He quietly put out the word,pretty quickly got approached by a hiring manager at another company - things were going swimmingly.
Then the Hiring manager put in the Req to HR - a V.P. called him personally and but confirmed this "no poaching" B.S. The wage hike would have been considerable for my friend (you can guess the two companies - Arrogant vs Top Payer) & he was pretty upset to learn that the real reason was Jobs being a Huge Asshole and bullying everybody into such a blatantly illegal pact.
So this is a very real "wage theft" collusion case. Unfortunately most of the parties involved had the "good" sense to NOT document it officially so the Smoking Gun might be hard to prove conclusively.
There was even a "no hire" list at one of these companies tacked on the wall of a HR Manager with the Caption "If you hire from there, we will fire (u) from here."
Of course if the Hr director turned states evidence they might be let off with a slap on the wrist.
Technically, you can find "temporary" job in smaller company and then move to the company you "really" want to work in. It just seem to me somewhat jerk move toward that smaller company.
I know of at least one person who had to quit her job... wait 2 weeks... then HP picked her up. Risky indeed if HP couldn't make good on their promise, but it worked that time.
(a) for Apple from March 2005 through December 2009;
(b) for Adobe from May 2005 through December 2009;
(c) for Google from March 2005 through December 2009;
(d) for Intel from March 2005 through December 2009;
(e) for Intuit from June 2007 through December 2009;
(f) for Lucasfilm from January 2005 through December 2009; or
(g) for Pixar from January 2005 through December 2009.
Source: https://hightechemployeelawsuit.com/faqs/#q0
If you fall into this group and want to file a claim to be part of the settlement, you have until March 19th to do so (which you can do via the above website).
This article stuck to the point much better. I do think Mr Levy (quoted in this article) went a little far in suggesting that the engineers are a very well heeled class.
"Santa Clara County, in the heart of Silicon Valley, has the highest average wage in the country,” said Stephen Levy, senior economist at the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy. “San Francisco and San Mateo are not far behind. It would be a mistake to think of these plaintiffs as an oppressed set of victims."
Agreed, programmers in the bay area aren't dust bowl refugees. However, we need to recognize that the relatively high salaries don't go far in high cost regions (where many of these companies are located), and aren't that high relative to the higher wages typical of these regions.
Application developers in SF earn, on average, a tiny bit less than RNs and a whisker more than dental hygienists (links at end). I'm 100% ok with good wages for nurses and dental hygienists, but keep in mind that these tech companies have been almost frantically lobbying congress to do something about a severe shortage of highly educated programmers and engineers.
Well, first and foremost, how about you stop colluding to suppress their wages? That might attract a few more people into the field.
http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/rankings/the-100-b...
http://blog.sfgate.com/gettowork/2013/12/17/what-the-most-co...
http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_41860.htm
It's certainly not the case that IT people are hurting terribly but it makes it hard to argue that there is in fact a significant shortage or that we need programs to attract more CS majors rather than, say, simply paying at least as much as some of the other things students choose to major in.
Anyone can hang out a shingle as a software developer, but are the barriers to getting through the technical grilling typical of a software interview process really low? Just because there are no legal barriers doesn't mean that it's an easy thing to learn.
I don't think that software engineers are suffering from bad pay, but is the pay high enough that it makes sense to be talking about a severe shortage that the government should start fixing? Based on pay, I'd say we should take the "software developer" shortage about as seriously as we take the "dental hygenist" shortage.
What? "unbearable"? That seems a little out of place. Would most NYTimes readers have any idea what he's talking about?
From the author's recent articles list:
--
In little more than a decade, Google has become essential and omnipresent. Now the question is whether people will start to resent and oppose it.
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As entrepreneurs invade regulated industries and evade traditional watchdogs, the question of who is responsible when something goes wrong looms large.
--
Airbnb likes to say that it gives more people the money they need to pay their bills. But new research suggests that as the sharing industry spreads, more people are going to need that money, because they’ll be unemployed.
--
Uber and a Child's Death
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Hard-hit by recession, many in Europe have questioned whether jobs at Amazon’s warehouses there are good for the economy or dehumanizing.
--
seems to exclusively write negative stories about bay area tech
If you only want to read happy happy joy, disruption yeah, cheerleader stories about how awesome the tech industry is, I suggest TechCrunch.
Our industry has a pervading attitude of treating anybody who is not "us" as roadkill on the highway to progress. That's going to turn against us a lot harder then these few relatively mild articles.
Wake up, guys. People have had tech giants invade their life way too much and they've all seen in The Social Network what kind of person a poster boy like Mark Zuckerberg really is.
Like recently, there was some article here about a failed startup, and it felt like most of the discussion was pointless. Killing time of people's lives for no end. Because I knew people at the company, and there was such massive dysfunction which severely cut the chances of success regardless of virtually any other factor. I mean really goofy, where elements should be on a sitcom.
