But you know, Jobs actually DID IT, he had the balls to hire a bunch of engineers to make his personal phone easier to use, and stiff them over and over systematically, like any business would.. Wait, what exactly did Jobs do? He had a lot of money.
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