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> Meg called to talk about our hiring practices. Here is what she said. Google is the talk of the valley because we are driving salaries up across the board.

> Meg called to talk about our hiring practices. Here is what she said. Google is the talk of the valley because we are driving salaries up across the board. Then Eric Schmidt says: > I would prefer Omid do it verbally since I don't want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later So Silicon Valley execs were illegally conspiring to drive down wages, and who knows how much more was done outside of the paper trail mentioned. Then we have an article discussion yesterday and blog posts etc. in the past few weeks about how companies can't find great engineers, and how we need immigration law changes that blocks Mexicans etc. but brings in more engineers to drive down engineer wages etc. Maybe if CEO's weren't illegally conspiring to drive wages below their market value, there wouldn't be a so-called "engineer shortage"? I mean it's risible. They conspire illegally to drive down wages, then whine that not enough people want to work in this field where wages have been artificially and illegally deflated.

Vardhan 12y ago
It's all propaganda. There's no engineering shortage. They're all just trying to flood the market with more engineers from all around the world. It's all propaganda plastered with a nice marmalade of feel goody "let's help the immigrants", or "everything great about our country came from immigrants", or other such variants of rhetoric. It's actually very smart, because it plays to the tune that people dance to. That said immigration policies do need to change, and immigration is indeed a good thing for this country. Attracting talent is a lot of what makes this country great, but we need to be careful with the fine print of such policies as to not destroy our own economy.
- untog 12y ago
  There's no engineering shortage. They're all just trying to flood the market with more engineers from all around the world. You could argue that this is the actual natural order of things. Let the free market decide the value of an engineer, not arbitrary government regulation. It is the Silicon Valley way, after all.
  - samstave 12y ago
    UH, CEO collusion is the same as "arbitrary [executive] regulation".... The free market is what the actual value of the engineers is - not how the CEOs choose to work together to suppress prices.
    - untog 12y ago
      Oh, I know. I wasn't disputing that. Just making an observation on perspective - that the current system of limited immigration is not the fairest, but it's in the interests of developers today to resist it being changed.
    - mbetter 12y ago
      No, you're thinking of a competitive market. Collusion between CEOs to suppress salaries is exactly the free market.
  - yulaow 12y ago
    Free market is strongly against "Cartels". Because, yeah, ceo-cartels are another way of arbitrary regulation. See them as a "maximum wage fixed" and you get why.
  - freyrs3 12y ago
    The natural order of things is that we have a process in place to create and change government regulation. If someone thinks that process is inflexible or arbitrary doesn't given the prerogative to break the law to get around it.
  - rayiner 12y ago
    Government control of immigration is a natural consequence of government establishing and defending a border. If you want to take the free market to its logical conclusion, we should get rid of that too, and leave Silicon Valley to its own devices vis-à-vis fending off hostile foreign actors. Historically that sort of thing has not worked out well.
    - chetanahuja 12y ago
- selmnoo 12y ago
  > That said immigration policies do need to change, and immigration is indeed a good thing for this country. I want them to change too... but in a different way. I'd rather that we take the unwanted and wounded, the homosexuals threatened to receive capital punishment in Uganda, the atheists who worry for their lives in Saudia Arabia, the homeless in Mexico yearning for just a small improvement in the access of opportunity (no matter how small of a step it may be). Let the Indians keep their talented engineers -- let them improve India, god knows it's got enough problem of its own, don't send them to us here so they can make another silly app. Let China keep its engineers, so they may one day create technologies that truly challenge the great firewall. Seriously, is it just me who sees this aggressive attempt of siphoning the world's talent as being opportunistic and predatorial? This is not the spirit of America that Emma envisioned, this isn't something to be proud of. "Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    Idealistic and well-intentioned. But there's little opportunity in many places for Engineers to be fully used. Its a positive good for humanity to get the most out of talented people. That can happen in America.
    - selmnoo 12y ago
