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This article is an embarrassment. He does not offer any evidence at all for his claim that the no-poaching agreement drove down programmers' salaries. It may h

• thurn 15y ago
  "pandodaily.com" is starting to become a URL I associate with low-quality linkbait.
  • pg 15y ago
    I was thinking that too. Though to be fair in this particular case they seem to be following the TechCrunch tradition of running linkbait guest posts on weekends (when there is less real news).
    • earbitscom 15y ago
      It's sad, given that so many good startups would love to get any kind of press coverage, weekend or not. Every time I see a worthless article on TC, I think, "There's 500 words that some good startup would have loved to have, and the audience probably would have enjoyed it more, too."
      • robryan 15y ago
        Would be interesting to see what percentage of posts covered the really big companies vs startups on there. Feels pretty skewed towards the ever small and often pointless detail of the big tech companies rather than startups.
  • mjwalshe 15y ago
    Well I would disagree they don't have rose tinted glasses and will call out the emperors new clothes when required. Ive seen plenty more spun for SEO linkbait on here which are gaming the system to post articles with tons of affiliate links for hosting companies
• vladd 15y ago
  The agreement with its secrecy (the intent) and its effects are 2 different things. Lack of the later doesn't make the former right. Come to think of it, there was at least one effect: at least 1 person was fired because he didn't respect the cartel rule.
  • pg 15y ago
    (the intent) and its effects are 2 different things That is exactly my point.
    • keeptrying 15y ago
      If we take into account that on Wall Street, there are engineers making $330K + for program trading jobs, then why would that not have happened here in the valley. HEdge funds routinely pay $200+. With a fair market I think we should have seen similar numbers here in the valley. There are many times more engineers in New York than in SV.
      • ntkachov 15y ago
        The economics are different. I'm assuming you mean the guys writing the programs that run trading platforms. Those guys are super specialists and for their employers a small boost in performance means a huge boost in revenue for the day. Also from some first hand account I've read from here and on Reddit the job is very demanding. You can get called in at any time to write something that needs to be done by the next morning. It comes with its perks of pay but the trade off is freedom.
        • keeptrying 15y ago
          Umm I used to be one and I know many doing that now. There arent any super specialists :) ... Hedge funds regularly give $250K or more for an engineer with experience.
          • nnann 15y ago
• InclinedPlane 15y ago
  Also no mention of how the overall economy and things like SOX have affected programmer compensation.
  • mkramlich 15y ago
    SOX affecting programmer compensation?! I don't follow. (And I'm assuming by SOX you mean Sarbanes-Oxley.)
    • InclinedPlane 15y ago
      Compensation includes equity. One of the primary ways that programmers become millionaires is by gaining lots of stock grants and options by being early employees at quickly growing companies that go public. That whole system has been curtailed somewhat in recent years by SOX.
      • helmut_hed 15y ago
        Was that SOX, or the (hotly debated but eventually issued) changes to the FASB rules regarding expensing of stock options?
• iqster 15y ago
  It is very hard to give numbers. But I think it is hard to argue direction though. If there was a no-poaching agreement in place amongst a "cartel", would salaries of the employees of the cartel be higher than normal? Certainly not. They could be the same (assuming there is a sufficiently large number of non-cartel employers) or lower. This sort of argument is often made in Economics, and is logically sound. Ceteris Paribus aka everything else being the same. I agree the article smells of link-bait. I don't understand why Facebook's IPO is different from every other IPO that has happened in the past. Why does the author feel that this IPO will raise wages of developers in the valley?
  • pg 15y ago
    Direction doesn't matter if magnitude isn't significant, and we have no evidence that it is. This is just a variant of argument from ignorance (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance).
    • etherael 15y ago
      To claim that it's unclear what the effect of a no poach cartel is on engineering salaries is at the same time to claim that it is not necessary that there should be legislation preventing no poach cartels from existing. Do you believe this to be the case? If so, do you really mean to say that engineering salaries should not be set by market forces?
      • keeptrying 15y ago
        PG is just saying that if it had been a competitive market we dont know the extent of how much it would have increased engineering salaries. Thats true. However lets take the case of NEw York where you can get program trading jobs for $300K and I have friends who got these kind of jobs. Hedge funds routinely pay $250K plus. I think this is what would have happened in the valley.
        • etherael 15y ago
• tw342 15y ago
  Agreed with most of what you said. However I find the cost of living in silicon valley to be an issue. I think companies should do something really crazy. They should go and develop a new area which would eventually beat silicon valley. Where engineers can find very affordable rents, and very affordable modern deco houses. Where the weather is sunny, driving engineers who sit all day in offices to go outside and get some vitamin D. Where the gender ratio is balanced. Where your neighbors are good at other stuff and are willing to share there knowledge, like a real world quota.com. A engineer, earning 120k from year 0 - 4, should very easily be able to save 250k and live comfortably in a 5 year timespan and not have to cut corners. PG, there is a real problem here with silicon valley. I don't think the salaries are too low but I think the cost of living is too high. If you truly want to be innovative and crazy, broaden your world beyond the web.
