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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

#341

Post by whywhywhy5 »

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…

Sure, if you get a 1 bedroom apartment =/

There are plenty of places with decent rooms you can rent for $800-1000. I paid $825 for my old place in South San Francisco (20 min commute to SF). It was a 2300sqft house shared by 3 others.

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

#342

Post by dvogel »

marme wrote: post #275
dredmorbius wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

H1B throws all that much more friction into an already unequal relationship, tossing power further to employers. My preferred reform would be for H1B to be fully unrestricted. If you're going to allow labor into the country, let it compete on fully equal footing with domestic labor. For the reasons Smith articulates and you've either failed to read or are intentionally choosing to ignore, employers already have the u…

real changes that need to be made to h1b are the fact that they need to prioritize the h1bs to foreigners who graduate from US universities. Every year thousands of foreign PhD students graduate and go back to their home country not because they want to but because they could not get an H1B visa mostly because they wont work at the cut rate a person fresh from their home country would work for. These PhDs are trained…

They do pay for their own education. They pay for it through substandard wages for the work they perform. If their department didn't pay for their tuition then there is no way those students would work for the peanuts they currently do. The net cost/income to the school would be the same but the current arrangement has less transactional friction and makes it very hard for the student to leave once they've started.

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

#343

Post by mattdeboard »

textminer wrote: post #303
tsunamifury wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do it every day.

Me too. Forty minute drive from Oakland to Menlo Park.

For about six months I commuted from south San Jose to Mountain View. It was a fucking nightmare. I will never in my life live in a situation that requires such a commute.

Of course, now I live in the midwest and am hating the weather. My commute? Not so bad. But I miss the weather.

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

#344

Post by [deleted] »

adventured wrote: post #229
hashmap wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you talking about? A "free market" encourages exactly this behavior! If it weren't illegal it would go on indefinitely.

A free market neither encourages nor discourages this type of behavior. What it does, is not regulate whether a company can poach other talent by paying higher wages, or whether a company can collude with other companies to pay the same wages and stagnate. If a company believes it has the upper hand against a competitor - and some company always acquires the upper hand sooner than later - then it would be in its best…

[deleted]

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

#345

Post by newyork »

daemin wrote: post #231
lotu wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing with and H1-B is if they lose their job they have to leave the country the same day. That is a big incentive to work very hard and accept low compensation.

Is it actually the same day? That would be quite harsh. E3 Visa holders get 2 weeks IIRC.

Yep, its same day. As crazy as it may sound, there is no respite period in H1, legally.

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

#346

Post by vasilipupkin »

stbtrax wrote: post #286
100k wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I looked at this calculation for Minneapolis versus SF a while back, and salaries were definitely lower in SF than Minneapolis * cost of living.

I've done this same calculation and I found the opposite. And after I moved I realized that you have to also factor in how much more awesome the Bay Area is. I've been able to be outside most days this winter hiking and doing other outdoor activities. I can't imagine going back to winters where I'm trapped indoors.

That's not entirely valid, that's a subjective judgement. I live in Chicago and I hate the outdoors. Just a simple back of the envelope calculation tells you Chicago software developers make about the same or more ( because trading companies pay more ) as SF developers yet cost of living is 2.5-3 times higher in SF. It's hard to explain this as a mere correlation with the known fact of illegal collusion.

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

#347

Post by bps4484 »

gress wrote: post #75
bps4484 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution here is the same as the solution when Zuckerberg complained about employees leaving their jobs too quickly[1]: Pay your employees more. Figure out what kind of value they bring, and the amount of cost if they were to leave, and adjust their wages accordingly. Make no mistake about it, the ultimate goal of stifling competition is to depress wages. While maybe described as "disrupting operation", it is rea…

You missed my point. The cost of losing a particular employee at a particular point in time can be far greater than the individual contribution they will ever make. That cost is transient because it depends on the state of a particular project. The value of the employee becomes the value of disrupting the project to the competitor. Matching the offer would be an option, but it would cause massive distortion within th…

"The cost of losing a particular employee at a particular point in time can be far greater than the individual contribution they will ever make. That cost is transient because it depends on the state of a particular project." I think what you're trying to say here is that if a competitive company can time it right they can derail a project by scooping away talent at the right time (say, right before a product launch) which will cause greater harm at the moment than what the employee is "normally" worth (by "normal" I mean an average of their normal value output). I agree with this, but it is a failure of the company's compensation structure if this is the case. For instance, project base bonuses (upon completion of the project) should relieve some of this pressure because they would only get paid out upon completion of the project.

Regarding "better products" do you mean in my analogy, or our real world case of companies competing for talent? In the analogy, the competition causes both company A and B to beat each others' products in order dominate the market (either by lowering price and improving the product). In the case of companies competing for talent, the "product" is really the overall compensation package. Some combination of salary, options, benefits, etc will attempt to be found that will keep the employee where they are.

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

#348

Post by lifeisstillgood »

johnmaddox wrote: post #335
wozniacki wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wozniak on Jobs : *...told Jobs the good things these machines could do for humanity, not the reverse. I begged Steve that we donate the first Apple I to a woman who took computers into elementary schools but he made my buy it and donate it myself.* http://i.imgur.com/a1I9DTs.jpg https://plus.google.com/+CarmsPerez/posts/GnVTvQNgvpf

After all this why does Steve Wozniak stay with him.

Because any maker wants their stuff to be in front of as many people as possible - and staying with Jobs sure made that happen.

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

#349

Post by danellis »

dba7dba wrote: post #265
Natsu wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No matter what I hear about him, it seems like I always end up respecting Steve Wozniak more.

Unfortunately most people only know/worship Jobs. Few non-geeks know about Wozniak. Sad.

Time for a Kickstarter for iWoz: The Movie.

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

#350

Post by wavefunction »

johnmaddox wrote: post #335
wozniacki wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wozniak on Jobs : *...told Jobs the good things these machines could do for humanity, not the reverse. I begged Steve that we donate the first Apple I to a woman who took computers into elementary schools but he made my buy it and donate it myself.* http://i.imgur.com/a1I9DTs.jpg https://plus.google.com/+CarmsPerez/posts/GnVTvQNgvpf

After all this why does Steve Wozniak stay with him.

Because he's the Woz, he's immutable and immovable like the Bhudda

Funny how Jobs was the 'Bhuddist.'

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