      > Its a positive good for humanity to get the most out of talented people. That can happen in America. I seriously, honestly doubt this. Consider the main force behind FWD.us: Mark Zuckerberg. You're telling me the most positive good for humanity to get out of talented people is at Facebook, where the most valuable people to the company are those who optimize advertisement algorithms that exploit cognitive biases of a population already being challenged in all sorts of horrendous ways? I really don't think your perspective is getting things right. If the engineers want to make great apps for Android or iOS, they can make it sitting in India or China or Brazil or wherever.
- username223 12y ago
  > we need to be careful with the fine print of such policies as to not destroy our own economy. Au contraire. Many Americans and Europeans would get a huge and valuable smack with the clue-bat if there were no immigration restrictions, and if licensing schemes designed to create arbitrary shortages of e.g. doctors were eliminated.
  - Vardhan 12y ago
    I think immigration policy will eventually be nonexistent, but before then many things need to happen. The developing nations need to achieve a certain quality of living across the board so that the people there don't all just decide to get up, and leave. Economies need to become less decentralized, and more global in their scope. Which arguable is very much a reality today, but I think this is simply the beginning. And there's a whole host of other developments that need to happen, but I believe eventually will happen in the coming decades. We'll see a more homogenous world, yet also a more diverse one.
zimbatm 12y ago
A developer is pretty well paid when compared to other professions regardless of the price fixing scheme. I'm not sure fixed pricing and developer shortage are linked.
- nickpinkston 12y ago
  Yea, to the contrary, they're actually trying to decrease the upward price pressure of the natural market.
  - lostlogin 12y ago
    They decreased inflation immediately prior to a major period of financial instability. We all owe them a debt of gratitude for the foresight demonstrated. Corporate tax cuts for all involved as reward.
- 31reasons 12y ago
  Software engineer's salary is nothing compared to doctors, lawyers and financial traders who enjoy protections from their organizations and a reputation of "being just expensive".
  - stephencanon 12y ago
    Lawyers and financial traders, maybe. Doctors, not so much (at least in the US). The NRMP is a far more effective wage-fixing cabal than anything anyone in silicon valley could ever dream up, and it's 100% legal.
  - minwcnt5 12y ago
    In the valley I think I'd rather be a software engineer than a doctor or lawyer if I wanted to maximize my expected career earnings.
    - 31reasons 12y ago
      I should point out that your Expected career earnings has nothing to do with your profession and everything to do with what you actually do.
late2part 12y ago
This is prima facie collusion and corruption. These executives should be fired and prosecuted for fraud and collusion. If it doesn't happen, it means our society endorses corruption and encourages this, and we'll see more bad behavior.
- lisper 12y ago
  It won't happen. Our society does endorse corruption as long as its profitable enough.
- bulatb 12y ago
  My understanding is the DOJ has closed their case. There won't be any prosecutions.
  - fiatmoney 12y ago
    It could happen at the state level. And many of these co's have physical nexii all over, not just CA.
- higherpurpose 12y ago
  Our society also endorses torture by imprisoning the people who exposed it and letting the ones who did it be free...and there are more examples of worse things than this that "our society endorses".
samstave 12y ago
The whole "immigration reform" is a continued effort by these companies to import cheaper labor... Don't be fooled by altruistic PR coming from Zuck and others...
CamperBob2 12y ago
Then Eric Schmidt says: > I would prefer Omid do it verbally since I don't want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later How does someone this stupid rise to such a high position of wealth and influence? Are we talking luck here, or are Faustian bargains involved? Where do I get some of that action? I'm only being half-facetious; this is weapons grade stupid. "Let's take this conversation offline because we'll get sued or indicted if it gets out." Yeah, that will totally work in a grand jury room. If low IQ isn't the explanation, and I don't see how it could be -- given the respect and reputation we all accord Eric Schmidt for his other achievements -- what is? Drugs? Mental illness? Distraction? Forgery? Did he fail a saving throw versus reality distortion on one of his walks on the beach with Jobs? What?
- nostrademons 12y ago
  Being a really smart person doesn't mean being smart in all respects. There are plenty of cases where someone highly-accomplished has turned out to be a complete idiot in something that's not their area of expertise. Think of William Shockley and eugenics, Henry Ford and fascism, Orson Scott Card and homosexuality, Steve Jobs and not being a dick, or Freeman Dyson and global warming.
  - aswanson 12y ago
    Einstein and economics comes to mind as well. People need to stop turning off logic and criticism of people tagged as "smart". It relieves cognitive burden, but at a considerable cost.
