Free market, Ceo's suck, etc ......... Split from "A successor already"


ekianjo said:
holdoncaulfield said:
Forget the DOS/GUI argument for a moment. Have you guys seen this article? How Silicon Valley's Most Celebrated CEOs Conspired to Drive Down 100,000 Tech Engineers' Wages CEOs are assholes.
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How convenient for you to change the topic.
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He said forget the issue at hand for a moment, so he may come back to it soon :D

It's like we're in war and one side says to the other side "ok let's stop, drink coffee together, and rest for a monent  then kick each other's ass again." :D
 
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^
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holdoncaulfield said:
Forget the DOS/GUI argument for a moment. Have you guys seen this article?


How Silicon Valley's Most Celebrated CEOs Conspired to Drive Down 100,000 Tech Engineers' Wages
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That story and lawsuit appears extremely spun. Agreeing to not headhunt each others employees or discussing comparable compensation is the same as driving wages down? While not inaccurate I suppose, it is an extremely subjective and biased way at looking at the situation. Its apparently an illegal business practice, but at best its only of questionable morality. I wouldn't want the biggest company I was in competition with going around trying to pull my employees from underneath me. Trying to top the compensation of the competitor seems unfair as well especially if they just one up you back and forth What ever happened to just compensation?
 
Its effectivly price fixing between the big players, which command the top end of the market. They have something to gain by securing their assets this way. Its not really a story, i think it was apple MS and google that initially agreed not to poach each others employees. It shouldnt be revealing to the world whats already blatantly obvious, much less in this case, when its in the open.
 
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From the other angle, targeting their competition's employees could also be seen as immoral as well. Say google used their big money for a year or two and literally threw money at someone like amazon's engineers, offering them like 1 million a year each? Not even if they needed them, but just so that amazon didn't have them anymore? Amazon would be out of buisness if they couldn't maintain and improve their services. That is anti-competitive and monopolizing in it's truest form. This act of mutual assured destruction is being spun as anti-competitive as well, but I just can't see it truly being that way.

Refusing to hire one company's current or previous employees is one thing, but agreeing to not actively head-hunt each other? That's where the breakdown is at.

The price fixing part is the strongest argument, but I personally see it as a sanity check. If google or apple *artificially* made the career field for software engineers go from a national average of 100-200k a year to something like 400-500k a year no software company startup (or even those just not as successful) would not even have a chance to compete. That ultimately boils down to a problem with the free market though, if that really could be seen as a problem at all, but at some point I feel it could be abused and turned into monopolizing the market. Like I said, questionable morality at best.

Now if the price fixing was at the lower end of the compensation tables like them all getting together to keep a highly skilled job at a minimum wage to boost profits, that's evil. (outsourcing to india *cough cough*) But keeping the price at a national average and appropriate for the actual demand for that type of worker, allowing for just compensation for the skills required, that in my opinion, is just sanity. If there was a true lack of personnel in that field and the price goes up, fine, but at the level and subject matter this article is talking about is directly in line with scouting each other's employees in terms of stopping each other from creating a monopoly by uprooting the gears that make those other companies work. 
 
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SNESFAN said:
Now if the price fixing was at the lower end of the compensation tables like them all getting together to keep a highly skilled job at a minimum wage to boost profits, that's evil.
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If that's the case the solution is easy: you are a skilled engineer, you make your own startup, get funding from an accelerator and get the salary you deserve (+ a healthy part of the profits). There's only so much room Google and Co have to play with, and as long as you are mobile there will always be competitors willing to pay the right price if needed, somewhere else on Earth.

Freelance is another way of avoiding these kind of traps. Seriously, you can't really "trap" people forever this way.
 
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Agreed, free market is absolutely the answer to the problem with skilled workers and just compensation especially when dealing with non-tangeable white collar skills. Free market is still the answer, as volitile as it may be, it does work at naturally evening out the balance when not manipulated.

However, we went through this across the world during the industrial revolution and why we (america) made a national minimum wage to prevent this kind of lower end price fixing. (when joint price fixing becomes borderline slavery) Physical labor or blue colar jobs are constantly fighting this battle because the price to startup is monumental. Like assebly lines, you may know how to put together a car, but without a factory you aren't going to be building your own in any resonable sense without a serious crap-ton of money. Dealing with something that can be created without any serious startup funds (in comparison) is relatively easy.

