Killing the Competition: How the New Monopolies Are Destroying Open Markets | Hacker News Reader

Killing the Competition: How the New Monopolies Are Destroying Open Markets

harpers.org

43 pointsahi15 comments

Um, the only problem is that the "new monopolies" aren't monopolies. I'll ignore the fact that the writer doesn't seem to know the difference between a monopoly and a monopsony.

But even so, somehow in this monopsonistic market, finding talent is difficult. Salaries are moving ever upwards, and you hear nothing but complaints from participants outside the alleged monopsony about how hard it is to find people. (I'm one of them.)

That doesn't sound like a monopsony. That sounds like a competitive market where demand outstrips supply.

Demand is only outstripping supply because they aren't paying sufficiently. That's the essence of the market. If they would only pay more, then demand would certainly not outstrip supply.

The problem is that just paying higher salaries would not necessarily correlate to increasing the supply of good developers. The sort of developers who only come in because you're paying 200k rather than 150k are usually not the sort Google wants to hire.

So the supply will increase, just of lesser developers. Additionally, I think it is possible to pay developers too much: I recall some study about how a salary beyond a certain point can actually make developers less productive. (I could very well be mistaken on this--I'm too lazy to go look right now.)

Basically, trying to hire great developers is complicated and just having more random people go into software is not the answer. Software is already one of the best paying "hacker" jobs around anyhow; you're not likely to attract true hackers based on more money.

> The sort of developers who only come in because you're paying 200k rather than 150k are usually not the sort Google wants to hire.

A listed-company with a market capitalization of USD 100+ billion cannot count only on its employees' passion anymore. If it pretends like it's doing so is disingenuous.

The money would affect people at the margin. The extra 10K a year might be the tipping point for a great developer to move to a different coast (or country) rather than stay put. That then opens her old job for someone else to move up. New developers can enter at any level to fill the gaps.

Not that I'm saying it's a perfect market, but if prices are being artificially stifled then the theory suggests that it'll reduce the supply, as people find better things to do with their time.

If you can't differentiate between developers of different skill levels then you've already got a problem (and a broken market).

It's up to each company's interview process to weed out the people who aren't likely to add value. Offering more would simply increase the company's available pool of employees. Put another way, the set of people who would work for you at $x is a subset (generally) of the set of people who would work for you at $y > $x

They are paying more. Wasn't there a story here a couple of days ago that the median salary in the valley just hit $104k?

Even so, the laborious market as the writer describes it would be better characterized as an olipsony, as collaboration was required to perform the action the article is speaking against.

I'm not familiar enough to speak on anything else in the article, but this in particular bothered me.

This excerpt is pretty poorly written. He makes a bunch of assertions without adding much in the way of facts. I dunno, there may be a case to make there. But he certainly hasn't made it.

This article just doesn't ring true to me at all. I am a developer in the Bay Area. I have helped recruit other developers from Google and other dominant Bay Area companies. I have not yet encountered the idea that developers ever feared career reprisals when leaving Facebook, Google, etc. Could be selection bias, I guess.

The reason why this article is hardly comprehensible is that author is reaching out to a libertarian crowd while noting a problem generally noticed by the left - labor rights.

What a lot of hot air. Silicon valley is one of the best places to work, and engineers are one of the privileged professions that are doing great even in the down economy. Even if big companies are colluding on non-poach agreements, why would that have any effect on startups? I'll poach Google/Facebook/Apple employees all day long.

Also, get a load of this:

> One team, he recounts, worked for 110 hours per week for nine months straight. But “everyone believed they were making something important.”

Bull-fucking-shit. Bullshit. You and your team did not work 15.7 hours every single day for 9 months. That's bullshit and the guy has no credibility.

Monopolies? Seriously, tech industry in general is probably one of the most dynamic market right now. Most big players secure dominance for barely 10 years, and only a select few will continue its legacy for any time longer than that. New players pop up providing new goods and services pop up all the time as well. If companies in tech industry are referred to as monopolies, there is no tangible meaning left in the term "monopoly".

The article asks a valid question: "Why aren't the employees of the cartel members baying for blood?" Presumably it is because any compensation from their employer will be more than cancelled by damage to their career, by the same employer?

There is a monopoly at work though. Since prospective employers engage data mining companies to build profiles from any and all Internet content, and there is only one Internet, the Internet has a monopoly over employee's reputations. If your reputation is tarnished on the Internet, for example, by being named as a plaintiff against your employer, it will be tarnished with every employer.

the TechCrunch link posted today shows very strong evidence of collusion and criminal conspiracy, but I'd agree that this Harpers thing builds up a whole tower of empty, meaningless nada on top of that very solid foundation.

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