- asdfologist 12y ago
  Uh, it's called a mistake. Smart people make them too.
  - quickquote 12y ago
    Do you remember what he said to justify Google's privacy policies? "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." The irony must be pretty painful.
icambron 12y ago
Colluding to hold down wages is terrible and I hope they get in a lot of trouble for it. But this doesn't follow: > Maybe if CEO's weren't illegally conspiring to drive wages below their market value, there wouldn't be a so-called "engineer shortage"? What illegally driven-down wages mean is that the shortage is more acute that previously thought. That's because the main way to measure the relationship of supply and demand is through price; i.e. the more the salaries grow, the less supply there is relative to demand. So if salaries have been held down, some of that evidence was masked. Secondly, it means that non-giant companies could be competitive in making job offers, whereas perhaps in a more free labor market they might not be able to compete salarywise with Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc. Thus, as seen from say, a startup's vantage point, this check on the upward price pressure actually kept the supply of affordable engineers up. So I remain sympathetic to the there-aren't-enough-programmers line of thinking, and certainly don't think of this as hypocritical or antithetical to that line. Of course, that doesn't excuse any of Google's behavior here; they've effectively stolen a great deal of money from all of us through illegal collusion, pocketing the money that an honest market would direct into the engineers' bank accounts. I hope there's hell to pay. Edit: I suppose it's theoretically possible that if the salaries went up to their natural levels, then people would pour into the field, and perhaps that's what you're trying to say. I think that's very unlikely, since software engineers are already paid a great deal more than most fields, so these people are either people who don't care about money unless it's a lot of money, or they're people who instead chose to be doctors and lawyers. I'm sure more people would say, "hmm, maybe I should be a programmer", but you have to ask why those people aren't doing it now. As economists might put it, this is a structural problem, not a market problem (I hope I'm using those terms right).
- TheCoelacanth 12y ago
  > What illegally driven-down wages mean is that the shortage is more acute that previously thought. That's because the main way to measure the relationship of supply and demand is through price; i.e. the more the salaries grow, the less supply there is relative to demand. So if salaries have been held down, some of that evidence was masked. Not really, price ceilings have a well-known effect of causing shortages because purchasers who should have been priced out of the market use up some of the supply. If the price had been allowed to rise naturally, those willing to pay the higher price would get what they need.
nova22033 12y ago
This may be heresy on HN but this actually proves the engineer shortage. If there wasn't a shortage, they wouldn't need non-poaching agreements.
- 6d0debc071 12y ago
  It supports the idea that the cost of finding someone of similar criteria among the unemployed, or taking a less skilled programmer and investing in them, exceeds the cost of finding them among one's peers. That's not necessarily a consequence of there being an engineer shortage. You'd expect much the same behaviour if most people who emerged from uni, or worked commonly in IT, didn't have the criteria they were interested in.
- arg01 12y ago
  Isn't one of the common arguments that they're isn't a shortage the companies just aren't willing to pay enough to get people interested. I mean when I think make BIG money in IT I think startup and all the risks involved or management rather than high level engineer. That will have an effect on who joins the industry.
- mabhatter 12y ago
  Not really... Because companies in Silicon Valley poach employees on purpose to interrupt other companies. It's a real problem in a lot of industries. I'd note you don't see Microsoft in this because they stayed in Washington and bought employment laws they like. So they can force employees to sign non-competes in Seattle while they poach from California that won't allow companies to do that. Working in an auto state, I've seen that in other industries and it's actually kind of sickening. In the auto industry it's in bad taste to do that. Many auto suppliers have no-poaching in their business contracts. Which ties up a lot of the industry because everybody does business with everybody. As an EMPLOYEE you can apply to another job, but recruiters aren't allowed to cold-call between companies. I've worked in an office where we would get cold call agents during work. They'd call all the extensions in the office and it was just offensive being put on the spot like that. I can't imagine working at Apple or Google and getting calls like that... And the work environment becomes "awkward" for the rest of the day because everybody knows everybody got a call... There's nothing good about that type of hiring practice.
