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Comment by shadowgovt | Hacker News Reader

> They ultimately controlled where those people worked

[citation needed]. I was a "victim" of that scandal, but if I ever decided to change employers I knew where the door was and I knew my résumé would get me considered at the other players. The agreement was mostly to keep their phone bank of recruiters from polling me continuously and the managers like four levels above me from playing pachinko with the pay and benefits packages (to the detriment of the folks at my level).

Regardless, the agreement was illegal and existing law broke it up without breaking up any of the companies. I don't see how the existence of that scandal supports the hypothesis that larger corporate breakups are either needed or beneficial.

Microsoft of today is an OS company, browser company, videogame development company, and cloud computing company, and they seem to be doing pretty well overall at it; happy users, good products, decent inter-operation.

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> The agreement was mostly to keep their phone bank of recruiters from polling me continuously and the managers like four levels above me from playing pachinko with the pay and benefits packages

Do CS majors not understand marginal thinking? High-level people in business certainly do.

Yes, each of those things might not sound that bad - who cares if the recruiters don't poll me if I "know the door." The problem is that phone polling does have a real impact on people switching jobs and it does depress wages if businesses agree to not do it.

Not really in an ecosystem where there's some hundred startup opportunities in addition to the big established players. The mathematics on that are far more complicated than "big company doesn't pay more ----> everyone's wages are lower."

Besides, I have a hard time worrying about if my wages were lower than they "should" be when they're already more money than I'd see in any other field. Apple, Google, Pixar, et. al. employees are extremely well-compensated.

> Besides, I have a hard time worrying about if my wages were lower than they "should" be when they're already more money than I'd see in any other field.

Ah. So yes, CS majors don't understand marginal thinking.

Or they're not as monetariliy greedy. There's multiple forms of value.

So you've retreated from "actually there was no harm" to "maybe CS majors don't care if they are paid substantially less than they could be due to collusion in the labor market."

I'm not going to continue responding.

It really depends on how you define "harm" and who is harmed. Classifying "not paid as much as some theoretical model claims a person should be paid" as "harm" without examining the theoretical model in detail is naive.

For example, let's assume we care about improving people's lives. It's probably a short walk to assume that more independent software companies (both big players and smaller startups) satisfy that goal better than only a few players, or one player.

A collusion-free labor market encourages players at the top to spend on labor until they bleed. Eventually, if nothing checks that cycle, they bleed out competing for a small pool of top talent, with the winner being the one with the deepest pockets who can afford to bleed longest. Then, the winner gobbles up the talent and resources of the bankrupting companies, and there are fewer players in the market (and the remaining players get to dictate labor prices on the grounds of being the only players).

Ironically, a soft salary cap can benefit the ecosystem in the long-term; employees aren't paid as much as they could be, hypothetically, short-term, but there's more job security because a price spiral is unlikely to disrupt their employer. And there's a more diverse set of independent companies in operation, likely leading to a more diverse set of software solutions and more improvement in people's lives than if salary spirals meant that only big players could afford to play.

It's one scenario among many possible, but it's interesting to observe how maybe not paying software engineers much as they could be in a completely laissez-faire market creates long-term benefits for the engineers, their employers, and consumers.

> salary spirals meant that only big players could afford to play.

The collision was between big players, who were already outbidding smaller players except Facebook with had absolutely massive funding. Smaller players weren't helped by this. (Pixar was smallish but in context it's best seen as part of Apple/Jobs)

> laissez-faire market

Calling anti-collision regulation "laissez-faire market" is strange.

Are you assuming all of these companies are going after the same top talent? There are plenty of average and above average talent who they can hire and not "bleed". You don't need to hire a team of Ken Thompsons to build a CRUD service.

If companies would stick to hiring the developers they can afford given the needs of whatever project they are hiring for, there would be no (or less drastic) upward spiral of labor cost.

In the case of Apple / Google / Pixar / etc., yes. They are definitely trying to grab every Ken Thompson they can. For Google in particular, I believe it is part of their hiring goals.

It's undoubtedly true that these companies' actions suppress wages at the margin. The first order effect is some level of harm to the impacted employees.

I can understand the argument you put forward about second order effects but I don't agree with it, underpriced labor will lead to overconsumption compared to what is optimal.

I'd also like to note that the soft cap is the outcome of laissez-faire policy, it's regulations and law that is attempting to remove it.