Or when you read about some tech which "everyone uses", and there's fundamental issues with it which inevitably bite people hard when they actually try to apply the thing, but everyone's like rah-rah.
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s...
"In 2013, Mr. Streitfeld was part of the team awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting “for its penetrating look into business practices by Apple and other technology companies that illustrates the darker side of a changing global economy for workers and consumers."
Some of his angst is that as a child of a major columnist in a broadsheet he feels that he should have a proper job on a proper news paper which in previous generations he woudl have stood a good chance of like say Polly Toynbee on the Guardian.
Due to the decimation of the traditional print media he can't get a nice job on the NYT as a columnist and has to slum it in a tabloid and they are using typical tabloid "monstering" techniques
It is perhaps worth reminding that the interplay between regulators and the market, and their co-evolution, have taken a different historical path than in Europe. While in Europe big government preceded laissez-faire, or at least, evolved hand-in-hand, the US was largely unregulated for many years. The result was that Ayn Randian titans took control of pretty much all power in the US, advancing the "economy" but at the same time practically enslaving the population. It was after many years of cries for help by the American people, and a long struggle led largely by the press, that Teddy Roosevelt was able to strengthen the government, wrestle back some power, and save the people from feudalist oppression.
Ironically, many Americans forgot what the US looked like when the government was powerless, and the market was allowed to roam free. People like Ayn Rand, who sadly came to the US just as the wheel was turning, didn't see the suffering that their romantic fantasies had brought about when playing out in the real world.
Obviously, as patent law demonstrates, regulation can be (and is) abused by capitalists. As the world changes, power shifts, and players adapt new strategies in this constant power struggle, both the market and regulation need to evolve hand-on-hand. The big question is what will play the role the press once played in exposing the workings of the intricate system of interests that is the economy?
I don't see any evidence that regulation stopped the behavior in this case. Perhaps the law will be used after the fact to sue or jail some people, but it doesn't seem to be what actually stopped the problem.
As another poster said, the class action date ranges end in 2009 because Facebook (a private company) wouldn't play ball.
Capitalism is a messy system, but it does tend to self correct in the long run.
[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/18/technology/18google.html
That's quite a generalization; extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
I'm confused - which side used the time machine?
I don't think anyone believes Silicon Valley engineers are a bunch of miserable, oppressed working-class folk, but it's good to know how even the most seemingly progressive of corporations behave.
As to "making compliance so hard that smaller players would find it very expensive to compete", I think that regulation sometimes swings this way, but it is sometimes gradually, slowly, fixed. I don't think anyone would say that all regulation is always good for the big players and bad for the small ones.
Lastly, where does the money come from?
Besides, how can their talent leave for players paying better money when nobody except for the large players can afford top wages? Just because Google can extract $150k+ of yearly value out of an engineer doesn't mean another company can. You need a large, successful business for that...
Government, is the one that should do the multi decade planning.
I will be surprised to see if Google or its investors do not care about their long term future. I will be less surprised to see someone like Obama planning only for re-elections and short term popularity ratings.
I believe that more than anything else, that's responsible for the Bay Area's long term technological ecosystem success.
Unless a few people end up in jail for this, nothing will change.
That's pretty much it. Does the govt come down on corporations for such acts? One rarely sees corporate honchos being jailed for such incidents. More often than not, it is a fine and then things move on to find and execute a different loophole.
... except when the corporate honcho refuses to do the government's bidding; in that case, his ass thrown into prison. See: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/09/30...
Google is pretty good at promoting this image, but that's all it is.
Except, today it's more like "Don't be evil*
* except where permitted by law and/or required for profit"
So what if one talented employee decided to quit one crappy company 'A' AND is unable to find work at the non-poach pact company 'B'? The place he quit will always find another willing sucker 'coz the supply is ever present (with, at most, a minor reduction in quality).
What collusion allows is for the employers to maintain these low prices, even when demand exceed supply.
A few years ago I overheard a new senior programmer argue with the cfo why developers should get 2 big monitors instead of a small 19". The cfo initially refused to go along. Of course some of it was due to his desire to keep cost down, as every good cfo should. But then he joked every dollar saved would mean more for his christmas bonus. we were a small/friendly company so I guess that's why he felt it was ok to joke about it. But I do believe his ultimate reason was to keep cost down at any 'cost' so that his bonus check would be bigger, as his performance is evaluated on how he manages the cash flow.
What the cfo didn't see was the productivity gain that could be gained by the programmers having bigger monitors. And these programmers were making near 6-figure salary. Their combined man hour cost was greater than his. But a cfo was making a decision to fatten his bonus check. Obviously this was not a good choice for the firm to make but it had been going on for awhile until the new senior programmer spoke up.