The argument still remains that we're talking about the higher end here and not the lower. My example was just to show where an actual problem lies, and not this "supposed" problem of artificial lowering of software engineers pay. Where in contrast, it is actually stopping it from being artificially inflated.
 
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SNESFAN said:
However, we went through this across the world during the industrial revolution and why we (america) made a national minimum wage to prevent this kind of lower end price fixing. (when joint price fixing becomes borderline slavery)
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Fixing minimal low wages is the best solution to create unemployment. Every country that went to create such minima has seen a rise in unemployment. I don't think that's the answer.
 
ekianjo said:
SNESFAN said:
However, we went through this across the world during the industrial revolution and why we (america) made a national minimum wage to prevent this kind of lower end price fixing. (when joint price fixing becomes borderline slavery)
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Fixing minimal low wages is the best solution to create unemployment. Every country that went to create such minima has seen a rise in unemployment. I don't think that's the answer.
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Every country right now has high unemployment.. minimal low wages or not.
 
Minimum wage is a social program for human rights. If the only jobs to be had know they can feed you a bowl of rice a day to keep you doing your job because of lack of options. That's why it is there. It being liveable or it's effect on the economy is the problem of those governments making that standard. The idea I feel is still correct, looking at it form a human rights perspective.

But you are still completely bypassing the main point I'm making and focusing on a side example I was making that has no real relevance to the subject. And you are snipping out where I said it wasn't the main point.
 
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ekianjo said:
Klumpen said:
http://en.wikipedia....iki/Godwins_law
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So what ? Saying that Apple made the first computer (or the first mp3 player, or the first tablet) is about as revionist of History at the other example I gave. Yet we don't call the other ones "creative".
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all apple do is steal ( oops "gather" ) ideas from others and combine them into a limited use product. you will do it apples way or not at all. as for ipods, way back in 1999 i joined a forum  http://www.mp3car.com/vbulletin/ long before the ipod was released. just checked and it was 2 years..... there were lots of discussions going on there and a couple of the guys were designing  a small stand alone mp3 player while the rest of us were building dc/dc converters to run small pc mother boards with 2 line by 16 character lcd screens hooked up to the parallel port. running cut down versions of win 98 and winamp with plugins.... anyway i diverge.. my point was these guys were open about designing this thing and then went all hush hush. hinting that someone had bought the design off them.....  connect the dots yourself... might not have been apple cause a few other devices came out soon after...

as for apple fanboy stupidity.... apple opened a new store in Brisbane Australia a week ago. no new products, no giveaways. it was only a new retail outlet. less than 50 yards away was another store selling the exact same products. BUT the fanboys camped outside the store all night to be the first in!!!! its so sad really to see and hear a bunch of apple tragics cheer and clap because 5 more people are allowed into the store.... brainwashing is all it can be...
 
TrashyMG said:
Every country right now has high unemployment.. minimal low wages or not.
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No, many developing countries have close to full employment. The world is not limited to the US & Europe.

SNESFAN said:
Minimum wage is a social program for human rights. If the only jobs to be had know they can feed you a bowl of rice a day to keep you doing your job because of lack of options. That's why it is there. It being liveable or it's effect on the economy is the problem of those governments making that standard. The idea I feel is still correct, looking at it form a human rights perspective.
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No, minimum wages were installed when people were already earning more than enough to survive. You are dead wrong about where it comes from. Check your story again.
 
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Cut all the 40h jobs into two 20h jobs (and the 60h jobs into three 20h jobs), combine it with a minimum wage and a maximum wage (!)

and you got more employed people getting down to a more humble but good living standard and get people more relaxed in general this way.

The main problem here in Germany is, that two contracted people are always more expensive than one because of the unfortunate handling of non-wage labour costs.

I read, that 30.000 years ago, people only needed 20hours per week for securing shelter, food and clothing.

If having to work MORE to survive is "advanced", I wonder if it's a good thing.

What do we have all those machines working instead of us for, if our working-time isn't reduced but rather getting more?
 
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