241–250 of 289 posts
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…
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…
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>equally with management in the returns. Managers at Google don't make much more and in some cases don't make more than the SWEs they manage. Did you mean to say shareholders?
I was told by someone in HR that has HR friends at Google that the manager of a group always makes at least as much as the highest paid employee in that group.
> estimated $3 billion in lost wages. Before the case went to trial, the companies settled for a total of $435 million So you get busted doing something illegal and walk away with a 2.5Billion in your pocket and 0 jail time. How do you expect execs to not do this all the time?
If the number of 64,000 employees is correct, even that $3B seems like a pittance. One commenter wrote their wage jumped by $100k the year after this settlement. $3B / 64k ~= $50k per person, less than half that number[1]. In the end they only had to pay an amount that was My guess is the executives who orchestrated this got a big bonus as a result. And why wouldn't they? They optimized for the corporation's good. Ho…
Also you are conflating base salary with total comp in your example.
Given how these large companies have a penchant to buy a promising company just to kill the product a couple years later, it seems like it's in the market's best interest to encourage distribution of power. This includes encouraging entrepreneurship with technologists & incentives to grow individual businesses to profitability, while discouraging M & A.
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Not a member of that class but one of the things that happened as a result of these revelations was that everyone at Google got a large raise (much larger than typical annual raises) and a substantial one-time cash bonus which appeared to be, during the announcement, just Eric being Uncle Moneybags but just after the all-hands we all found out the reason from the newspapers.
Are you talking about the 2010 adjustment or something in more recent years. I don’t remember this.
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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,…
The people voting NIMBY don't suffer any consequences though. VCs and big tech companies are happy to throw money away on higher salaries. Prop 13 keeps property taxes low for existing homeowners. The only people who actually suffer are those forced into homelessness and (to a lesser extent) those paying ever-higher rents for aging housing.
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.
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Then why aren't they being held accountable? Ever? Banking scandals. This example. Why aren't those who are tasked with enforcing the law enforcing the law?
Because they're actually tasked (implicitly or otherwise) with protecting capital. In many cases this means enforcing the law, but in cases of corporate misbehavior, usually means ignoring it.
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…
> 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. Weird that this is a problem in Vancouver, Toronto, etc. The larger trend that you're ignoring is that global capital finds real estate in these areas to be good investments compared to their domestic options for storing value. Instead of competing locally or domestically for real…