14 ms·

It seems like we should be able to measure whatever effect there was. There must be sources of data about salaries in the Bay Area. Has anyone tried looking to

by pg 13y ago

It seems like we should be able to measure whatever effect there was. There must be sources of data about salaries in the Bay Area. Has anyone tried looking to see if there is a depression in tech workers' salaries, relative to people in other fields, during the time this agreement was in force?

vasilipupkin 13y ago
Look at a typical software developer salary in SF vs a typical software developer salary in Chicago, adjust for cost of living, the difference between SF salary and adjusted Chicago salary is the depression For example, demand in SF is much higher than Chicago so SF salary should be >> Chicago * cost of living adjustment. My guess is it's lower
- 100k 13y ago
  I looked at this calculation for Minneapolis versus SF a while back, and salaries were definitely lower in SF than Minneapolis * cost of living.
  - stbtrax 13y ago
    I've done this same calculation and I found the opposite. And after I moved I realized that you have to also factor in how much more awesome the Bay Area is. I've been able to be outside most days this winter hiking and doing other outdoor activities. I can't imagine going back to winters where I'm trapped indoors.
    - vasilipupkin 13y ago
      That's not entirely valid, that's a subjective judgement. I live in Chicago and I hate the outdoors. Just a simple back of the envelope calculation tells you Chicago software developers make about the same or more ( because trading companies pay more ) as SF developers yet cost of living is 2.5-3 times higher in SF. It's hard to explain this as a mere correlation with the known fact of illegal collusion.
      - will_work4tears 13y ago
        Cost of living or the cost of housing? Because they aren't the same. Sure, rent/mortgage payments take a huge toll, but it isn't like that Ramen costs 3x as much or that you pay 3x as much for gas or a new car. I'd wager the costs of goods are not even close to 1.5x. I broke down some numbers awhile back comparing Seattle to SF, because a guy claimed that 80k in Seattle is the same as 200k in SF. Clearly not. Even after paying 4x my current mortgage I had thousands of extra dollars a MONTH of free spending money. Hardly the pity party I see from all the comments.
        vasilipupkin 13y ago
        My guess is everything is SF is more expensive than in Chicago. Housing is 4X more expensive and other things as a result, are somewhat more expensive. Of course, you can still spend the same amount on housing in SF by living in a much smaller place, but that's besides the point. per square foot it is still more.
      - stbtrax 13y ago
        Trading companies do pay well, but that's a pretty boring and not value-adding industry to pigeonhole oneself into, and the corporate culture is beyond terrible. There aren't a plethora of interesting jobs sw devs can jump from and to in Chicago. Trust me, I wouldn't have moved if this wasn't the case.
- blacksmythe 13y ago
  Not such a simple calculation, as paying higher salaries drives up the cost of living.
natrius 13y ago
I don't think that comparison would be illustrative. I suspect that trends in tech wages in the Bay Area are divorced from those in other fields in the same way that finance wages in New York are. The productivity of a single programmer has famously increased as the rise of multimillion-dollar companies with less than ten employees shows. You still need the same number of nurses and teachers, though.
lmg643 13y ago
It is funny that there would be reason to complain, given that this statistic would probably show that tech is a profitable place to work relative to other industries. But we're talking about the tech employee's relative share of the company's own profits, right? which means cross-industry comparisons aren't relevant. i'm sure this is the line the defense would take. I guess - we would be asked to believe that even though you have the collusion stated as plain as day, "it was not successful" - just talk. And that might actually fly. but it's crazy to see the greedy underbelly of SV out in the open like this, although it fits with the aggressive ("legal!") tax avoidance strategies. (EDIT: IMHO both behaviors are forms of community theft, even if you don't consider your taxes to be a charitable contribution.) I suppose it only feels like hypocrisy because of the lionization of our heroes. We expect more, particularly considering how they position themselves relative to their values - "think different" - "don't be evil" - more than just businesses. 50 years from now, once the tech equivalent of the iphone is in every object on earth, I suspect Jobs will be looked at as another Rockefeller - awesome, epic, business man, just not necessarily the guy you aspire to become when you grow up.
- pstuart 13y ago
  Jobs was epic in his own way. Just not necessarily a nice human being.
- akbar501 13y ago
  > But we're talking about the tech employee's relative share of the company's own profits, right? Not exactly. The key issue is not whether anyone made more or less money. What is at issue is violation of US law. As of today, conspiracy is illegal.
  - judk 13y ago
    Collusion to manipulate the market is illegal. Conspiracy means something else.
    - akbar501 13y ago
      conspiracy: a secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful. collusion: secret or illegal cooperation or conspiracy, esp. in order to cheat or deceive others.
akbar501 13y ago
