the leaders of Apple and Google are greedy crooks...they are just way better at PR than most other corporate bigwigs
How Silicon Valley CEOs conspired to drive down tech engineer wages
91–100 of 488 posts
Re: How Silicon Valley CEOs conspired to drive down tech engineer wages
#92The typical response I hear to the idea of more widespread labor unions or AMA-like professional associations for programmers and network/systems/storage/database administrators is that if someone is really talented, they can negotiate a good salary, and that labor organizing together would just protect the lazy and the slackers. You hear this same thing when someone is lowballed a salary number, or has to put up wit…
As a H1-B myself, I think I'm pretty much a modern-day slave without the physical shackles. I hate going back to my home country and I love the intellectual, rational environment here. But I'm stuck with my current company until I get a green card which isn't bound to happen in the foreseeable future. I read his book on this and I agree with one of Matloff's points that H1-B should be solely for talent and I also agr…
> I hate going back to my home country and I love the intellectual, rational environment here.
The US is an intellectual, rational environment? What are you from Borat's country?
Re: How Silicon Valley CEOs conspired to drive down tech engineer wages
#93Maybe it goes back further than that - maybe in the late '80s lobby Congress to get the "Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1990" - a.k.a. the H-1B - to get some cheap immigrant headcount up, then maybe come up with the Java programming language to get a simplified base point where they would be at equal state, or something like that, maybe ship some of them back home to train more, and then recurse. Maybe. Maybe people other than engineers do engineering.
Re: How Silicon Valley CEOs conspired to drive down tech engineer wages
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
1. This is not a zero-sum game. The incremental value gained by a large company defrauding their employees may be the same dollar amount, but to the employees it makes a much larger subjective difference. Also the company that gets caught colluding once will have a much harder time regaining its good name. A tech employee gets offered $300k/year + options? He jumps. Google's "double irish" has $3 billion more in reve…
> Society's behavior just serves to convince us that the hacker ethos was right after all. … We are decentralized. No thank you to all forms of government. Well, I'm certainly convinced that pure optimism will trump powerful interests with huge financial reserves and far more influence with lawmakers and the media. How could this not succeed?
What exactly are you proposing? An alternative credo for hackers to ascribe to? Please specifically mention whether you are pro- or anti-union and whether you live and work in the US or not.
Edit: I see you're using Windows, so would you mind also listing your tech experience?
Re: How Silicon Valley CEOs conspired to drive down tech engineer wages
#95Jobs' comments: >OK, I’ll tell our recruiters they are free to approach any Adobe employee who is not a Sr. Director or VP. Am I understanding your position correctly? >if you [Brin] hire a single one of these people that means war. Chizen's comment: >if I tell Steve [Jobs] it’s open season (other than senior managers), he will deliberately poach Adobe just to prove a point. Knowing Steve, he will go after some of ou…
If you are a student, I would still recommend moving to SV. It's probably the best place in the world right now to be a software developer. This wage-theft stuff is for very experienced echelons of engineers.
Re: How Silicon Valley CEOs conspired to drive down tech engineer wages
#96Yeah hate to spoil the party, but this is not 'wage theft'. Wage theft is very specifically the act of withholding wages that an employee is entitled to according to the terms of his or her employment agreement. What happened here is not even 'price-fixing', it's a fairly weak attempt at 'collusion'. Yes, it seems improper at first blush and the email exchanges are almost comically incriminating, but my guess is that…
If big tech companies are colluding to depress engineer wages, they're pretty obviously failing.
If crooks are trying to rob retailers, I don't see empty shelves at walmart so the crooks are obviously failing.
(I don't think it matters if Jobs failed or succeeded. The appalling thing here is that Steve Jobs attempted an extremely scummy and potentially illegal move.)
Re: How Silicon Valley CEOs conspired to drive down tech engineer wages
#97The article claims that a "no-poach" agreement constitutes "wage theft". I lost count at how many times that phrase was used in the article, but it was probably fifteen times. It's completely incorrect, dishonest, and overdramatic to the point of being insulting.