vacri 12y ago
This is an interesting fight to watch from here on the sidelines, given that many employees were colluding to drive up wages - here on HN, we had people boasting about having a stable job, then hearing about a job at another BigNameCo, and applying for it just to drive up their own wage. No intention of leaving their own company, and that it was turning into a routine process rather than the odd here-and-there. I'm sure there will be apologetics, but it's not like one side was behaving ethically. They conspire illegally to drive down wages, then whine that not enough people want to work in this field where wages have been artificially and illegally deflated. This field where wages are still significantly above mean values? Where are these engineers going to go en masse for better wages? Into medicine? Hello for another 10 years training. Law? Already overstaffed, and wages are similar for most anyway. Finance gets some, but isn't going to hold them all. If the engineers are in the career for the dollar, restarting in another career that will pay more is going to be difficult as a group.
- n09n 12y ago
  >we had people boasting about having a stable job, then hearing about a job at another BigNameCo, and applying for it just to drive up their own wage. No intention of leaving their own company, and that it was turning into a routine process rather than the odd here-and-there. Regardless of your opinions about the morality of this practice, there's no basis for calling it collusion.
  - vacri 12y ago
    Sure there is - people here on HN were openly talking about colluding with their friends in other companies to do it. It's not to say that all engineers were doing it (which I think is a salient point), but in all these arguments, the engineers are painted as naifs who had done nothing as a group to merit this. To be clear, I don't agree with the ethics the companies displayed, I just think it's unfair that the collusion between some engineers gets glossed over amongst all the outrage.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- 12y ago
stanleydrew 12y ago
In your rush to bash illegally-colluding tech execs for the engineer shortage you seem to have missed the end of the article where the policy is posted. From that document: "For each of these 'Restricted Hiring' companies... "3. Additionally there are _no_ restrictions at _any_ level for engeineering candidates" The majority of the companies included were just on a "Do Not Cold Call" list, but Google would actively recruit people from those companies based on referrals, and of course based on applications. So, if you worked at Apple and applied to Google, Google would actively recruit you. I fail to see how this policy has anything to do with an engineering shortage. It may well be deemed illegal, but it's certainly not as bad as you're making it out to be.
philwelch 12y ago
The income and standard of living for software engineers in Silicon Valley is so high that low wages are not the constraining factor in engineer population.
- eggie 12y ago
  I have long told recruiters that I'd need something in the $250k range to even consider working as an engineer for a corporate tech shop. The work is brutal. You sell your mental life to hippie robber barons who write emails in all lowercase while siphoning enough energy out of you to buy second-hand nuclear icebreakers for personal yachts. None of them has yet taken me seriously, but thankfully this reduced the number of calls I was getting.
  - c4n4rd 12y ago
    > I have long told recruiters that I'd need something in the $250k I wish more people were like you. Disclaimer: I do the same.
- geebee 12y ago
  The average salary for a "software developer, applications" in San Francisco is about $111K a year. In San Jose, it's a bit higher, at 116K a year. http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/software-developer/salary http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/software-developer... The median price for a 3br house in SF is (I used zillow's numbers for this) 1.1Mil. (btw, check the pay for the other "top 10" professions in high cost areas like SF. It does make economic sense for top students with good options to choose other fields).
bowlofpetunias 12y ago
Why do we keep bringing up these issues as if they were mutually exclusive? The whole conspiracy has not been driven by a desire to bring down wages (most of the involved company can pay the price), but by the instability caused by an already existing shortage. Yes, driving down wages only makes the issue worse, and lobbying for migrant workers whilst doing so is extremely hypocritical. But at the end of the day it's a symptom of the problem, not the root cause.
tootie 12y ago
Read the policy. It's basically against poaching executives. It specifically says that anyone at the individual contributor level (ie developers, designers, testers) are all fair game. At the executive level for these places, salaraies are probably $300K-$30M range. I feel like depressing their wages isn't a pressing issue for this country.