In cases of conspiracy, I believe the illegal act is the very act of meeting to plan criminal activity. The effectiveness of such planning is not the deciding factor as to whether or not the people involved have behaved criminally. As a parallel, planning to distribute illegal drugs is illegal (conspiracy to distribute). While actually distributing is an additional charge. Something similar is going to happen here, where the executives in question may have broken several laws only one of which is conspiracy. I'm not a lawyer, so I could be wrong. But this is what I remember from Business Law during my MBA.
- ghshephard 13y ago
  pg wasn't questioning whether this was illegal or not, he was interested in what the impact was.
  - cma 13y ago
    > he was interested in what the impact was No he wasn't; comparing tech salary growth to other salary growth in the presence of a tech boom was completely disingenuous. Wages can increase relative to other industries, and still be being slowed by collusion. It would be just as disingenuous if someone said we should measure it by whether tech companies' profit per-employee increased during the time relative to other fields, which would give the exact opposite conclusion.
    - aptwebapps 13y ago
      If you had good enough data you would be looking at the change over time and could see dips in the rate of change. Also, 'disingenuous'? Because he posited the idea that there might be data that could be brought to bear?
employee 13y ago
If you somehow got complete data, you would be certain to find that Google employees received a large raise after these agreements were terminated (as others pointed out in this thread): http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2010/11/10/on-googles-10-percent-pay-hike-and-antitrust-law/ http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2010/11/10/on-googles-10-percent-pa... That was something like 20,000-30,000 people, so if you consider it among the population of the 5 companies involved, it's extremely significant. That was the largest raise I've received in a 13 year career in Silicon Valley, so I consider it anomalous. But then you're back to the problem whether correlation is causation. You could conceivably argue that it was due to competition from Facebook, which was not part of those agreements. In my opinion, salaries were depressed -- although how much and for how long is very hard to determine.
ctl 13y ago
Other industries are deeply unlike tech, so comparing salary trends would be meaningless. A sibling comment suggests that we look at salaries in tech companies that didn't collude. But that doesn't work either, because (1) those salaries could have been indirectly affected by the collusion, and (2) other tech companies are different than Apple, Google, et al -- most importantly, they have less money!
blantonl 13y ago
>> It seems like we should be able to measure whatever effect there was. Against what litmus test? All the players (Apple, Google, Intuit, etc) were blazing new trails in a whole new economic model - and localized to an economy in the SV. That is why the whole scheme wasn't apparent at the time.
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  It's not a new economic model, it's ephemeralization, advertising, Veblen goods, and especially disaggregation of previously existing models largely involving breaking down existing toll-collection interfaces in transactions of physical goods. And the scheme was apparent, to those who were paying attention. It simply wasn't being discussed in polite society.
goobers 13y ago
If that data exists, the plaintiffs' lawyers will get it.
cs702 13y ago
I doubt we will ever be able to "measure" the effect. We can only guess and debate it with hypothetical scenarios -- "what if all these CEOs had had to compete for talented employees, instead of fixing the market for them?" Regardless of the effect, it is a shame to see that these leading CEOs, who for years have vociferously complained about media & telecom oligopolies for preventing competition, were for years simultaneously using their oligopoly to prevent competition for employees. Apparently, they're all for free markets, except when it affects their bottom line!
- AndrewKemendo 13y ago
  Apparently, they're all for free markets, except when it affects their bottom line! Seems to be a trend in every discipline, why should Big Tech be any different? See: Big TELCO, Big Banking, Big Oil, Big Ag etc...
  - mooreds 13y ago
    Err, I think it is more a human trend, than a "big" trend. Most everyone I know loves the benefits of competition, except when they are competing, then they aren't as big a fan. (Yes, yes, there are the people who love competition even when they are competing, but I find that they are fairly uncommon.)
    - wildgift 13y ago
      Capitalism hates competition. I think Adam Smith said that.
- hashmap 13y ago
  What are you talking about? A "free market" encourages exactly this behavior! If it weren't illegal it would go on indefinitely.
  - adventured 13y ago
    A free market neither encourages nor discourages this type of behavior. What it does, is not regulate whether a company can poach other talent by paying higher wages, or whether a company can collude with other companies to pay the same wages and stagnate. If a company believes it has the upper hand against a competitor - and some company always acquires the upper hand sooner than later - then it would be in its best interests to poach, pay higher wages for superior talent, and bleed the competition to death.
emmett 13y ago
Specifically you'd want to find other SV companies who weren't party to these negotiations (Netflix? Twitter? I didn't see a comprehensive list), since they'd be a pretty close to exact benchmark...
