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Big companies collude to hold down pay.
- prosa 16y agoCan anyone track down a non-paywalled story?
- anigbrowl 16y agoSearch for the headline on Google and click on the link from there instead of here. At worst, registering will let you read a lot more stories for free; they don't spambomb free registrations.
- whatusername 16y agohttp://www.google.com.au/search?q=Deal+Near+in+Hiring+Probe+site%3Awsj.com http://www.google.com.au/search?q=Deal+Near+in+Hiring+Probe+...
- anigbrowl 16y agoThe companies have argued to the government that there's nothing anticompetitive about the no-poaching agreements. They say they must be able to offer each other assurances that they won't lure away each others' star employees if they are to collaborate on key innovations that ultimately benefit the consumer. Some economists believe that banning such agreements could harm Silicon Valley's open, collaborative model. If the existence of an agreement isn't disclosed to the employees, then the model is not really what it is always held out to be, but something more akin to private industrial policy. I don't believe this is any better for consumers than for employees over any length of time. I've personally felt (as a consumer) that tech & internet development have stagnated in the last year or two, notwithstanding the existence of new things; perhaps this is why. Settlement or litigation, this is probably going to set off a wave of cross-hiring because firms will no longer have the security of the agreement in place when negotiating employment agreements, and turning away a candidate from another firm with good skills may look suspicious. Good for engineers, good for the local economy, probably good for innovation; not so good for CFOs and CIOs who like sleeping at night. I'm guessing companies will settle rather than fight; but if not, it'll set off a sector-wide feeding frenzy in the market. This should make the rest of the year interesting. It's partly political, to be sure, but slow wage growth in a period of generally rising productivity per capita has been a source of discontent for quite a while now. There is a lot of pent-up frustration, and also a lot of companies sitting on cash reserves in search of a market signal; neither situation is sustainable. Incidentally, Microsoft, IBM and Genentech are all said to be in the clear.
- lazyjeff 16y agoThis definitely should be disclosed to the employee. From my understanding, it would make it difficult to get a job at Apple if you accept an offer at Intel. Basically, this closes doors for you, and makes a job offer at Intel less valuable.
- scott_s 16y agoI've personally felt (as a consumer) that tech & internet development have stagnated in the last year or two, notwithstanding the existence of new things. I can't reconcile those two clauses.
- gabrielroth 16y agoI think the poster above is suggesting that the new things, though extant, are not sufficiently many/various/innovative/useful/delightful to constitute satisfying progress.
- anigbrowl 16y agoOh, sorry! I meant that some people are innovating, but that the overall trend has been towards sameness and value extraction. Many superficially novel offerings are only stylistically different. It's hard to articulate; I feel like I've seen the pattern before at least twice, and soon after there's a game-changing disruption. The two previous instances would the browser and web services. This time? Adaptive structural decomposition.
- lionhearted 16y ago> I meant that some people are innovating, but that the overall trend has been towards sameness and value extraction. Many superficially novel offerings are only stylistically different. I think you're half-right, but the most exciting thing happening right now in technology are some of the expensive cool technologies turning into commodities. This doesn't have the "wow!" factor of new breakthroughs, but is an important step. Soon-ish (10 years?) everyone will own a smartphone, which means a computer in your pocket. That's pretty cool. Also, the mobile web stuff is pretty cool, and the ability to get high end scalable cloud hosting for relatively cheap is cool. These aren't major breakthroughs the way social news was, the way better search was, the way better email was, etc. I do see less of those, but new competition and collapsing prices in cool technologies is a really good thing, even though it doesn't set off the wow factor so much.
- marknutter 16y agoSo they'll all just end up with a less talented workforce in the long run, leaving room for younger, more innovative, and generous companies to eat their lunch.
- aero142 16y agoThat is the way it should work at least. This gives credence to the companies defense that they did it to allow cross company cooperation without poaching. But do all of these companies really have engineers meeting and working on the same projects? Sounds pretty flimsy to me. I can't figure out what the goal of it was because none of the explanations really sound all that useful.
- btilly 16y agoStandards organizations frequently have very good people from many of those companies working closely together under circumstances that make it very clear how much the company trusts those people.
- okaramian 16y agoThis would be great in theory, but however you cut it, it really sucks when the most capitalized companies are all colluding with eachother to prevent the market from working efficiently.
- marknutter 16y agoIt also sucks that the most capitalized companies are so big and powerful, but that doesn't mean they're unassailable.
- okaramian 16y agoI never said they were unassailable. Expecting small companies with very little capital to throw money at developers because big companies are being "bad guys" about something and "good guys win" is... not very realistic. If these allegations are true the big companies involved are effectively controlling the rate in the entire market (this would include rates in startups and other smaller companies). Why would smaller companies (with less money) start throwing more money at workers than companies that could actually afford to do so but choose not to unless someone twists their arm?
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- hugh3 16y agoCompanies colluding to drive down pay is, of course, the mirror image of unions, which have employees colluding to drive up pay.
- yummyfajitas 16y agoIt would be interesting to see how many union supporters also support monopsony agreements between corporations.
- gloob 16y agoGiven that the purpose of unions is to weaken companies' bargaining position by preventing them from "divide-and-conquering" the workers, I would guess...almost none? And it would be perfectly ideologically consistent?
- hugh3 16y agoI've found you don't generally get far with people by pointing out that their political principles are horrendously inconsistent. In fact, it's only a tiny minority of people who care whether their political principles are consistent or not.
- Daishiman 16y agoWho told you a union supporter believes that what is "fair" to workers should also be allowable by corporations?
