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The tech giants ultimately reached a settlement in the amount of $400 million in a lawsuit involving allegations of these dishonest backdoor dealings. [1] http

by gzer0 4y ago

The tech giants ultimately reached a settlement in the amount of $400 million in a lawsuit involving allegations of these dishonest backdoor dealings. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33292364 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33292364 [2] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/04/24/306592297/tech-giants-settle-wage-fixing-lawsuit https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/04/24/306592297...

thayne 4y ago
And financially, it was probably worth it to them.
- hinkley 4y ago
  I suspect the fines exceed the salaries the employees were 'owed' but are much less than the profits earned from those employees, yes.
  - BHSPitMonkey 4y ago
    > I suspect the fines exceed the salaries the employees were 'owed' Maybe to the specific candidates affected, but this would also have had a stifling effect on compensation across the industry too (and the resulting growth would have lasted for years). This kind of subtle wage fixing pays off in spades.
    - hinkley 4y ago
      Call me crazy, but I don’t think the industry benefits from people bouncing between FAANGs. They have a massively distorted view of the world and that creates massively distorted engineers who have lost the capacity to think about solving a problem for 100,000 people instead of four billion. That’s four and a half orders of magnitude off. The perverse incentive with the anti poaching collusion is to move from FAANG to a startup. Where you are confronted by problems involving 50 servers instead of a million. Normal problems.
- no_butterscotch 4y ago
  It was, from the wikipedia: > On May 23, 2014, Apple, Google, Intel, Adobe agreed to settle for $324.5 million. > .. > In June 2014, Judge Lucy Koh expressed concern that the settlement may not be a good one for the plaintiffs. Michael Devine, one of the plaintiffs, said the settlement is unjust. In a letter he wrote to the judge he said the settlement represents only one-tenth of the $3 billion in compensation the 64,000 workers could have made if the defendants had not colluded. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
  - koheripbal 4y ago
    No, that was dishonest math. He aggregated ALL TOTAL comp for POTENTIAL employees based upon a BEST-CASE compensation for ALL of them. ...and none of that is realistic. The correct estimate would be the INCREMENTAL comp for the portion of employees that ACTUALLY looked for work with the competitors. Never blindly trust one-side of the story in a damages lawsuit.
faangiq 4y ago
Meanwhile they probably saved $40+ billion and are still doing it.

by gzer0 4y ago

thayne 4y ago

And financially, it was probably worth it to them.

hinkley 4y ago
I suspect the fines exceed the salaries the employees were 'owed' but are much less than the profits earned from those employees, yes.
- BHSPitMonkey 4y ago
  > I suspect the fines exceed the salaries the employees were 'owed' Maybe to the specific candidates affected, but this would also have had a stifling effect on compensation across the industry too (and the resulting growth would have lasted for years). This kind of subtle wage fixing pays off in spades.
  - hinkley 4y ago
    Call me crazy, but I don’t think the industry benefits from people bouncing between FAANGs. They have a massively distorted view of the world and that creates massively distorted engineers who have lost the capacity to think about solving a problem for 100,000 people instead of four billion. That’s four and a half orders of magnitude off. The perverse incentive with the anti poaching collusion is to move from FAANG to a startup. Where you are confronted by problems involving 50 servers instead of a million. Normal problems.
no_butterscotch 4y ago
It was, from the wikipedia: > On May 23, 2014, Apple, Google, Intel, Adobe agreed to settle for $324.5 million. > .. > In June 2014, Judge Lucy Koh expressed concern that the settlement may not be a good one for the plaintiffs. Michael Devine, one of the plaintiffs, said the settlement is unjust. In a letter he wrote to the judge he said the settlement represents only one-tenth of the $3 billion in compensation the 64,000 workers could have made if the defendants had not colluded. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
- koheripbal 4y ago
  No, that was dishonest math. He aggregated ALL TOTAL comp for POTENTIAL employees based upon a BEST-CASE compensation for ALL of them. ...and none of that is realistic. The correct estimate would be the INCREMENTAL comp for the portion of employees that ACTUALLY looked for work with the competitors. Never blindly trust one-side of the story in a damages lawsuit.

faangiq 4y ago

Meanwhile they probably saved $40+ billion and are still doing it.