This talks to a society wide problem, basic logical thinking tools (thinking at the margin, elementary statistics, etc) aren't taught in school and most of the population are ignorant of them.

They're not the most difficult concepts to grasp but high school students are busy memorizing facts instead, and these thinking tools are only taught in very specific university courses that not everyone will take.

There's an interesting book on how learning these tools changes one's political philosophy.

https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Rational-Voter-Democracies-Polic...

> I have a hard time worrying about if my wages were lower than they "should" be when they're already more money than I'd see in any other field.

Never get complacent. Always demand more. Give it away if you don't need it, but get what you're worth.

That's one philosophy but not one I subscribe to. I target win-win.

You won’t be hired and you won’t work for a company in the first place if it wasn’t a win-win agreement between the employer and employee.

What working for lower wages than you’re worth contributes to is a win-lose situation between employers in your field and employees in your field where the employees lose.

It will become a problem for you not now, but in the future when you are looking for a different job or when you want a raise (even if you’re satisfied now with your salary, inflation can catch up with you quickly, for example).

Win-win is a fine philosophy when negotiating person-to-person. Not so much when it's person-to-organization.

How do you feel about profiting sharing?

It doesn't seem like a bad idea.

Google’s minister of misinformation Laszlo Bock explained it at TGIF as

1) Google did nothing wrong because 2) Outbound recruiting has no effect 3) So execs just spent a ton of time working out a complicated arrangement to prevent outbound recruiting

It amazed me that Google would brag about hiring “the smartest people” then feed them directly contradictory information and expect them to buy it, which shockingly many did. For all the typical criticism of Trump supporters being a misinformed cult coming from Googlers, I saw a ton of similarities in the logical brain turns off when dear leaders explain things.

> just spent a ton of time working out a complicated arrangement

A few emails and phone calls isn't a complicated arrangement.

Anyway, just because the defendant said something doesn't mean the plaintiffs believed it.

> depress wages

Which is not even close to OP's extreme claims.

I think OP was just listing out the consequences of switching jobs.

They also engaged in agreements to not counteroffer in competition with each other above their initial offer so that employees couldn't negotiate between offers.

There is a lot to unpack here, but I think it needs to be addressed since your comment is getting so much exposure.

>> They ultimately controlled where those people worked

This is entire point of the anti-solicitation agreement. I don't need to cite anything.

Read the transcripts from Jobs and tell me again how it was to protect you from recruiters. How did you get sufficient protection after they lost the suit?

The point is showing the behavior of large companies that wield too much power and control large portions of the market, either from the customer's standpoint or the employees. They stopped their behavior only after being sued by the employees, who gained very little, the lawyers won and the GAFS ultimately profited from this endeavor.

Microsoft today is immaterial to the MS that should have been replanted in the 90s. Does not follow.

BTW it is hard to respond when your post is continually ninja-edited.

> Microsoft today is immaterial to the MS that should have been replanted in the 90s. Does not follow.

Microsoft of today follows from the MS that wasn't replaced in the '90s. Of course it's material.

Follows it in time only. MS today is not because of the stagnated Microsoft, but in spite of it. Nadella saved MS.

You are committing fallacies of conflating cause and effect and surviorship bias.

You claim MS "should have been replanted" in the '90s, but that claim makes the assumption that the end-result would be better than what we have now, does it not?

I don't think that's a safe assumption.

> decent inter-operation

We don't want interoperation only between Microsoft products, but between all products. Customer lock-in is an anticompetitive act. That's a big deal, and breaking up companies would be very advantageous to the consumer in that regard.

Would it? Because in general, when I look at the software ecosystem (in the open-source community and the closed-source cross-company community), I see a minefield of impedance mismatches and a programmer's lifetime of writing shim code.

The one-company ecosystems are incentivized to make their software work with its siblings. I've never seen any such strong incentive in other environments. I'd expect open-source to succeed at it, except instead it's a compatibility nightmare because people are interested in their own apps and not in making them talk to each other.

A textbook example is interop in email vs interop in instant messengers. Email was standardized, while instant messengers are left to the whims of individual companies. Normal interop isn't a hard problem, unless there's complicating circumstances (but then you have bigger problems), it's just that companies are incentivized to restrict it for their benefit.

do you know Fred Huxham? What you say about "mostly recruiters" is literally false

I'm afraid I don't. All attempts to learn more are telling me about track & field, which is not what I assume you're referring to.

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