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Comment by schlauerfox | Hacker News Reader

It was an industrywide collusion to suppress wages.

Was? Companies still collude to suppress wages, albeit via layers of indirection. cf: Radford survey.

Was it? Engineers at FANG make absurd amounts of money even out of college. So, at the very least the collusion wasn’t very successful

How overpaid are employees relative to the amount of money they are bringing into the company?

much more relative to the average worker in many other industries

How much money a company makes should not matter. You get paid by how hard you are to replace and how important your task is to continued revenue.

You can make your company $1 billion a day, and save countless lives, but if you can be replaced easily, do you expect to get paid much?

> how important your task is to continued revenue

Yes, that's what I meant by how much money you bring into the company.

If you bring in $1B a day (and save countless lives) and I can easily hire another employee just like you, why wouldn't I have done so already? Perhaps that is your point?

Be that as it may, how overpaid do you think tech employees are compared to the cost of replacing them?

Year over year wage increases relative to all workers and competition for labor in the tech sector are the signals you want to use. Total mergers and acquisitions and number of discontinued software products would be good secondary signals.

You're neglecting the most crucial variable here: profit margin. These engineers are super cheap.

Yes, it absolutely was. Well documented, complete with Justice Department litigation and settlements.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

BTW, Facebook didn't participate, and was by some measures, one of the reasons the collusion didn't continue to succeed.

Salaries were suppressed until after the litigation that my sibling comment by compiler-guy cited. Salaries did not begin to take off until ~2011.

Palm really should have been on board then.

To do illegal things?

The point was that Palm, like any tech company, would probably have loved cheaper labor as well.

Most companies will eagerly pursue profitable illegal action – and subsequently express sincere remorse that they were caught and punished.

Some won't. You can call that ethics or fear of being caught or whatever but it is of course morally better than doing the illegal thing.

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