Vardhan 12y ago

It's all propaganda. There's no engineering shortage. They're all just trying to flood the market with more engineers from all around the world. It's all propaganda plastered with a nice marmalade of feel goody "let's help the immigrants", or "everything great about our country came from immigrants", or other such variants of rhetoric. It's actually very smart, because it plays to the tune that people dance to. That said immigration policies do need to change, and immigration is indeed a good thing for this country. Attracting talent is a lot of what makes this country great, but we need to be careful with the fine print of such policies as to not destroy our own economy.

untog 12y ago
There's no engineering shortage. They're all just trying to flood the market with more engineers from all around the world. You could argue that this is the actual natural order of things. Let the free market decide the value of an engineer, not arbitrary government regulation. It is the Silicon Valley way, after all.
- samstave 12y ago
  UH, CEO collusion is the same as "arbitrary [executive] regulation".... The free market is what the actual value of the engineers is - not how the CEOs choose to work together to suppress prices.
  - untog 12y ago
    Oh, I know. I wasn't disputing that. Just making an observation on perspective - that the current system of limited immigration is not the fairest, but it's in the interests of developers today to resist it being changed.
  - mbetter 12y ago
    No, you're thinking of a competitive market. Collusion between CEOs to suppress salaries is exactly the free market.
- yulaow 12y ago
  Free market is strongly against "Cartels". Because, yeah, ceo-cartels are another way of arbitrary regulation. See them as a "maximum wage fixed" and you get why.
- freyrs3 12y ago
  The natural order of things is that we have a process in place to create and change government regulation. If someone thinks that process is inflexible or arbitrary doesn't given the prerogative to break the law to get around it.
- rayiner 12y ago
  Government control of immigration is a natural consequence of government establishing and defending a border. If you want to take the free market to its logical conclusion, we should get rid of that too, and leave Silicon Valley to its own devices vis-à-vis fending off hostile foreign actors. Historically that sort of thing has not worked out well.
  - chetanahuja 12y ago
selmnoo 12y ago
> That said immigration policies do need to change, and immigration is indeed a good thing for this country. I want them to change too... but in a different way. I'd rather that we take the unwanted and wounded, the homosexuals threatened to receive capital punishment in Uganda, the atheists who worry for their lives in Saudia Arabia, the homeless in Mexico yearning for just a small improvement in the access of opportunity (no matter how small of a step it may be). Let the Indians keep their talented engineers -- let them improve India, god knows it's got enough problem of its own, don't send them to us here so they can make another silly app. Let China keep its engineers, so they may one day create technologies that truly challenge the great firewall. Seriously, is it just me who sees this aggressive attempt of siphoning the world's talent as being opportunistic and predatorial? This is not the spirit of America that Emma envisioned, this isn't something to be proud of. "Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  Idealistic and well-intentioned. But there's little opportunity in many places for Engineers to be fully used. Its a positive good for humanity to get the most out of talented people. That can happen in America.
  - selmnoo 12y ago
    > Its a positive good for humanity to get the most out of talented people. That can happen in America. I seriously, honestly doubt this. Consider the main force behind FWD.us: Mark Zuckerberg. You're telling me the most positive good for humanity to get out of talented people is at Facebook, where the most valuable people to the company are those who optimize advertisement algorithms that exploit cognitive biases of a population already being challenged in all sorts of horrendous ways? I really don't think your perspective is getting things right. If the engineers want to make great apps for Android or iOS, they can make it sitting in India or China or Brazil or wherever.
username223 12y ago
> we need to be careful with the fine print of such policies as to not destroy our own economy. Au contraire. Many Americans and Europeans would get a huge and valuable smack with the clue-bat if there were no immigration restrictions, and if licensing schemes designed to create arbitrary shortages of e.g. doctors were eliminated.
- Vardhan 12y ago
  I think immigration policy will eventually be nonexistent, but before then many things need to happen. The developing nations need to achieve a certain quality of living across the board so that the people there don't all just decide to get up, and leave. Economies need to become less decentralized, and more global in their scope. Which arguable is very much a reality today, but I think this is simply the beginning. And there's a whole host of other developments that need to happen, but I believe eventually will happen in the coming decades. We'll see a more homogenous world, yet also a more diverse one.

