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Comment by napoleond | Hacker News Reader

> I'm convinced one huge reason all this happens is to discourage job-hopping, because in this market, liquidity would probably help salaries move up faster.

Walk yourself through that for a second. You're saying a company that's hiring would intentionally make the process difficult for applicants in order to help their competitors retain their employees? That doesn't make sense. Even if they conspired with said competitors for this purpose, they would simply be ceding the hiring advantage to anyone who wasn't conspiring with them.

Occam's razor suggests a simpler answer: it turns out that identifying good software workers is a hard problem.

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Do you realize that there was a class-action lawsuit where the "competitors" Google, Apple, Adobe etc were working together to not poach each other's employees? You're acting like I'm a conspiracy nutjob when there were emails from Eric Schmidt and Steve Jobs where they admitted they were illegally colluding.

Do you realize that many "competing" startups have the same VC firms investing in them who don't want bidding wars between their engineers?

They want new talent but they don't want their current talent bouncing around for more money.

> Do you realize[...]

Yes.

> They want new talent but they don't want their current talent bouncing around for more money.

Of course everyone wants to retain employees, and I'm sure that many will stoop to less-than-ethical means to do so. I never suggested that the possibility of a conspiracy between companies was crazy, just pointed out why it's ineffectual. Google and Apple can maybe make it work, because there's no substitute for those names on a resume. But once you start going down the brand name ladder a bit, it is (a) infeasible for the large number of companies to conspire together effectively and (b) far more likely that some companies will refuse to conspire, and those companies will get the upper hand in the hiring market.

You missed the point of the comment, yes they colluded to not steal each other engineers, but they didn't change their interview process to facilitate it. If they had done that, like the previous commenter said, anyone not colluding with them would have been getting all their good engineers at most likely a discount from their true value because of the other failed interviews. Not exactly the best business strategy.

Raising salaries increase cost of doing business for everyone in the sector--increased competition may only result in decreased realized revenue, and often may just result in further investment in the sector.

To use a crude analogy:

Burger King and Starbucks don't mind if a KFC or whatever opens across the street, because while the newcomer is "competition", it isn't a big deal, and may even bring in more customers overall (because now that area is a "food zone").

They will, however, all fight tooth-and-nail to fight raising the minimum wage, because that results in higher costs for everyone.

I never mentioned a conspiracy around salaries. That would be as ineffectual as the scenario described, but at least it would be cheaper than investing in a hiring process and then breaking it intentionally.

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