Another example of (usually giant) companies deciding to risk breaking the law because its cheaper in the long run to do so.
Settlements go to the plaintiffs, not the authorities. Plaintiffs have to agree to the settlement offer.
The plaintiffs could have gone to trial over this matter. They chose not to because fundamentally they must have perceived that the guaranteed settlement money was better than the risk that they walk away empty-handed. If the case was a slam dunk, the settlement would have been higher or they would have just gone to trial.
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?
And if not, and this is what holding down salaries looks like, imagine what the housing market would be like without it.
You're OK with them paying you less because you still got paid well by some standard? You (and as a result many other people) would be making more both in the past and today if they hadn't colluded.
For at least some subset of those affected by this collusion the salary lost will make a significant difference in their families' and their own quality of life either now or in the future.
And as for the people theoretically adversely affected, you'd have to figure out who they are, which wouldn't be easy, since it's people who were in demand enough that they might have started a bidding war.
There is not much more justice to be had in this case. If you're interested in pursuing justice, why not focus on current problems with identifiable victims?
And reading your comments on this page, I have to ask: are you representing nobody's opinion but your own, on your own terms?
> I think it's safe to say that any depressing effect on software engineers' salaries is long gone?
Every problem can be solved with one level of indirection. At scale, all of the big tech report their salary stats to survey firms who "aggregate" them and give it back to them. Yup.
These are not in any way, shape or form arguments or defences for these practices.
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.
> 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.
Harh, harh. I must admit, I know nothing about a lot of things. Thanks for sharing your viewpoint however, it grows my knowledge by at least one :)
My main point I'll make is simple -- you were victim of wage depression, it was found out and 'fixed' because it was illegal, and you benefited -- precisely because you were an identifiable victim. Now, imagine if you 'benefited' X to (X+Y) years earlier. Wouldn't you have retired earlier -- if that's your desirable outcome?
The reason it makes sense to settle something like this is that it's a bunch of what-ifs and would be hard to prove either way. How important is recruiting for getting people to switch jobs when it's well known you can get a higher salary from job-hopping and some people already do it? Particularly since there is also competition from other companies not in on it, and many people ignore recruiters.
It's never going to be clear whether the settlement was overly generous (a bit of unearned money for us) or whether we would have done much better if it had never happened, so the settlement should have been higher. The illegal collusion stopped, so I guess that's successful government action? Since the market for software engineers was and still is pretty robust, it seems like you could just as easily argue that it was a big success or that it made little difference.
It just seems weird to question the settlement now. Would you want to re-argue a settlement for some bankers who supposedly got screwed a decade ago? Aren't there more important injustices in the world that are still going on?
You can see this going on today with autonomous cars increasing salaries for engineers working on that problem, which has had knock-on effects for machine learning engineers and top tier software engineers in general.
As a Google employee, you were especially shafted by the settlement. Google's compensation structure at the time had a significant performance bonus component, even for low performers, but the settlement distribution was allocated based on base salary, so employees at companies with smaller bonus compensation got a disproportionate amount of the settlement.