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Comment by sbisker | Hacker News Reader

Now that this is exposed and (presumably) not as present, has anyone done any work to see if salaries at Apple, Google, etc have since risen higher than salaries at companies who weren't involved with such activity?

This sort of shenanigans went on 100 years ago, but we couldn't study the consequences so tightly back then...it seems that Glassdoor's data, H1B data, etc provides a unique opportunity to study the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of such federal intervention.

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Anecdotally salaries at the major tech companies just shot up in early 2011, which was soon after the DOJ started its investigation. It's hard to infer causation though, as this could have been because of rising competition from Facebook for employees, or it could have been because of the large amount of seed capital sloshing around in the startup world then, or it could have been because of the Fed's easy-money policies.

Connecting this to current events, this was also the start of SF's rent-and-eviction crisis. 2011 was when new grads started getting 6-figure salaries to work in tech, and experienced senior engineers started getting up to $250K/year in total comp. Turns out that when a large number of workers start getting big salaries in a region where the housing supply is basically fixed, much of that money goes into rent.

Facebook was the company that broke the cabal based on everything I've heard from friends at these companies. I think it actually started a little before 2011, more like the end of 2009, early 2010. Facebook was (obviously) not averse to poaching employees of other companies, and was particularly good at hiring ex-Googlers by offering large stock grants and relatively high salaries (~150k + 100k+ in options) for someone with 2-3 years of experience out of school. Google made some jaw dropping counteroffers to those who left and gave everyone a large raise and bonus at the end of 2010 as a result of the increased competition.

I wonder how much things have increased beyond the initial 10% pay bump in 2010: http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2010/11/10/on-googles-10-percent-pa...

I agree it would be a mistake for the layperson to infer strong causation, especially in the middle of the issue - I was more musing that this is the sort of opportunity where a student in law or economics could someday get a Ph.D attempting to answer it properly with data. (It doesn't seem impossible to normalize for the impact of fed policies across industries, for instance.) I hope someone does it and shares the paper with me. :)

Hard to say since the hiring boom has mostly passed. There's still demand for tech talent but you don't have multiple companies trying to hire thousands of engineers at once anymore.

We'll have to wait for another "boom" to see.

At least at Google, there was a 10% raise at the start of 2011.

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