patio11 13y ago
Remember when Facebook started aggressively poaching Google employees and Google responded publicly by giving every engineer a substantial raise and privately in ways substantially more expensive than that? And Facebook pretty much just laughed and matched offers? And every engineer in the Valley figured out simultaneously that $100k was a floor not a ceiling? That strikes me as persuasive anecdotal evidence of what happens when a tech titan feels threatened by poaching that they cannot resolve by a gentlemen's agreement. My recollection for the timing of those opening salvoes in the talent war was mid-2010. This would have been right after the DoJ told the cartel to knock it off. I'll acknowledge off the top that that may be purely a coincidence.
- judk 13y ago
  They didn't give substantial raises, they moved comp from variable bonus to base salary (instead $X being the minimum bonus, $Y < $X was the minimum bonus and base was raised.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - umeshunni 13y ago
    There was also an across-the-board base pay increase in addition to that.
- boobsbr 13y ago
  I'm in Brazil and can only dream of BRL 100k/y, which is about USD 41k/y.
  - alphadogg 13y ago
    What are your living expenses, though. It's not top-line salary that matters, if you have to piss it away on renting a one-bedroom apt...
  - grinich 13y ago
    If you're skilled, you should work remotely.
InclinedPlane 13y ago
Probably wouldn't provide reliable data. One of the major factors that would have driven up tech salaries was if some of the biggest and most profitable tech companies (indeed, some of the most profitable companies in history) such as Apple, Google, etc. were openly competing to try to lure talent to their companies through financial incentives. Likely, compared to other industries tech workers were nevertheless handsomely paid, but I think this is still an example of abuse of power. It's all the more worrisome because the changes in the nature of the stock market and so forth have made it that much more difficult for top tier tech workers to become rich. That used to be the pattern in the '80s and '90s, there are thousands of millionaires who worked at apple, microsoft, etc. for only a decade but were around during those companies' crucial early growth phases. Today I think that phenomenon is much less common except with extremely early stage employees. A lot of startups are the brain children of the sort of top tier techies who made it rich working at various vast growing companies. That variety of wealth is, I believe, very important to the vitality of the industry. But for various reasons it seems to have been significantly curtailed in the last decade or so, but if there is a more competitive marketplace for salaries in the tech field then that would go a long way toward bringing it back.
Patrick_Devine 13y ago
I remembered having commented on this about half a year ago on a post which at the time didn't get a lot of up-votes. I just dredged it up: "Clearly the tech talent shortage can't be that bad, otherwise salaries would be going through the roof. I realize they may seem high relative to many other professions, however if we really are in dire straights, one would expect them to have spiked dramatically. That just hasn't happened. Either collectively the valley is colluding to not inflate wages, or, more likely, the problem isn't as big as many companies are making it out to be and those companies want to bring in foreign workers to help put deflationary pressure on wages." I guess it turns out that was a false dichotomy and both things were happening. It looks like there was a conspiracy, and the tech companies still complained about not being able to find workers while pressuring congress for more H1-B visas. My point is I don't think you'll be able to really get an accurate picture of how much wages were depressed because many companies are trying their hardest to decrease workforce mobility any way possible (legal or otherwise). I've personally seen some pretty crazy shenanigans at a very large tech company with workers being steered through insane hurdles to get a green card. And I guess why not? If you can get someone to stick around for 5 or 6 years at a reduced wage, why wouldn't you do that?
clavalle 13y ago
I am not entirely sure that 'relative to other fields' is a useful metric in this case. Maybe if we could restrict those fields to others in the middle of a boom or otherwise in a fierce competition for talent...petroleum and other engineers in the oil industry in the past few years, for example. (though I'd wonder if the big players in that industry have similar pacts in place). I don't know. It would be difficult to hold enough variables constant to make any useful comparisons but there might be something in the broad strokes.
cylinder 13y ago
We should measure the effects. But, in terms of determining whether this was illegal and/or unethical, all that matters is the intent and the acts.
protomyth 13y ago
The statistics are there for the time period[1], but I am a little uncertain what would be a valid comparison career. I would bet the wages grew above the local aggregate. Perhaps looks at the line on the last boom? 1) http://www.bls.gov/data/ http://www.bls.gov/data/ http://www.bls.gov/bls/blswage.htm http://www.bls.gov/bls/blswage.htm
abalone 13y ago
> Has anyone tried looking to see if there is a depression in tech workers' salaries, relative to people in other fields... You want to use other fields as a control? That makes little sense. From 2005-2009 the tech industry grew at a vastly greater rate than most other fields.

