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So far, I don't see a lot of people asking the really tough questions of what this non-competition for employees (especially engineers / developers) actually means. * If some of the top companies are implicitly not competing for you (as an employee), it means your value as an asset is lowered. There is simply less desire for another company to lure you away with more money, better benefits, a more attractive project to work on, etc. Once you work at one of the companies "on the list," none of the others will come knocking. Your value is also lowered in terms of being able to negotiate a better salary, for instance: HR (and perhaps your manager) knows that you do not have an offer from Yahoo or Google just waiting to whisk you away. * The basic effect on general engineers' salaries is thus: the less it costs Google/MS to hire a Silicon Valley A-lister, the less incentive they will feel to look for bargains by hiring outside the circle of "made men". Thus they will hire fewer such relative-newcomers, at lower salaries. Thus there will be less upward pressure on non-Silicon-Valley-A-list salaries: fewer engineers will leave the broader pool for Silicon Valley and those that do will be receiving less money to do so, so the competitive pressures on the non-SV-A-list employers are weakened too. So less salary for SDEs broadly. This knock-on effect is likely minimal for junior ASP.NET bank programmers etc. but likely significant for hotter engineers at more high-powered dev/research/etc. workplaces throughout the US. * Because certain kinds of employees' labour mobility is lowered, it means that access to engineers is somewhat more limited. Your company may not be able to get the rockstar/ninja/hip term of the week who already knows the valley, doesn't need to relocate, and just wants to pay off his SF condo more quickly. Inversely, you may not want to compete for top graduates from places like Stanford with the 90k/100k first year salaries that Facebook and some others have been throwing around. This means you can either get second-tier native talent that may need relocating or that hasn't proven itself yet ... or you can play the H1 visa game and get a much cheaper foreign programmer who is contractually tied to your company, often fears for his immigrant status, and is thereby much less likely to leave your company for another one. This is a bad thing for US graduates or relatively inexperienced programmers, as it depresses their salaries, as well. In terms of the free market, I guess it's only a natural expression of international labour mobility. * The lack of commentary on the above may be due to the current economic conditions and the "thank $DEITY I still have a job" attitude I've seen quite a bit. On the other hand, we got plenty of people on here with the kind of inside knowledge who would be able to tell us more on this subject. |