zimbatm 12y ago

A developer is pretty well paid when compared to other professions regardless of the price fixing scheme. I'm not sure fixed pricing and developer shortage are linked.

nickpinkston 12y ago
Yea, to the contrary, they're actually trying to decrease the upward price pressure of the natural market.
- lostlogin 12y ago
  They decreased inflation immediately prior to a major period of financial instability. We all owe them a debt of gratitude for the foresight demonstrated. Corporate tax cuts for all involved as reward.
31reasons 12y ago
Software engineer's salary is nothing compared to doctors, lawyers and financial traders who enjoy protections from their organizations and a reputation of "being just expensive".
- stephencanon 12y ago
  Lawyers and financial traders, maybe. Doctors, not so much (at least in the US). The NRMP is a far more effective wage-fixing cabal than anything anyone in silicon valley could ever dream up, and it's 100% legal.
- minwcnt5 12y ago
  In the valley I think I'd rather be a software engineer than a doctor or lawyer if I wanted to maximize my expected career earnings.
  - 31reasons 12y ago
    I should point out that your Expected career earnings has nothing to do with your profession and everything to do with what you actually do.

late2part 12y ago

This is prima facie collusion and corruption. These executives should be fired and prosecuted for fraud and collusion. If it doesn't happen, it means our society endorses corruption and encourages this, and we'll see more bad behavior.

lisper 12y ago
It won't happen. Our society does endorse corruption as long as its profitable enough.
bulatb 12y ago
My understanding is the DOJ has closed their case. There won't be any prosecutions.
- fiatmoney 12y ago
  It could happen at the state level. And many of these co's have physical nexii all over, not just CA.
higherpurpose 12y ago
Our society also endorses torture by imprisoning the people who exposed it and letting the ones who did it be free...and there are more examples of worse things than this that "our society endorses".

samstave 12y ago

The whole "immigration reform" is a continued effort by these companies to import cheaper labor... Don't be fooled by altruistic PR coming from Zuck and others...

CamperBob2 12y ago

Then Eric Schmidt says: > I would prefer Omid do it verbally since I don't want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later How does someone this stupid rise to such a high position of wealth and influence? Are we talking luck here, or are Faustian bargains involved? Where do I get some of that action? I'm only being half-facetious; this is weapons grade stupid. "Let's take this conversation offline because we'll get sued or indicted if it gets out." Yeah, that will totally work in a grand jury room. If low IQ isn't the explanation, and I don't see how it could be -- given the respect and reputation we all accord Eric Schmidt for his other achievements -- what is? Drugs? Mental illness? Distraction? Forgery? Did he fail a saving throw versus reality distortion on one of his walks on the beach with Jobs? What?

nostrademons 12y ago
Being a really smart person doesn't mean being smart in all respects. There are plenty of cases where someone highly-accomplished has turned out to be a complete idiot in something that's not their area of expertise. Think of William Shockley and eugenics, Henry Ford and fascism, Orson Scott Card and homosexuality, Steve Jobs and not being a dick, or Freeman Dyson and global warming.
- aswanson 12y ago
  Einstein and economics comes to mind as well. People need to stop turning off logic and criticism of people tagged as "smart". It relieves cognitive burden, but at a considerable cost.
asdfologist 12y ago
Uh, it's called a mistake. Smart people make them too.
- quickquote 12y ago
  Do you remember what he said to justify Google's privacy policies? "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." The irony must be pretty painful.

