Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

whenrulesdontapply.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 289 posts

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

#91

Post by mywittyname »

yardie wrote: post #70
maxxxxx wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has been shown repeatedly that boards won't do much and repeated fines are more and more just another cost of business. Either the fines need to be raised to a level where the company loses profit for one or more years or we need to go after individuals.

Don’t bother to fine them. They’ll just use that to punish employees and shareholders. Make the executives liable.

Shareholder can, and do, sue for damages from fines as the result of poor decisions by executives and the board.

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

#92

Post by munk-a »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #83
mtgx wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't think people were executed post-war for "just following orders" before the Nuremberg trials? In other words, do you really think such people got off easy before the Nuremberg trials? If anything, much worse has happened to them throughout history, because the kings and dictators didn't have to put them through a judicial process.

Whether or not you're punished for following orders has more to do with whether or not you're on the side that writes history than anything else.

This is an embarrassment of the victor and never celebrated - atrocious actors on the victorious side have been punished at times throughout history but I agree the bar is higher. It certainly isn't celebrated though - and informed societies can still be outraged (See Guantanamo, Abu Gharib, Yemenese drone strikes under Obama & Trump, the Bay of Pigs, Guatemala... the general familiarity of this list is a testament to the fact that the victor can be held accountable - even if individual actors are generally given more levity[1]...)

[1] _sigh_ Oliver North, honestly America... why did you never... eh.

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

#93

Post by Animats »

stcredzero wrote: post #50
tomjakubowski wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If A and B are both located in desirable locations, and C is not, then the strangeness of there being more A->C->B jumps than A->B is only stronger. If A and B are in the same desirable location, all the weirder.

If A and B are both located in desirable locations, and C is not, then the strangeness of there being more A->C->B jumps than A->B is only stronger. Again, you're assuming that there only a few entirely orthogonal variables. If A and B are both located in a desirable location, the cost of moving to A or the cost of moving to B might be high enough, such that it's only justified if there is a large increase in salary.…

That's just one metric. This is a good machine learning problem. Use companies caught in anti-poaching collusion to train the system.

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

#94

Post by taurath »

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.

Let's call settlements what they are: Bribes. Sometimes a bribe can bring justice, but in cases like this where they've created a systemic problem, the knock-on effects are too large for a bribe to ever be true justice. Thats why people need to go to jail.

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

#95

Post by skybrian »

mrmuagi wrote: post #73
skybrian wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?…

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 problem with some identifiable victims.

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

#96

Post by erikpukinskis »

rightbyte wrote: post #56
erikpukinskis wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a powerful insight, thank you. I am fascinated by the way "fitness landscapes" manifest in companies OUTSIDE the financial fitness of the company's trade. People often act like trade fitness is the only realm where we compete in capitalism, but there are so many more. Moat fitness for a company doesn't benefit their trade at all. Customers don't benefit when you kill a competitor, but you do. Similarly PowerP…

Power Point? What have PPT ever done to you?

No offense to PowerPoint fans! I've observed people making pointless presentations to shore up their brand as employees, not to facilitate trade.

It has other uses but... Have you not seen what I describe? That would be a useful data point for me if true.

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

#97

Post by Frost1x »

fjp wrote: post #41
munk-a wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the fair thing to realize, as a society, is that corporate profit taxes just make sense. If a company is operating in a high profit margin line of business it has more than enough money to invest in future growth, fairly compensate employers and owners _and_ provide a societal benefit for all those other community members that work in less high profit margin societies. Sure, you've got good healthcare and wha…

I can't understand how people don't realize that putting some of our massive, massive wealth towards building a better society would not benefit them. Can you imagine how many more inventions and advancements there would be if everyone had access to good education? Didn't have to worry about going bankrupt or dying because they can't meet medical expenses? If we put money into things that don't necessarily directly d…

When you're super rich, you already have that better society, it just costs a bit more (nothing you can't easily afford). Who cares about the rest of the hoi polloi.

That's how our society works and we applaude it by promising the potential to become one of the super rich, when much of obtaining that degree of wealth isn't earned through hard work and innovation but instead, pure situational luck and ability to curb your morals and ethics to climb over people and pull the ladder behind you.

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

#98

Post by ghettoimp »

mywittyname wrote: post #91
yardie wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t bother to fine them. They’ll just use that to punish employees and shareholders. Make the executives liable.

Shareholder can, and do, sue for damages from fines as the result of poor decisions by executives and the board.

Interesting -- are there some good examples of that happening?

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

#99

Post by Frost1x »

defen wrote: post #36
keepper wrote: post #2

So while this is bad... I don't know how to feel about this. The other side of the coin is that these companies pay WAY ABOVE average salaries. I'm intimately familiar with this having FAANG companies average of 50% more compensation than average. Especially outside of the bay area. Typical range TC Sr. SDE in nyc: 150-250k + Bonus. Typical range TC for Sr. SDE in nyc: for Google/Facebook/Amazon 300-400k ( and goes h…

> So while this is bad... I don't know how to feel about this. Just to be clear: you are saying it's possibly ok for a cartel of billionaires to collude to suppress wages for a bunch of people making six figures? Because those employees have it "pretty good" and should be happy with what they're given, even though they are working to build world-historical fortunes and power for the business owners?

Additional irony is, that behavior is condemned while any sort of orchestrated labor union in the industry is met with resistance at every turn.

Your employers, even as competitors dealing with monetary counts in billions, try to unionize (aka collusion). Stop pretending businesses are looking after your best interests. Chances are, if the business supports something, unless your goals align on that thing with the business, you probably want to do the opposite. Compensation maximization and labor expense minimization are nearly orthogonal.

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

#100

Post by dnr »

DontGiveTwoFlux wrote: post #31

Can any member of the class lawsuit here comment on the settlement? How did that work out for you?

I got some stuff in the mail, and eventually two checks for the two phases. I think they were something like $1100 and $7000.

I was kind of annoyed because the initial settlement was apparently so embarrassing that the _judge_ rejected it, something like $330M on supposedly $3B in lost wages. So they went back and increased it to the $435M, still nowhere close to what it should have been. Of course at this point the lawyers' incentives and the class' incentives are not aligned at all, so that's how it ended.

Post reply on HN