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Comment by MisterPea | Hacker News Reader

Wow, I was unaware of this and was really confused why the sourcer got fired.

DOJ helped software engineer salaries tremendously

> DOJ helped software engineer salaries tremendously

No, Facebook did, by just refusing to take part in the cartel. You only need one company to start bidding up salaries for the category of employee they want to move the market if they have a big enough budget. The DOJ didn't even push for a reasonable fine, one measured in years of revenue, or reasonable punishment, like jailtime for executives and HR staff who were in on the conspiracy.

Source on Facebook refusing to participate? It's one of the few bits of info that makes me like Facebook as a company.

Found this from 2014: https://techcrunch.com/2014/03/24/sheryl-sandberg-facebook-r...

Why is this being downvoted? I didn't know it either, and it also improves my perception of FB as a company.

They had to refuse. They needed to grow their talent pool. The others were focused on defending against msft.

It is well known and was in the same pile of court discovery leaks

FB has always been good to employees. Much like Microsoft (comparatively).

The number of amoral geniuses purely driven by technical challenge is limited. Businesses making money on the edge of ethics have to treat their employees well to keep them. When there is no "big lofty goal", you need to get people motivated someway. Adtech, fintech, crypto...

Well the employees they deem worthy at least

That only works if you get a job offer from FB though.

The effect is systemic.

I'm not sure if I follow. How does "not trying to hire each others employees" lead to wage cartel? Wouldn't they instead have to agree to fix their wages for that to happen?

Apple pays employee x, Google offers x*1.2, Apple could retain by offering x*1.2 (or more). Apple instead decides to collude with Google to not poach from each other. Now all companies everywhere decide to do this. Wages get fixed.

It's a negative pressure on wages if you manage to get hired at one of the top companies in the country, but are unable to jump to one of the other large companies. It effectively removes the most stable companies from that employees prospects, only allowing growth if that employee moves to a smaller company.

Just to be sure, did they completely refuse to hire each other's employee, or did they just agree to not send emails poaching them?

Empirically, within a few months after publication of Facebook refusal of a "truce" with Google, Google implemented a 10% raise across the board, and a $1,000 bonus.

This was part of the lawsuit. They communicated with each other about offers made to each other's employees and agreed not to counter-offer above the initial offer.

Not in any way that shows up in the actual statistics.

Oh really? That's surprising as well, I would've expected top talent to be paid more by jumping around.

Can't really get raises by jumping around if all the best options collude to keep wages own

A lot of those recruiters were contract employees. Maybe most of them, if they were doing cold calling like that.

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