icambron 12y ago

Colluding to hold down wages is terrible and I hope they get in a lot of trouble for it. But this doesn't follow: > Maybe if CEO's weren't illegally conspiring to drive wages below their market value, there wouldn't be a so-called "engineer shortage"? What illegally driven-down wages mean is that the shortage is more acute that previously thought. That's because the main way to measure the relationship of supply and demand is through price; i.e. the more the salaries grow, the less supply there is relative to demand. So if salaries have been held down, some of that evidence was masked. Secondly, it means that non-giant companies could be competitive in making job offers, whereas perhaps in a more free labor market they might not be able to compete salarywise with Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc. Thus, as seen from say, a startup's vantage point, this check on the upward price pressure actually kept the supply of affordable engineers up. So I remain sympathetic to the there-aren't-enough-programmers line of thinking, and certainly don't think of this as hypocritical or antithetical to that line. Of course, that doesn't excuse any of Google's behavior here; they've effectively stolen a great deal of money from all of us through illegal collusion, pocketing the money that an honest market would direct into the engineers' bank accounts. I hope there's hell to pay. Edit: I suppose it's theoretically possible that if the salaries went up to their natural levels, then people would pour into the field, and perhaps that's what you're trying to say. I think that's very unlikely, since software engineers are already paid a great deal more than most fields, so these people are either people who don't care about money unless it's a lot of money, or they're people who instead chose to be doctors and lawyers. I'm sure more people would say, "hmm, maybe I should be a programmer", but you have to ask why those people aren't doing it now. As economists might put it, this is a structural problem, not a market problem (I hope I'm using those terms right).

TheCoelacanth 12y ago
> What illegally driven-down wages mean is that the shortage is more acute that previously thought. That's because the main way to measure the relationship of supply and demand is through price; i.e. the more the salaries grow, the less supply there is relative to demand. So if salaries have been held down, some of that evidence was masked. Not really, price ceilings have a well-known effect of causing shortages because purchasers who should have been priced out of the market use up some of the supply. If the price had been allowed to rise naturally, those willing to pay the higher price would get what they need.

nova22033 12y ago

This may be heresy on HN but this actually proves the engineer shortage. If there wasn't a shortage, they wouldn't need non-poaching agreements.

6d0debc071 12y ago
It supports the idea that the cost of finding someone of similar criteria among the unemployed, or taking a less skilled programmer and investing in them, exceeds the cost of finding them among one's peers. That's not necessarily a consequence of there being an engineer shortage. You'd expect much the same behaviour if most people who emerged from uni, or worked commonly in IT, didn't have the criteria they were interested in.
arg01 12y ago
Isn't one of the common arguments that they're isn't a shortage the companies just aren't willing to pay enough to get people interested. I mean when I think make BIG money in IT I think startup and all the risks involved or management rather than high level engineer. That will have an effect on who joins the industry.
mabhatter 12y ago
Not really... Because companies in Silicon Valley poach employees on purpose to interrupt other companies. It's a real problem in a lot of industries. I'd note you don't see Microsoft in this because they stayed in Washington and bought employment laws they like. So they can force employees to sign non-competes in Seattle while they poach from California that won't allow companies to do that. Working in an auto state, I've seen that in other industries and it's actually kind of sickening. In the auto industry it's in bad taste to do that. Many auto suppliers have no-poaching in their business contracts. Which ties up a lot of the industry because everybody does business with everybody. As an EMPLOYEE you can apply to another job, but recruiters aren't allowed to cold-call between companies. I've worked in an office where we would get cold call agents during work. They'd call all the extensions in the office and it was just offensive being put on the spot like that. I can't imagine working at Apple or Google and getting calls like that... And the work environment becomes "awkward" for the rest of the day because everybody knows everybody got a call... There's nothing good about that type of hiring practice.

