That strikes me as persuasive anecdotal evidence of what happens when a tech titan feels threatened by poaching that they cannot resolve by a gentlemen's agreement.
My recollection for the timing of those opening salvoes in the talent war was mid-2010. This would have been right after the DoJ told the cartel to knock it off.
I'll acknowledge off the top that that may be purely a coincidence.
"Clearly the tech talent shortage can't be that bad, otherwise salaries would be going through the roof. I realize they may seem high relative to many other professions, however if we really are in dire straights, one would expect them to have spiked dramatically. That just hasn't happened. Either collectively the valley is colluding to not inflate wages, or, more likely, the problem isn't as big as many companies are making it out to be and those companies want to bring in foreign workers to help put deflationary pressure on wages."
I guess it turns out that was a false dichotomy and both things were happening. It looks like there was a conspiracy, and the tech companies still complained about not being able to find workers while pressuring congress for more H1-B visas.
My point is I don't think you'll be able to really get an accurate picture of how much wages were depressed because many companies are trying their hardest to decrease workforce mobility any way possible (legal or otherwise). I've personally seen some pretty crazy shenanigans at a very large tech company with workers being steered through insane hurdles to get a green card.
And I guess why not? If you can get someone to stick around for 5 or 6 years at a reduced wage, why wouldn't you do that?
Regardless of the effect, it is a shame to see that these leading CEOs, who for years have vociferously complained about media & telecom oligopolies for preventing competition, were for years simultaneously using their oligopoly to prevent competition for employees.
Apparently, they're all for free markets, except when it affects their bottom line!
Seems to be a trend in every discipline, why should Big Tech be any different?
See: Big TELCO, Big Banking, Big Oil, Big Ag etc...
(Yes, yes, there are the people who love competition even when they are competing, but I find that they are fairly uncommon.)
There is some information on, say, glassdoor.com, but it's anecdotal. Is there a reliable and high-res salary datasource?
What I meant to convey with that first sentence is that any effort at measuring the effect is bound to be highly politicized and subjected to endless debate, so it's best to focus first on the documented actions of these CEOs, which are objective facts.
The most relevant questions right now, I think, are not about the magnitude of the effect, but about the actions themselves: who, what, when, why, and to whom?
But we're talking about the tech employee's relative share of the company's own profits, right? which means cross-industry comparisons aren't relevant.
i'm sure this is the line the defense would take. I guess - we would be asked to believe that even though you have the collusion stated as plain as day, "it was not successful" - just talk. And that might actually fly.
but it's crazy to see the greedy underbelly of SV out in the open like this, although it fits with the aggressive ("legal!") tax avoidance strategies. (EDIT: IMHO both behaviors are forms of community theft, even if you don't consider your taxes to be a charitable contribution.)
I suppose it only feels like hypocrisy because of the lionization of our heroes. We expect more, particularly considering how they position themselves relative to their values - "think different" - "don't be evil" - more than just businesses.
50 years from now, once the tech equivalent of the iphone is in every object on earth, I suspect Jobs will be looked at as another Rockefeller - awesome, epic, business man, just not necessarily the guy you aspire to become when you grow up.
Not exactly. The key issue is not whether anyone made more or less money.
What is at issue is violation of US law.
As of today, conspiracy is illegal.
collusion: secret or illegal cooperation or conspiracy, esp. in order to cheat or deceive others.
Do you voluntarily pay more tax than you are legally obligated to? Likely not.
http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2010/11/10/on-googles-10-percent-pa...
That was something like 20,000-30,000 people, so if you consider it among the population of the 5 companies involved, it's extremely significant.
That was the largest raise I've received in a 13 year career in Silicon Valley, so I consider it anomalous.
But then you're back to the problem whether correlation is causation. You could conceivably argue that it was due to competition from Facebook, which was not part of those agreements.
In my opinion, salaries were depressed -- although how much and for how long is very hard to determine.
A sibling comment suggests that we look at salaries in tech companies that didn't collude. But that doesn't work either, because (1) those salaries could have been indirectly affected by the collusion, and (2) other tech companies are different than Apple, Google, et al -- most importantly, they have less money!
The productivity of a single programmer has famously increased as the rise of multimillion-dollar companies with less than ten employees shows. You still need the same number of nurses and teachers, though.
The effectiveness of such planning is not the deciding factor as to whether or not the people involved have behaved criminally.
As a parallel, planning to distribute illegal drugs is illegal (conspiracy to distribute). While actually distributing is an additional charge. Something similar is going to happen here, where the executives in question may have broken several laws only one of which is conspiracy.
I'm not a lawyer, so I could be wrong. But this is what I remember from Business Law during my MBA.
No he wasn't; comparing tech salary growth to other salary growth in the presence of a tech boom was completely disingenuous. Wages can increase relative to other industries, and still be being slowed by collusion.
It would be just as disingenuous if someone said we should measure it by whether tech companies' profit per-employee increased during the time relative to other fields, which would give the exact opposite conclusion.
Also, 'disingenuous'? Because he posited the idea that there might be data that could be brought to bear?
Likely, compared to other industries tech workers were nevertheless handsomely paid, but I think this is still an example of abuse of power.
It's all the more worrisome because the changes in the nature of the stock market and so forth have made it that much more difficult for top tier tech workers to become rich. That used to be the pattern in the '80s and '90s, there are thousands of millionaires who worked at apple, microsoft, etc. for only a decade but were around during those companies' crucial early growth phases. Today I think that phenomenon is much less common except with extremely early stage employees. A lot of startups are the brain children of the sort of top tier techies who made it rich working at various vast growing companies. That variety of wealth is, I believe, very important to the vitality of the industry. But for various reasons it seems to have been significantly curtailed in the last decade or so, but if there is a more competitive marketplace for salaries in the tech field then that would go a long way toward bringing it back.
For example, demand in SF is much higher than Chicago so SF salary should be >> Chicago * cost of living adjustment. My guess is it's lower
I broke down some numbers awhile back comparing Seattle to SF, because a guy claimed that 80k in Seattle is the same as 200k in SF. Clearly not. Even after paying 4x my current mortgage I had thousands of extra dollars a MONTH of free spending money. Hardly the pity party I see from all the comments.
Maybe if we could restrict those fields to others in the middle of a boom or otherwise in a fierce competition for talent...petroleum and other engineers in the oil industry in the past few years, for example. (though I'd wonder if the big players in that industry have similar pacts in place).
I don't know. It would be difficult to hold enough variables constant to make any useful comparisons but there might be something in the broad strokes.
You want to use other fields as a control? That makes little sense. From 2005-2009 the tech industry grew at a vastly greater rate than most other fields.
Against what litmus test?
All the players (Apple, Google, Intuit, etc) were blazing new trails in a whole new economic model - and localized to an economy in the SV. That is why the whole scheme wasn't apparent at the time.
And the scheme was apparent, to those who were paying attention. It simply wasn't being discussed in polite society.
1) http://www.bls.gov/data/ http://www.bls.gov/bls/blswage.htm