  • mahyarm 15y ago
    Gender ratio is a consequence of our industry being gender imbalanced and tech being the superstar industry of the area. If you want to find all of that except for the climate, you can find it in Seattle. The wages are almost bay area levels, the housing significantly cheaper and better quality usually, no reams of crappy 1930s craftsman track houses everywhere. You have no state income tax and tech doesn't dominate as much, so it's significantly more gender balanced. Austin also has that potential I hear too and it's a sunny place. Texas also doesn't have state income tax.
    • tw342 15y ago
      Didn't know about Seattle. I will have to visit. I was trying to formulate an ideal living area, not just for engineers but for anyone who loves knowledge(think Quora). I feel modern cities have so many problems, why not just start from scratch or from the ground up.
      • olalonde 15y ago
        That's a bit what Zappos' CEO is working on in Las Vega. See http://downtownproject.com/ http://downtownproject.com/.
• zedshaw 15y ago
  You can prove it had an effect on the employees that worked there, and to a fairly exact number. The agreement covered all employees, not just tech workers. Combined that makes up about 350k employees, and you can then extrapolate how many were engineers in silicon valley, or engineers in general. That means that there was at least a proportion of the population that was affected very inversely by these agreements. If you then realize that other companies use the larger more successful companies' salary policies as the model for their own, then it would have impacted other companies as well, and the employees that work there. That alone disproves your implied statement: That these agreements did nothing to anyone. It definitely did something, and just the fact that those companies amount to tons of employees and tons of salaries is enough to show it had an effect. You however are pulling the oldest trick in the book. You want conclusive proof that these completely illegal actions by corporations had a measurable effect before you'll admit that they were wrong. But, it was a conspiracy. You're not going to get exact numbers. It's not like these guys are keeping a ledger of money saved by not-poaching. You are basically demanding the impossible. But, you are also demanding more than you give yourself. Where's your proof this did nothing? I know, you didn't explicitly say it did nothing, but that's your clever trick. You just imply your counter argument and then run around dumping links to logical fallacies on Wikipedia rather than give real numbers. So, Paul, stop being a hypocrite and give us your bet on what impact this really had. If you demand exact socio-economic evaluations before you'll believe this did anything, then I demand that you give the same evidence it did nothing. And your first task will be to disprove what's already been proven in court: That these agreements did impact all the employees at these companies, that it did reduce salaries or they wouldn't have bothered, that reducing salaries was their goal, and that they did fire employees over it. Until then, your demand for exact evidence violates the standard in philosophical argument that your own argument can't be used against itself.
  • pg 15y ago
    Your comment suggests you don't understand the distinction between saying something is false and saying there's no evidence either way. I'm not saying the no poaching agreement had no effect. I'm saying he offers no evidence for his claim that it had a big effect. Complaining that someone has offered no evidence for a claim is not an "implied statement" that it's false. Do you understand that distinction?
• DasIch 15y ago
  The no-poaching agreement effectively created a monopoly on the demand side which allows complete control of the price/salary by the employer. Unless those participants had absolutely no idea what they were doing, salaries did at least not rise as much as was warranted. This is not some far fetched theory this is economics 101 applied to the real world. Asking for evidence for this claim is the real embarrasment here.
  • TheCowboy 15y ago
    Quoting another comment on this topic I made while inebriated to back up the idea that this is economics 101 material: Libertarian views assume that free markets regulate themselves basically due to perfect competition. (Trying to keep this short and simple.) Realistically, you do not always have perfect competition and you have problems with monopoly, oligopoly, etc. Firms are potent enough that their collective decisions can manipulate markets, and in this it would be labor markets. (Perfect competition assumes that firms cannot manipulate markets.) Libertarians oppose a government presence in markets because they believe the result is inefficiently functioning markets, and we are all worse off. In this case, the firms collude and are manipulating labor markets so that they behave inefficiently to the advantage of the manipulative firms and disadvantage of labor. (This is usually where people try to justify labor unions as a counter to the influence of firms.)
• cbsmith 15y ago
  THIS. These agreements haven't gotten in the way that most engineers in the valley know there are a ton of other places they can work, including the "no poach" companies. Valley engineers switch jobs with an ease and frequency uncommon for the tech business in general. Facebook alone certainly doesn't hire enough engineers for it to matter THAT much.