vacri 12y ago

This is an interesting fight to watch from here on the sidelines, given that many employees were colluding to drive up wages - here on HN, we had people boasting about having a stable job, then hearing about a job at another BigNameCo, and applying for it just to drive up their own wage. No intention of leaving their own company, and that it was turning into a routine process rather than the odd here-and-there. I'm sure there will be apologetics, but it's not like one side was behaving ethically. They conspire illegally to drive down wages, then whine that not enough people want to work in this field where wages have been artificially and illegally deflated. This field where wages are still significantly above mean values? Where are these engineers going to go en masse for better wages? Into medicine? Hello for another 10 years training. Law? Already overstaffed, and wages are similar for most anyway. Finance gets some, but isn't going to hold them all. If the engineers are in the career for the dollar, restarting in another career that will pay more is going to be difficult as a group.

n09n 12y ago
>we had people boasting about having a stable job, then hearing about a job at another BigNameCo, and applying for it just to drive up their own wage. No intention of leaving their own company, and that it was turning into a routine process rather than the odd here-and-there. Regardless of your opinions about the morality of this practice, there's no basis for calling it collusion.
- vacri 12y ago
  Sure there is - people here on HN were openly talking about colluding with their friends in other companies to do it. It's not to say that all engineers were doing it (which I think is a salient point), but in all these arguments, the engineers are painted as naifs who had done nothing as a group to merit this. To be clear, I don't agree with the ethics the companies displayed, I just think it's unfair that the collusion between some engineers gets glossed over amongst all the outrage.
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12y ago

stanleydrew 12y ago

In your rush to bash illegally-colluding tech execs for the engineer shortage you seem to have missed the end of the article where the policy is posted. From that document: "For each of these 'Restricted Hiring' companies... "3. Additionally there are _no_ restrictions at _any_ level for engeineering candidates" The majority of the companies included were just on a "Do Not Cold Call" list, but Google would actively recruit people from those companies based on referrals, and of course based on applications. So, if you worked at Apple and applied to Google, Google would actively recruit you. I fail to see how this policy has anything to do with an engineering shortage. It may well be deemed illegal, but it's certainly not as bad as you're making it out to be.

philwelch 12y ago

The income and standard of living for software engineers in Silicon Valley is so high that low wages are not the constraining factor in engineer population.

eggie 12y ago
I have long told recruiters that I'd need something in the $250k range to even consider working as an engineer for a corporate tech shop. The work is brutal. You sell your mental life to hippie robber barons who write emails in all lowercase while siphoning enough energy out of you to buy second-hand nuclear icebreakers for personal yachts. None of them has yet taken me seriously, but thankfully this reduced the number of calls I was getting.
- c4n4rd 12y ago
  > I have long told recruiters that I'd need something in the $250k I wish more people were like you. Disclaimer: I do the same.
geebee 12y ago
The average salary for a "software developer, applications" in San Francisco is about $111K a year. In San Jose, it's a bit higher, at 116K a year. http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/software-developer/salary http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/software-developer... The median price for a 3br house in SF is (I used zillow's numbers for this) 1.1Mil. (btw, check the pay for the other "top 10" professions in high cost areas like SF. It does make economic sense for top students with good options to choose other fields).

bowlofpetunias 12y ago

Why do we keep bringing up these issues as if they were mutually exclusive? The whole conspiracy has not been driven by a desire to bring down wages (most of the involved company can pay the price), but by the instability caused by an already existing shortage. Yes, driving down wages only makes the issue worse, and lobbying for migrant workers whilst doing so is extremely hypocritical. But at the end of the day it's a symptom of the problem, not the root cause.

tootie 12y ago

Read the policy. It's basically against poaching executives. It specifically says that anyone at the individual contributor level (ie developers, designers, testers) are all fair game. At the executive level for these places, salaraies are probably $300K-$30M range. I feel like depressing their wages isn't a pressing issue for this country.