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How Apple, Google, and other tech companies conspired against their own workers

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Re: How Apple, Google, and other tech companies conspired against their own workers

#121

Post by module0000 »

munk-a wrote: post #16
turc1656 wrote: post #11

Notice the difference: " Top executives of leading tech companies secretly agreed among themselves not to hire each other’s employees" "...brought charges against the companies " They should have been indicting both, or just the executives for their explicit role in this criminal behavior. I really detest the lack of individual accountability in all these cases when we deal with large companies. If this was a couple…

I agree, there is far too much ability to transfer liability in the modern world which lets this sort of stuff get abstract and easier to dismiss. Companies should be held accountable to the extent their growth has encouraged bad behavior, but individuals at that company committed the behavior and, if they were instructed to do so and blindly followed then... 1. "Just following orders" isn't now and has never been a…

>> 1. "Just following orders" isn't now and has never been a valid excuse

Yes it is, see: https://definitions.uslegal.com/c/corporate-immunity/

That said..I agree with the spirit of your post. The only officers that cannot receive corporate immunity are the CEO and CFO - they can be held liable in criminal and civil litigation.

Re: How Apple, Google, and other tech companies conspired against their own workers

#122

Post by nostrademons »

So I was at one of these companies when the scandal broke. I didn't get screwed quite so much as my coworkers, since I'd only been working there for a year or so. The settlement was a joke - I got about $1100, but my compensation increased by roughly $100K/year the year after the cartel broke, and kept rising. Can't say I'm terribly pleased about either the wage-fixing or the settlement, but...

My wife works in philanthropy, and one of her jobs is investing in homeless shelters. We were talking the other day about how the Bay Area's housing/homelessness crisis is a direct consequence of the collapse of the high-tech wage-fixing cartel. Before 2010, the wage distribution from one of these huge companies was that founders and VCs would make billions, ~1000 early employees would end up with millions, and the rest of the employees live comfortable upper-middle-class lifestyles. The ~1000 employees who could cash out pre-IPO stock options would bid up prices in Hillsborough/Atherton/PacHeights/Woodside to ~$5M, but the rest of the Bay Area would be priced at what an ordinary professional could afford. After the cartel broke, the compensation structure changed so we have ~100K engineers each making ~$300-400K/year. That's enough to buy all the available housing inventory in the region. So now house prices in Mountain View and Sunnyvale go from $800K -> $2.4M, and you must be a dual-tech-income family to afford a house.

I say this not to imply that the cartel was a good thing (cartels are bad, and I'd much rather the solution be greater wage equality for everyone and building more housing so everyone can stay in the area), but to highlight the problem of unintended consequences. I've seen many people ask "Why don't companies hire remote workers at Silicon Valley wages?" and in the same breath say "Because I would never move to the third-world hellhole that the Bay Area has become", not realizing that if they did hire remote workers, the same thing would happen in their communities. Inflation is the flip side of higher wages; when everybody gets paid more, everything costs more.

Re: How Apple, Google, and other tech companies conspired against their own workers

#123

Post by arebop »

gok wrote: post #89

> Top executives of leading tech companies secretly agreed among themselves not to hire each other’s employees That's not accurate. The agreement was about recruiters cold-calling each other's employees. Employees were free to reach out on their own between companies. Workers routinely switched companies while the agreement was in effect. I still think it was bullshit, but it wasn't quite as egregious as the article…

Your statement is also not accurate, because there were several variants of "the agreement" and for some pairs of companies the agreement extended beyond cold-calling [https://www.lieffcabraser.com/antitrust/high-tech-employees/]. I'm sure multiple careers were set back when their prospective employer's HR department notified their current employer's HR department about the disloyalty.

Re: How Apple, Google, and other tech companies conspired against their own workers

#124

Post by lern_too_spel »

skybrian wrote: post #51
cliffy wrote: post #35

The settlement is laughable given the number of people whose salaries were held down as a result of this collusion. It's not just workers at these companies that suffer. It has a network effect of holding salaries down at companies which aren't even colluding. Another example of (usually giant) companies deciding to risk breaking the law because its cheaper in the long run to do so.

It was a long time ago. I got a raise out of it and later retired early, and I'm a pretty average software engineer, for Google anyway. Your argument that I "suffered" when actually they treated me very well by almost any standard isn't going to work. Based on what I've heard about current salaries for in-demand people, I think it's safe to say that any depressing effect on software engineers' salaries is long gone?…

This was going on at the height of the smart phone wars, which was a trillion dollar opportunity that ultimately made Apple the most valuable company on the planet. If Apple defended its early market position by poaching employees instead of by litigating competitors, there would have been a huge jump in engineer salaries that would have rippled across the industry.

