Because it indirectly affected the salaries of everyone who works in tech in Silicon Valley, San Francisco, and possibly a larger portion of the U.S. tech industry.
It's standard practice in HR to calibrate salaries based on what other companies are doing. Some large companies end up being benchmarks for entire categories or regions.
If top engineer salaries at one company are suppressed, then so are junior engineer salaries. If that company's salaries are artificially low, then any company that uses that as a benchmark will duplicate those low salaries.
I don't believe you. Top engineers are in a completely different bargaining category than regular, and especially junior engineers.
A junior engineer adopting "Steve Jobs is keeping me down" as his personal narrative probably has problems other than the games Silicon Valley billionaires play with each other.
Junior engineers are more likely to be affected precisely because of this reason; they have far less bargaining power than a top engineer and are subject to the standard “This is the salary band based on our research on our competitors' salaries”
I think there are current court battles playing out over the employers who didn't settle. That being said, everyone is acting like this didn't happen and ostensibly stop five years ago.
It's standard practice in HR to calibrate salaries based on what other companies are doing. Some large companies end up being benchmarks for entire categories or regions.
If top engineer salaries at one company are suppressed, then so are junior engineer salaries. If that company's salaries are artificially low, then any company that uses that as a benchmark will duplicate those low salaries.