by pg 13y ago

vasilipupkin 13y ago

Look at a typical software developer salary in SF vs a typical software developer salary in Chicago, adjust for cost of living, the difference between SF salary and adjusted Chicago salary is the depression For example, demand in SF is much higher than Chicago so SF salary should be >> Chicago * cost of living adjustment. My guess is it's lower

100k 13y ago
I looked at this calculation for Minneapolis versus SF a while back, and salaries were definitely lower in SF than Minneapolis * cost of living.
- stbtrax 13y ago
  I've done this same calculation and I found the opposite. And after I moved I realized that you have to also factor in how much more awesome the Bay Area is. I've been able to be outside most days this winter hiking and doing other outdoor activities. I can't imagine going back to winters where I'm trapped indoors.
  - vasilipupkin 13y ago
    That's not entirely valid, that's a subjective judgement. I live in Chicago and I hate the outdoors. Just a simple back of the envelope calculation tells you Chicago software developers make about the same or more ( because trading companies pay more ) as SF developers yet cost of living is 2.5-3 times higher in SF. It's hard to explain this as a mere correlation with the known fact of illegal collusion.
    - will_work4tears 13y ago
      Cost of living or the cost of housing? Because they aren't the same. Sure, rent/mortgage payments take a huge toll, but it isn't like that Ramen costs 3x as much or that you pay 3x as much for gas or a new car. I'd wager the costs of goods are not even close to 1.5x. I broke down some numbers awhile back comparing Seattle to SF, because a guy claimed that 80k in Seattle is the same as 200k in SF. Clearly not. Even after paying 4x my current mortgage I had thousands of extra dollars a MONTH of free spending money. Hardly the pity party I see from all the comments.
      - vasilipupkin 13y ago
        My guess is everything is SF is more expensive than in Chicago. Housing is 4X more expensive and other things as a result, are somewhat more expensive. Of course, you can still spend the same amount on housing in SF by living in a much smaller place, but that's besides the point. per square foot it is still more.
    - stbtrax 13y ago
      Trading companies do pay well, but that's a pretty boring and not value-adding industry to pigeonhole oneself into, and the corporate culture is beyond terrible. There aren't a plethora of interesting jobs sw devs can jump from and to in Chicago. Trust me, I wouldn't have moved if this wasn't the case.
blacksmythe 13y ago
Not such a simple calculation, as paying higher salaries drives up the cost of living.