- peppone 16y agodepends on which union model you take german style codetermination might be ok with that or the laissez faire model not so much
- guelo 16y agoIf there's going to be an unfair bias between labor and capital I'll side with labor everytime. Besides, labor has been on the losing side for a decade now, http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2008/04/09/business/20080409_LEONHARDT_GRAPHIC.html http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2008/04/09/business/200804...
- Dove 16y agoIt would be interesting to see companies genuinely compete for talented developers. I don't think the guys that are 10x as productive would be making 20% more anymore.
- joshhart 16y agoHow do you identify someone who is 10x more productive? The difference between good and great is not always apparent in an interview. Perhaps developers with significant amounts of open source work could be identified but I'm sure that for every one of those there are several amazing developers who are instead working on proprietary stuff.
- jcdreads 16y agoThe difference between good and great is usually pretty obvious to former colleagues who are now at a new company that's hiring.
- quanticle 16y agoThat's true, but are those colleagues allowed to talk about the work that the person did? At a lot of places, the only thing the manager can confirm is that the person worked there during the dates given on the resumé. Further questions are to be directed to HR, which will filter any genuine feedback the manager can give.
- InclinedPlane 16y agoThere's no objective method, but many experienced programmers are capable of using subjective measures. Indeed, such skills are a huge competitive advantage to established dev. shops with talent (hire the best, keep hiring the best).
- mahmud 16y agoI know someone who is 10x more productive than his entire team, I worked in a next-door department and watched the beast do his magic. Truth be told, no one liked him. We couldn't keep up with him, all our bug reports would be several releases too old. We couldn't get him to install an IM client, he doesn't carry a phone, his email response rate is ~5%, several days too late, and only responds to say he can't make it to social gatherings, etc. We wasted weeks holding meets to architecture something he already had in place, grrrr. He wasn't a child, but a grown man with gray hair. Not exactly a prima dona either; he will happily talk to you for ours about your build problems and give you all the help you need. He was just not very good at communication. He was a fake "yes man"; he says yes to every request and suggestion, but somehow only his more sensible ideas end up in deployment. I don't think someone who is 10x as productive, but emits zero feedback or communication is worth the trouble of poaching from others, specially of you're a big corp. Give him 10x market rate and let him bootstrap a startup all by himself, sure, but this particular guy would suck in a team environment. He really didn't fit any "hacker" stereo-type either. He was a fit soccer player / yogi, worked strictly 9-6, and had a taste for illicit leisure .. I think.
- patrickgzill 16y agoDoes a human being have the right to contract with whomever he wants to sell his labor to? Seems to me that these agreements might interfere with that, although the article does not seem to give enough information to tell exactly how they were structured.
- quanticle 16y ago>Does a human being have the right to contract with whomever he wants to sell his labor to? Yes, a person does, but I don't think that question really gets to crux of the matter. I think the question is whether these companies were forming a cartel of sorts. Not a cartel of widget or oil production, but a cartel of jobs production. Its actually not clear to me that existing anti-trust law covers this case, and, from the DoJ's actions, it isn't clear to them either. If the Justice Department was confident of its case, we'd be seeing a lot more publicity in order to put pressure on the companies involved. The fact that DoJ isn't raising a ruckus over this means they think they have enough to go to trial, but not necessarily win. In circumstances like these, where the law isn't exactly clear on the topic, both sides seek to settle because neither wants to be proven wrong in open court.
- _delirium 16y agoAn interesting flip on the right-to-work laws. Those are usually targeted at union-negotiated exclusivity provisions, e.g. if a company and a union sign an agreement that the company will hire only members of that union, states with "right-to-work" laws hold any such contracts unenforceable. It'd be interesting if the principle were extended to ban any contract that interfered with the ability of two parties to come to terms, though. For example, if I have a right-to-work as a programming employee, do I also have a right-to-consult as a programming contractor, rendering any exclusivity provisions standing in the way void? It seems to me like the principle should be similar. If a company has an exclusive-vendor agreement with an engineering-consulting firm for all its engineering services, that seems very much like the case where the company has an exclusive-hire agreement with an engineering union for all its engineering employees (just think of the union as a labor-selling firm). In both cases they've agreed to only purchase a certain category of services from a certain category of providers. I'd be somewhat amenable to banning all these kinds of exclusivity agreements (including non-compete, no-poaching, union-labor-only, exclusive-vendor, etc.).
- Kliment 16y agoIs there a full list of the companies involved somewhere? I'm finding it hard to find.
- awakeasleep 16y agoWow. I personally read the companies argument as huge lie. > They say they must be able to offer each other assurances that they won't lure away each others' star employees if they are to collaborate on key innovations that ultimately benefit the consumer. > They say they must be able to offer each other assurances that they won't lure away each others' star employees if they are to collaborate on key innovations that ultimately benefit the consumer. It seems like they want to build their business on deception, and hope that the employees can't figure out where is a better place to work, instead of what I interpet as an honest solution, being open and allowing people to choose where to work based on good information, and then trusting them.
- known 16y agoSince Corporations have become bigger and smarter, Govt cannot monitor their day-to-day illegal & immoral activities. It is better to breakup these corporations into smaller entities to promote competition and solve unemployment crisis
- donaldc 16y agoThis is especially interesting in light of the recent stories about Google offering huge raises and incentives to keep key employees from jumping to Facebook. Good thing that Google and Facebook don't have a no-poaching agreement. But not so good that all these other companies had no poaching agreements.