Engineers Allege Hiring Collusion in Silicon Valley

> It also offers a portrait of Silicon Valley engineers that differs sharply from their current caricature as well-paid villains who are driving up the price of real estate in San Francisco and making the city unbearable for others.

What? "unbearable"? That seems a little out of place. Would most NYTimes readers have any idea what he's talking about?

From the author's recent articles list:

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Uber and a Child's Death

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seems to exclusively write negative stories about bay area tech

Can Software Engineers in California that weren't working at one of these companies get in on this class action? I mean even if you weren't at one of those companies its easy to see how suppressing wages at the largest companies would suppress wages for the entire industry.

Some relevant points for engineers addressed here: http://blog.mightyspring.com/post/74827679281/battling-outsi...

Know who (with)holds information

Avoid information asymmetry

I have personally witnessed the frustrating side of this "no poaching" pact. A close friend was tired of the "Manager Arrogance" at one of these colluding companies.

He quietly put out the word,pretty quickly got approached by a hiring manager at another company - things were going swimmingly.

Then the Hiring manager put in the Req to HR - a V.P. called him personally and but confirmed this "no poaching" B.S. The wage hike would have been considerable for my friend (you can guess the two companies - Arrogant vs Top Payer) & he was pretty upset to learn that the real reason was Jobs being a Huge Asshole and bullying everybody into such a blatantly illegal pact.

So this is a very real "wage theft" collusion case. Unfortunately most of the parties involved had the "good" sense to NOT document it officially so the Smoking Gun might be hard to prove conclusively.

There was even a "no hire" list at one of these companies tacked on the wall of a HR Manager with the Caption "If you hire from there, we will fire (u) from here."

Interesting, since most of Palm's ideas on smartphones pre-dated the iPhone. No wonder we've changed the patent law to first to file, rather than first to invent.