natrius 13y ago

I don't think that comparison would be illustrative. I suspect that trends in tech wages in the Bay Area are divorced from those in other fields in the same way that finance wages in New York are. The productivity of a single programmer has famously increased as the rise of multimillion-dollar companies with less than ten employees shows. You still need the same number of nurses and teachers, though.

lmg643 13y ago

It is funny that there would be reason to complain, given that this statistic would probably show that tech is a profitable place to work relative to other industries. But we're talking about the tech employee's relative share of the company's own profits, right? which means cross-industry comparisons aren't relevant. i'm sure this is the line the defense would take. I guess - we would be asked to believe that even though you have the collusion stated as plain as day, "it was not successful" - just talk. And that might actually fly. but it's crazy to see the greedy underbelly of SV out in the open like this, although it fits with the aggressive ("legal!") tax avoidance strategies. (EDIT: IMHO both behaviors are forms of community theft, even if you don't consider your taxes to be a charitable contribution.) I suppose it only feels like hypocrisy because of the lionization of our heroes. We expect more, particularly considering how they position themselves relative to their values - "think different" - "don't be evil" - more than just businesses. 50 years from now, once the tech equivalent of the iphone is in every object on earth, I suspect Jobs will be looked at as another Rockefeller - awesome, epic, business man, just not necessarily the guy you aspire to become when you grow up.

pstuart 13y ago
Jobs was epic in his own way. Just not necessarily a nice human being.
akbar501 13y ago
> But we're talking about the tech employee's relative share of the company's own profits, right? Not exactly. The key issue is not whether anyone made more or less money. What is at issue is violation of US law. As of today, conspiracy is illegal.
- judk 13y ago
  Collusion to manipulate the market is illegal. Conspiracy means something else.
  - akbar501 13y ago
    conspiracy: a secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful. collusion: secret or illegal cooperation or conspiracy, esp. in order to cheat or deceive others.

akbar501 13y ago

In cases of conspiracy, I believe the illegal act is the very act of meeting to plan criminal activity. The effectiveness of such planning is not the deciding factor as to whether or not the people involved have behaved criminally. As a parallel, planning to distribute illegal drugs is illegal (conspiracy to distribute). While actually distributing is an additional charge. Something similar is going to happen here, where the executives in question may have broken several laws only one of which is conspiracy. I'm not a lawyer, so I could be wrong. But this is what I remember from Business Law during my MBA.

ghshephard 13y ago
pg wasn't questioning whether this was illegal or not, he was interested in what the impact was.
- cma 13y ago
  > he was interested in what the impact was No he wasn't; comparing tech salary growth to other salary growth in the presence of a tech boom was completely disingenuous. Wages can increase relative to other industries, and still be being slowed by collusion. It would be just as disingenuous if someone said we should measure it by whether tech companies' profit per-employee increased during the time relative to other fields, which would give the exact opposite conclusion.
  - aptwebapps 13y ago
    If you had good enough data you would be looking at the change over time and could see dips in the rate of change. Also, 'disingenuous'? Because he posited the idea that there might be data that could be brought to bear?

