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Comment by beambot | Hacker News Reader

> wages were probably below what they should've been for years...

Not only that... tech companies like Apple, Adobe, Pixar, Google, Intel, eBay, Lucasfilm, and Intuit all illegally colluded to keep them low. The settlement for the affected workers was appallingly low!

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

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I agree that the settlement was definitely low, but I really disagree that the settlement was absurdly low on aggregate.

I've always done freelance/contract work, so I'm not 100% sure what 'significantly' better means in the normal software world, but I'm going to assume 5k/year would be a really significant raise. I know the national average is somewhere around 3%, so 5k seems like it would be absurdly more than average. Please do correct me if I'm wrong.

So, just going on $5,000 lost for a year for the 64,000 litigants, that's $320,000,000. They settled for $324,000,000. I swear I didn't presuppose any of those numbers, they just worked out like that.

The period in question is 4 years so multiply by 4 (although not all litigants were present during all 4 years so you can back it off a little).

And 5k is too low. Google gave a 10% raise across the board around the time this information came out. So assume 150k salary * 10% = 15k. Salaries also continued to rise more rapidly after the 10% raise, but it's hard to say by how much without having access to the internal data.

I'm not being snarky; where does 4 years come from? Do we have start/end dates on when the agreement was formed/ended? If we do, then I'm totally willing to revise my judgement on this. Also, 10% from Google does not translate to 10% across the board, only to any employees who would be hired by Google, which would surely not be 100%.

From the linked wikipedia article: "The civil class action which was filed by five plaintiffs, one of whom has died, accused the tech companies of collusion to not recruit one another's employees between 2005 and 2009."

Hence 4 years of wage suppression. Given tech salaries in SV, $5k is off by about an order of magnitude -- especially when you consider the knock-on effects of job mobility that was systemically quashed by collusion (i.e. moving jobs => better pay => faster career progression => compounded earnings).

Your first question is answered by beambot. The 10% argument is that Google felt it had to raise salaries by that much for everyone after collusion ended, in order to retain employees.

Given that the suit was about wage collusion, not about suppressing raises, calculating based on raises seems like an incorrect method. The reason prices were lower was not due to a lack of raises, but rather because those companies were artificially suppressing the demand for software engineers by agreeing not to poach, which makes calculating exact losses extremely difficult (unless we can precisely quantify the loss in demand).

This, exactly. We aren't talking about a typical annual wage increase percentage, but collusion that effectively set a cap on salaries for certain types of employees couldn't test the market. I'm wildly guessing, but i would think the difference in salary for many was 40k+ a year.

>On September 8, 2014, Judge Koh set April 9, 2015 as the actual trial date for the remaining defendants, with a pre-trial conference scheduled for December 19, 2014. Also, as of early September 2014, the defendants had re-entered mediation to determine whether a new settlement could be reached.

Wikipedia seems out of date, what was the final result?

Apparently the payment is increased to $415M, which in my opinion is still too low.

https://pando.com/2015/04/14/apple-wage-fixing-plaintiff-acc...

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