I would say it affected an entire industry. If the salaries have a certain value in SV then everybody else will use those as a signal and adjust their offers accordingly.

edit: not really difficult to do, you can compare the salaries per region (averages, median and distributions) pre and post lawsuit.

It's fine to say that, but finding actual data to support that hypothesis is awfully difficult.

> which likely affected 15,000 software developers at most

Where does this number come from? When the wage fixing agreement was canceled, Google immediately issued an across the board raise, and compensation has increase very quickly since then. That's 15k software devs right there, not even considering the second-order effects, which are surely non-zero.

I made a rough tally of the developers employed by the companies involved in the conspiracy at that time. What do you think is a more accurate count?

Can you discuss the second-order effects? They're not apparent to me.

Edit: HN isn't allowing me to reply to you. Thanks for correcting my estimate. I was way off.

15k barely covers the engineers employed by Google alone at the time. The class action lawsuit covers 64k employees, and that's a subset of the employees affected. If your argument is that Eric Schmidt's entering in the agreement only affected employees at Google, that's clearly false. A single company no-poach agreement would clearly be worthless, so it must be the case that Eric Schmidt's actions affected employees at other companies. If you believe some of the latest news, the agreement spread to enough companies that 1M employees were directly affected: https://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles-wage.... Schmidt and Jobs were central in creating the agreement and its spread.

As for the second order effects, do you know a hiring manager? Ask them about how competitive offers have changed since the no-poach agreement was canceled. The effect is much larger than just having to keep up with the across the board raise Google gave to their employees when the agreement expired, which was itself non-trivial.

Right. I'm sure that he knew better than they did, it was fine for him to limit their choices through collusion as long as he also took actions which helped some of them a little and himself a lot.

When your costs don't increase in line with profits then share price rises. The easiest way to do this is wages. In the 1980s it was through massive layoffs.