employee 13y ago

If you somehow got complete data, you would be certain to find that Google employees received a large raise after these agreements were terminated (as others pointed out in this thread): http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2010/11/10/on-googles-10-percent-pay-hike-and-antitrust-law/ http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2010/11/10/on-googles-10-percent-pa... That was something like 20,000-30,000 people, so if you consider it among the population of the 5 companies involved, it's extremely significant. That was the largest raise I've received in a 13 year career in Silicon Valley, so I consider it anomalous. But then you're back to the problem whether correlation is causation. You could conceivably argue that it was due to competition from Facebook, which was not part of those agreements. In my opinion, salaries were depressed -- although how much and for how long is very hard to determine.

ctl 13y ago

Other industries are deeply unlike tech, so comparing salary trends would be meaningless. A sibling comment suggests that we look at salaries in tech companies that didn't collude. But that doesn't work either, because (1) those salaries could have been indirectly affected by the collusion, and (2) other tech companies are different than Apple, Google, et al -- most importantly, they have less money!

blantonl 13y ago

>> It seems like we should be able to measure whatever effect there was. Against what litmus test? All the players (Apple, Google, Intuit, etc) were blazing new trails in a whole new economic model - and localized to an economy in the SV. That is why the whole scheme wasn't apparent at the time.

dredmorbius 13y ago
It's not a new economic model, it's ephemeralization, advertising, Veblen goods, and especially disaggregation of previously existing models largely involving breaking down existing toll-collection interfaces in transactions of physical goods. And the scheme was apparent, to those who were paying attention. It simply wasn't being discussed in polite society.

goobers 13y ago

If that data exists, the plaintiffs' lawyers will get it.

cs702 13y ago

I doubt we will ever be able to "measure" the effect. We can only guess and debate it with hypothetical scenarios -- "what if all these CEOs had had to compete for talented employees, instead of fixing the market for them?" Regardless of the effect, it is a shame to see that these leading CEOs, who for years have vociferously complained about media & telecom oligopolies for preventing competition, were for years simultaneously using their oligopoly to prevent competition for employees. Apparently, they're all for free markets, except when it affects their bottom line!

AndrewKemendo 13y ago
Apparently, they're all for free markets, except when it affects their bottom line! Seems to be a trend in every discipline, why should Big Tech be any different? See: Big TELCO, Big Banking, Big Oil, Big Ag etc...
- mooreds 13y ago
  Err, I think it is more a human trend, than a "big" trend. Most everyone I know loves the benefits of competition, except when they are competing, then they aren't as big a fan. (Yes, yes, there are the people who love competition even when they are competing, but I find that they are fairly uncommon.)
  - wildgift 13y ago
    Capitalism hates competition. I think Adam Smith said that.
hashmap 13y ago
What are you talking about? A "free market" encourages exactly this behavior! If it weren't illegal it would go on indefinitely.
- adventured 13y ago
  A free market neither encourages nor discourages this type of behavior. What it does, is not regulate whether a company can poach other talent by paying higher wages, or whether a company can collude with other companies to pay the same wages and stagnate. If a company believes it has the upper hand against a competitor - and some company always acquires the upper hand sooner than later - then it would be in its best interests to poach, pay higher wages for superior talent, and bleed the competition to death.

emmett 13y ago

Specifically you'd want to find other SV companies who weren't party to these negotiations (Netflix? Twitter? I didn't see a comprehensive list), since they'd be a pretty close to exact benchmark...

patio11 13y ago

Remember when Facebook started aggressively poaching Google employees and Google responded publicly by giving every engineer a substantial raise and privately in ways substantially more expensive than that? And Facebook pretty much just laughed and matched offers? And every engineer in the Valley figured out simultaneously that $100k was a floor not a ceiling? That strikes me as persuasive anecdotal evidence of what happens when a tech titan feels threatened by poaching that they cannot resolve by a gentlemen's agreement. My recollection for the timing of those opening salvoes in the talent war was mid-2010. This would have been right after the DoJ told the cartel to knock it off. I'll acknowledge off the top that that may be purely a coincidence.

judk 13y ago
They didn't give substantial raises, they moved comp from variable bonus to base salary (instead $X being the minimum bonus, $Y < $X was the minimum bonus and base was raised.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- umeshunni 13y ago
  There was also an across-the-board base pay increase in addition to that.
boobsbr 13y ago
I'm in Brazil and can only dream of BRL 100k/y, which is about USD 41k/y.
- alphadogg 13y ago
  What are your living expenses, though. It's not top-line salary that matters, if you have to piss it away on renting a one-bedroom apt...
- grinich 13y ago
  If you're skilled, you should work remotely.

