221–230 of 289 posts
I wonder how much small firms/startups have /benefited/ from this arrangement. By artificially reducing demand for labor, big tech firms have effectively made it more profitable for smaller firms to compete against them.
I think you got it the other way around. They have decreased the price of labour and thus increased the demand for it. This is more or less an employer union.
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>> 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.
Hey, it reads "in good faith" . This only works when an officer in question could not know (s)he is breaking a law. Knowingly doing illicit things is not covered, afaict.
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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.
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It's just exposed and accelerated an underlying issue in housing policy. When demand goes up supply is also supposed to go up to meet demand in a healthy market, but because of artificial supply restrictions this is what happened. The government is to blame.
New housing development plans in the Valley, especially plans for higher-density developments, suffer from zoning restrictions arising out of “NIMBY” attitudes at the local level. However, I don’t think that’s the state or federal government’s responsibility to change. If American government is truly to be “of the people, by the people”, then the people’s decisions at the local government level ought to be respected,…
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.
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…
> 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. Inflated housing costs are a worldwide phenomenon, you'll see a very similar story in Sydney, London, Tokyo and other places so I very much doubt the root cause is anything to do with the bay area. It might be worse there given the amount of money flowing in…
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> That is not to say that pay is bad, or that wage theft is going on (extreme positions), employees in California at least are at will and can quit at any time to offer their services to another player. The regulatory requirement though is to identify and prevent collusion between those players in keeping salaries low. Wait, but isn't this situation actually making them getting hired at other players much more diffic…
It was not "much more difficult." They didn't have recruiters calling them, which I guess is market information of a sort.
I hate having recruiters call me. It's actively annoying. Having only Facebook recruiters call me was strictly better than the alternative that all major tech company recruiters cold call me, which started happening right after this broke.
I'm totally in favor of distributing more profits for all enterprises to workers, tech workers included, but "we agreed to not annoy one another's workers, but we're happy to hire when they apply" isn't really the story people tell. But that was my (and it sounds like your) experience of this.
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…
"In the early 1960s, CA’s population was 15 million & we built 250K-300K homes/year. Today, CA’s population is 40 million & we build 80K homes/year. So our population nearly tripled while housing production dropped by over 2/3. And people wonder why housing is so expensive."
> By one estimate from the California Department of Housing and Community Development, the state needs to build 1.8 million units over the next seven years just to keep pace with population growth
You need to build about 257k just to keep up with growth, not to address any sort of shortage. This to me should sound like a builder's gold rush. Why are builders not flocking to CA to build? Are there some stringent set of regulations that greatly reduce the economic feasibility? Is this Prop 13 proving to be a failure?
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Who gets to judge how much an engineer is worth to a company making billion upon billions of dollars a year? If some of these engineers are what is enabling these companies and their executives to make millions then maybe they really are worth a 1 million dollar salary.
you're right. But there's MANY other companies making similar profits.. yet not of them pay anything similar? I think you guys can't separate your dislike for these companies, with an actual, thoughtful analysis. Most oil companies make similar profits.. yet the average oil engineer makes 80-100k. With a lot more risk, and in similar high demand as a software engineer.
To be clear though, the people doing data analysis, land exploration, etc. for oil well discovery get paid much more by the way. They make similar amounts to what tech companies can offer in fact.
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We are talking about a hypothetical wage calculation with many unknowns versus a cash settlement. In truth, nobody knows what would have happened in the counterfactual case, but settlements require picking a number.
The number ought to err too high, not too low. This is supposed to be punishment and deterrent, not a gamble to get ahead illegally.