You can see this going on today with autonomous cars increasing salaries for engineers working on that problem, which has had knock-on effects for machine learning engineers and top tier software engineers in general.

As a Google employee, you were especially shafted by the settlement. Google's compensation structure at the time had a significant performance bonus component, even for low performers, but the settlement distribution was allocated based on base salary, so employees at companies with smaller bonus compensation got a disproportionate amount of the settlement.

Re: How Apple, Google, and other tech companies conspired against their own workers

#125

Post by defen »

skybrian wrote: post #95
mrmuagi wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The critical point is that, potentially, you were a candidate of having your wages colluded to be depressed illegally. Ponder about this fact for a moment. Now, how could you straightforwardly make an argument that you are okay because they "treated me very well" or that it's a good thing because it helps the housing market (less income on your end)? These are not in any way, shape or form arguments or defences for t…

It was never OK or legal but it was settled. I can say that I was happy with the settlement. I cannot speak for others except to say that I don't think I'm all that much of an outlier, so don't write me off, bro. I still think this is a better argument than people arguing on behalf of hypothetical others they don't know anything about. One data point is better than zero. If you want to pursue justice, find a current…

Imagine if they had been paying you actual market wages, instead of "collusion-depressed" market wages. Then they came to you and said "Hey skybrian, we need you to take a $100k/year pay cut. You'll still be making a ton of money by any standard and this will help us hire other people for less money, so our business will be even more profitable". How would you feel about that deal?

Re: How Apple, Google, and other tech companies conspired against their own workers

#126

Post by chillacy »

nostrademons wrote: post #122

So I was at one of these companies when the scandal broke. I didn't get screwed quite so much as my coworkers, since I'd only been working there for a year or so. The settlement was a joke - I got about $1100, but my compensation increased by roughly $100K/year the year after the cartel broke, and kept rising. Can't say I'm terribly pleased about either the wage-fixing or the settlement, but... My wife works in phila…

Just a nit: Inflation is the result of too much money chasing too few goods, so not everything increases in price. Electronics and mass consumer goods typically stay the same price. Only goods which have limited supply and no substitution get more expensive, like housing.

Otherwise everything else makes sense.

Re: How Apple, Google, and other tech companies conspired against their own workers

#127

Post by GeekyBear »

crowdpleaser wrote: post #33
munk-a wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, there is far too much ability to transfer liability in the modern world which lets this sort of stuff get abstract and easier to dismiss. Companies should be held accountable to the extent their growth has encouraged bad behavior, but individuals at that company committed the behavior and, if they were instructed to do so and blindly followed then... 1. "Just following orders" isn't now and has never been a…

"Just following orders" was a valid excuse until the Nuremberg trials.

"Just following orders" has been used as recently as the Obama administration as an excuse not to prosecute CIA operatives for torture, despite American law on the books that explicitly forbids using it as an excuse for torture.

Re: How Apple, Google, and other tech companies conspired against their own workers

#129

Post by SupperMonty »

Silicon Valley companies are really interesting sometimes for entertainment value mostly. I doubt we are going to see any great progress coming out of that place - except maybe more spying and the like.

I don't know if you noticed those badges the drones there usually carry with a phone number, where you can report "inappropriate conduct". For some reason I had this image in my mind about someone calling to ask if it was okay to eat a ham sandwich, if one of your colleagues was a muslim and those people operating those phone lines would then have morning standups, where they would discuss such important issues.

So I was minding my own business one day doing what I do and suddenly get called upon by the big man to explain why I was a jew hater. Apparently someone had picked up that I had made a comment about jews at some point. I may or may not have made a sarcastic joke about some news story involving one or two jews. No idea, but being a bit autistic and odd person in general, that may have happened. Its not like I burned a Quran or something like that, but...

I made an attempt at explaining how that didn't make any sense, since I was a jew myself and had even lived in Israel as a child. Apparently that didn't really make a difference. The machinery had been set in motion and I had been stamped as incompatible with Apple values. I tend to agree with that..

Re: How Apple, Google, and other tech companies conspired against their own workers

#130

Post by chillacy »

thorwasdfasdf wrote: post #52

It's interesting the lengths they'll go to rip off their own workers, and yet they won't even make the slightest effort to hire in locations where labor is much cheaper. There's countless places in the US where they could've fairly paid 1/3 less. And significantly more savings outside the US.

A lot of companies have satellite offices in smaller cities with lower CoL. But they still want to be in urban centers with lots of people and next to strong CS colleges.
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