InclinedPlane 13y ago

Probably wouldn't provide reliable data. One of the major factors that would have driven up tech salaries was if some of the biggest and most profitable tech companies (indeed, some of the most profitable companies in history) such as Apple, Google, etc. were openly competing to try to lure talent to their companies through financial incentives. Likely, compared to other industries tech workers were nevertheless handsomely paid, but I think this is still an example of abuse of power. It's all the more worrisome because the changes in the nature of the stock market and so forth have made it that much more difficult for top tier tech workers to become rich. That used to be the pattern in the '80s and '90s, there are thousands of millionaires who worked at apple, microsoft, etc. for only a decade but were around during those companies' crucial early growth phases. Today I think that phenomenon is much less common except with extremely early stage employees. A lot of startups are the brain children of the sort of top tier techies who made it rich working at various vast growing companies. That variety of wealth is, I believe, very important to the vitality of the industry. But for various reasons it seems to have been significantly curtailed in the last decade or so, but if there is a more competitive marketplace for salaries in the tech field then that would go a long way toward bringing it back.

Patrick_Devine 13y ago

I remembered having commented on this about half a year ago on a post which at the time didn't get a lot of up-votes. I just dredged it up: "Clearly the tech talent shortage can't be that bad, otherwise salaries would be going through the roof. I realize they may seem high relative to many other professions, however if we really are in dire straights, one would expect them to have spiked dramatically. That just hasn't happened. Either collectively the valley is colluding to not inflate wages, or, more likely, the problem isn't as big as many companies are making it out to be and those companies want to bring in foreign workers to help put deflationary pressure on wages." I guess it turns out that was a false dichotomy and both things were happening. It looks like there was a conspiracy, and the tech companies still complained about not being able to find workers while pressuring congress for more H1-B visas. My point is I don't think you'll be able to really get an accurate picture of how much wages were depressed because many companies are trying their hardest to decrease workforce mobility any way possible (legal or otherwise). I've personally seen some pretty crazy shenanigans at a very large tech company with workers being steered through insane hurdles to get a green card. And I guess why not? If you can get someone to stick around for 5 or 6 years at a reduced wage, why wouldn't you do that?

clavalle 13y ago

I am not entirely sure that 'relative to other fields' is a useful metric in this case. Maybe if we could restrict those fields to others in the middle of a boom or otherwise in a fierce competition for talent...petroleum and other engineers in the oil industry in the past few years, for example. (though I'd wonder if the big players in that industry have similar pacts in place). I don't know. It would be difficult to hold enough variables constant to make any useful comparisons but there might be something in the broad strokes.

cylinder 13y ago

We should measure the effects. But, in terms of determining whether this was illegal and/or unethical, all that matters is the intent and the acts.

protomyth 13y ago

The statistics are there for the time period[1], but I am a little uncertain what would be a valid comparison career. I would bet the wages grew above the local aggregate. Perhaps looks at the line on the last boom? 1) http://www.bls.gov/data/ http://www.bls.gov/data/ http://www.bls.gov/bls/blswage.htm http://www.bls.gov/bls/blswage.htm

abalone 13y ago

> Has anyone tried looking to see if there is a depression in tech workers' salaries, relative to people in other fields... You want to use other fields as a control? That makes little sense. From 2005-2009 the tech industry grew at a vastly greater rate than most other fields.