It was an industrywide collusion to suppress wages.

Was? Companies still collude to suppress wages, albeit via layers of indirection. cf: Radford survey.

Palm really should have been on board then.

To do illegal things?

The point was that Palm, like any tech company, would probably have loved cheaper labor as well.

Most companies will eagerly pursue profitable illegal action – and subsequently express sincere remorse that they were caught and punished.

Some won't. You can call that ethics or fear of being caught or whatever but it is of course morally better than doing the illegal thing.

Was it? Engineers at FANG make absurd amounts of money even out of college. So, at the very least the collusion wasn’t very successful

Yes, it absolutely was. Well documented, complete with Justice Department litigation and settlements.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

BTW, Facebook didn't participate, and was by some measures, one of the reasons the collusion didn't continue to succeed.

How overpaid are employees relative to the amount of money they are bringing into the company?

much more relative to the average worker in many other industries

How much money a company makes should not matter. You get paid by how hard you are to replace and how important your task is to continued revenue.

You can make your company $1 billion a day, and save countless lives, but if you can be replaced easily, do you expect to get paid much?

> how important your task is to continued revenue

Yes, that's what I meant by how much money you bring into the company.

If you bring in $1B a day (and save countless lives) and I can easily hire another employee just like you, why wouldn't I have done so already? Perhaps that is your point?

Be that as it may, how overpaid do you think tech employees are compared to the cost of replacing them?

Salaries were suppressed until after the litigation that my sibling comment by compiler-guy cited. Salaries did not begin to take off until ~2011.

You're neglecting the most crucial variable here: profit margin. These engineers are super cheap.

Year over year wage increases relative to all workers and competition for labor in the tech sector are the signals you want to use. Total mergers and acquisitions and number of discontinued software products would be good secondary signals.

I’ve never thought of it that way. Come to think of it, I could name many of the influential people at Apple from the 1970s through the 1990s beyond the founders and CEOs. Bill Atkinson, Larry Tesler, Ike Nassi, Alan Kay, Susan Kare, Chris Espinosa, Johanna Hoffman, Jean Louis Gassée, Steve Sakoman, Bruce Tognazzini, and Don Norman immediately come to mind. I can also name many of the key NeXT players, like Avie Tevanian and Bertrand Sertlet. However, with the exceptions of Jony Ive and Scott Forstall, I don’t know the names of key engineers and product designers at Apple these days. This may be due to Apple’s evolving culture of secrecy.

> However, with the exceptions of Jony Ive and Scott Forstall, I don’t know the names of key engineers and product designers at Apple these days.

Perhaps rather proving your point, neither is still at Apple!

Outside of WWDC (which isn't even in person anymore) Apple doesn't seem to allow its technical staff to have much public visibility. On the other hand, the decline in visibility you cite might also correspond somewhat with a media shift toward the web and social media. I expect Apple has strict requirements regarding employee blogs and social media presence.

It's a shame, because Apple has great technical and design staff, and it would be nice to hear more from them.

But of course Apple is also a much larger company now than it was in the 1980s-2000s.

> Good for Apple. It served the company and the brand well. No one can argue with the stock trajectory.

I will. Opportunity cost is the danger in focusing on the stock price beyond your existential financial needs.

What did silencing those engineers cost in terms of creativity and motivation? Yes Apple’s stock price went up, but at what cost? How many iPhone-level innovations did their corporate culture cost?

This exactly. It was Jobs himself who said "Real artists sign their work" - as in the (literal) case of the original Mac, which included the signatures of the Mac team including Steve Jobs.

Losing that sort of energetic and creative culture has short term and long term costs which are hard to quantify.

Not sure if SJ was to blame, but your sentiment about the commoditization of software engineering is right on target. It was industry-wide.

It's true that teams had to grow in size as software got more complex. Was commoditization the best way to do it? It certainly aggregated power in the hands of management. That was probably an intended consequence.

One unintended consequence is that tech leads and staff engineers became increasingly selected more for political than technical merit. That in turn decreased the per-capita merit of the workforce as a whole.

Post-ZIRP and post-AI, a lot of layoffs are still ahead IMO.