There were no explicit compensation controls in place here. The top engineers at these companies are millionaires. Good engineers, as cromwellian points out, make easily in excess of 200K (sometimes a lot more) with total compensation.

This is about a no-cold-call agreement for employees, with a possible extended no-poaching agreement. This certainly already applied to executives, not just engineers. More-over, it is open to debate whether this actually had a negative effect on the industry as a whole. It might actually have given startups the opportunity to hire decent talent, and may have deflected hiring spending to engineers not already at Google/Apple/etc...

I'm not trying to justify the backroom, in-the-shadows type of dealings that went on here. That certainly came across as a little slimy. I am purely making a commentary on the perception that this somehow had a material effect in depressing the tech industry, engineering wages and/or quality of life.