And I think this kind of logic in executive suite is probably common everywhere.
Lastly, I think it's about time these big tech companies add profit sharing ON top of the base salary as part of the compensation package. Why should an executive make SO much more than master and phds who are adding real value to the company?
I wonder if in the world of technology it makes sense to retain a demotivated employee?
It absolutely does. The nature of tech work practically demands that every employee develop intimate knowledge of the very specific domain his work touches. It takes so long for new hires to become productive that in most cases the bottom line begs you to hold on to anyone who already has that intimate knowledge.
On the other hand, keeping a tech employee motivated often looks like a fool's game to management. If he's good at what he does, he doesn't see the world the same way as they do. If you're a growth-oriented engineer, it makes sense for you to bounce around different companies so as to maintain a sense of movement and there's not much your employer can do to "maintain your sense of movement" because it's a completely alien concept to them and often presents as "unnecessary shit that will cost time and money and be risky". Your career goals will often clash hard against your company's needs.
End result? This situation where top talent sinks collude to reduce their engineers' inherent negotiating advantage. This practice would be widespread, if only technology weren't such a wide field that any engineer with any desire at all for something better can very quickly find something. It only happened at the top level because that's the only circle in which there is no more upward mobility except among the same cloistered few.
Know who (with)holds information
Avoid information asymmetry
Am I missing something? Is this worth pursuing for a prospective claimant?
--> smaller than they should be engineer wages --> higher engineer wages --> even higher engineer wages -->
... --> absurdly high unsustainable engineer wages -->
... --> more outsourcing --> even more outsourcing -->
... --> massive outsourcing -->
... ... ... --> smaller than they should be engineer wages
...I think the "evil masters" of this "no poaching" pact managed to prevent an engineers' job marked fluctuation. And you think about it, such a fluctuation would only have benefited the foreign outsourcing providers and encouraged the displacement of parts of tech industry outside US ...which imho would've have been a great thing for Europe's tech sector and maybe even for worldwide IT innovation as a whole, since lots of new pseudo-innovations start to sound more and more like "american-inbread ideas".
Just what you'd expect.
"Mr. Jobs proposed a no-poaching deal to Edward T. Colligan, Palm’s chief executive. Mr. Colligan responded that such a deal would be unfair to employees as well as “likely illegal.” Mr. Jobs then threatened to unleash Apple’s patent lawyers on Palm."
Yep. It's our badly broken patent system yet again.
This is the reason that tech companies seek to acquire large rather than technically sound patent portfolios.
Briefly: defense against infringement runs around $1-$10 million per patent )(it may be higher, my information's somewhat dated). Defeat one patent, and the company with the larger portfolio presses suit with another, and another. Even if the plaintiff successfully defends itself against these suits, it's still out $1-$10 million per patent. Often far better to strike a licensing deal for $40k (or some value less than $1-$10m).
It's possible to countersue, and this happens, usually with the result that the companies reach a cross-licensing arrangement.
That said, most of the time that Palm (and Handspring etc.) devices existed, they were PDAs, and the reason Palm beat out Apple's Newton is probably that they chose a subset of functionality that was more modest and probably more appropriate to the hardware of the time.
For example, while Newton's handwriting recognition was often unreliable, Palm devices asked its users to use a an arcane script that was easier to process. (Later lost in a patent-related issue, if I remember correctly)
Probably someone here was actually involved in the history of developing the devices, but as I remember it, the revolution of Palm pilots and other models was that they worked more smoothly, and they synced more reliably with your computer than any competitors. That involves a lot of good engineering and attention to detail, but it does not necessarily mean that there can't still be overlaps with patents held by companies which invented something earlier but with an implementation that didn't win over enough customers to survive.
People should be virtually rioting for this.
The assumption is that the only places to work are the big companies. Anti-Poaching agreements are rarely about the Money and more about the "I won't steal your trade secrets if you don't steal mine" types of "we can't patent this stuff" stand offs.
It is also protection against having a company put another company out of business by "poaching".
You look at some of the teams at companies and you can see where a group of 10 guys went from company to company. When they all left most the time that company failed. You can't withstand a blow of having 40% of your team walk, and take everything they were working on to a larger competing company.
"Salary Fixing" doesn't work. Someone always offers 15% more to get better talent and when that eats in to the talent pool everyone else has to ante up as well.
Silicon Valley just feels entitled. Yeah it costs more to live there, but the expendable income of SV engineers is vast compared to engineers anywhere else in the US, and the world.
For the US at $200k you are a 95%'er At $550k you are a 99%
That's a lot different than "C-Level" and "millions in liquid assets"
A lot of people at Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft are 95th percentile.
Quite a few are 98th percentile.
Same in the UK a tube driver earns far more than the average developer does in London and has a Final Salary pension plus overtime.