I accuse pandodaily of brain theft.
HN needs a kill file, I have truly never read an intelligent article from them.
Re: How Silicon Valley CEOs conspired to drive down tech engineer wages
#98This conduct is obviously despicable, though certainly not out-of-character for Steve Jobs (all due respect for his talents). However, I generally believe this will resolve (and has been resolving) itself via market mechanisms. The mistaken assumption is that the only competition here is between Apple, Google etc and that it is focused primarily on income. The market is a lot more subtle than that: 1. Hackers are not…
Your points are well thought out, but I'd like to play devil's advocate to get you to expand on them, if I may... 1. Isn't this why large companies target the inexperienced, the recent college grad who is scrambling to make rent, or exploit people who can only live and work in the US if they get that job? 2. Some would say once you're a successful startup founder, you're "one of them" and the incentives become revers…
1. Absolutely, they do target these people, particularly through internships which are essentially recruiting tools. The BigCo advantage is that any decent salary will seem like a lot to people who've never had one before.
However, they are not the only players in the game, particularly recently. Y-Combinator itself started as a recognition of this paradox: while recent grads may be "struggling" to make rent (and in need of income), they are good at struggling (scrappy, risk-tolerant etc) and therefore ideally suited to starting a startup.
That said, I believe this particular lawsuit is more relevant to "proven" talent than students.
2. I think "hackers" will generally retain the "hacker" ethos, which I don't think is particularly tied to how they behave as founders or executives. I don't see "hackers" as any more or less benevolent or idealistic than the general population in the long run. In the short run, however, they are more likely to feel empathy since they were in the same shoes as their early employees more recently. From a more pragmatic standpoint, they realize more acutely that it will take a lot to get the best people to stay and contribute to someone else's dream.
Finally until they are formidable enough to engage in strategic discourse with the likes of Google and Apple, they don't have the ability to attempt such collusion.
3. Perhaps, but not necessarily. Acquihires might be a particularly good tool for talent discovery. There's also the potential threat that acquihires represent (if you treat us (engineers) too badly we'll just leave and you will have to buy us back 10x).
Your argument here is a good one, acquihires may reduce information available to all parties. However, this information asymmetry may work against the acquirer more than the acquired (or vice versa). I don't think there is enough data to confirm either possibility.
4. It depends on what you mean by compensation. In many cases (not all), the work may be more interesting and more importantly you (may) have more freedom in choosing what to work on. I qualify these statements because to get all the way to this utopia you need to get tenure, which is hard.
Regardless, you get to work with the best and most interesting people, which is a form of compensation. Also, plenty of startups come out of academia simply because it's like an extension of student life* (particularly grad students, post-docs and other non-tenured people).
* discussed in #1
Re: How Silicon Valley CEOs conspired to drive down tech engineer wages
#99Yeah hate to spoil the party, but this is not 'wage theft'. Wage theft is very specifically the act of withholding wages that an employee is entitled to according to the terms of his or her employment agreement. What happened here is not even 'price-fixing', it's a fairly weak attempt at 'collusion'. Yes, it seems improper at first blush and the email exchanges are almost comically incriminating, but my guess is that…
If big tech companies are colluding to depress engineer wages, they're pretty obviously failing. How do you conclude that they're failing?
Astroturfing
Re: How Silicon Valley CEOs conspired to drive down tech engineer wages
#100Yeah hate to spoil the party, but this is not 'wage theft'. Wage theft is very specifically the act of withholding wages that an employee is entitled to according to the terms of his or her employment agreement. What happened here is not even 'price-fixing', it's a fairly weak attempt at 'collusion'. Yes, it seems improper at first blush and the email exchanges are almost comically incriminating, but my guess is that…
it's a fairly weak attempt at 'collusion'.
What form of success here qualifies as "weak?"
If big tech companies are colluding to depress engineer wages, they're pretty obviously failing.
You're going to have to show your work here.