[lectrick]

> were it not for him conspiring to prevent competitors from poaching employees, we'd be able to make more at our work places

So Apple, Google, Adobe and one other company agreed to not poach employees from each other and get into an expensive wage war. I don't see how that's automatically bad and here's why:

In the dotcom booms, salaries skyrocketed unchecked. During the bust, MANY people got laid off... with a certain salary expectation, which hampered them. I dated someone like this, she spent 6 months going into CC debt trying to swallow the pill that she just wasn't going to make again what she made as a marketer at the height of the first dotcom boom. She literally refused to accept the market rate for herself.

All Jobs, Schmidt etc. did is prevent people from being paid unreasonably (and unsustainably) high salaries. And we're already talking comfortable 6 figure salaries, here. You know what would happen if these were allowed to rise unchecked? The guys at the top would eventually get laid off at the first sign of a downturn. And their "net income" would likely be the same as if they never had their pay unsustainably raised to begin with.

An arms race is no good for anyone.

> we'd be able to make more at our work places

So that's bullshit. EVERYONE gets paid market rate, more or less. Anything else is not sustainable or requires someone being fooled indefinitely, which is impossible (unless they are a fool to begin with).

[palakchokshi]

Ok let's take your argument "You know what would happen if these were allowed to rise unchecked?" in the opposite direction. Your premise is rise of salaries should be checked. Now let's say once those salaries were checked by companies by promising not to hire each other engineers, if those companies decided well let's reduce the salaries of our own engineers since they are not going to get a better deal elsewhere anyways. Very soon those salaries will be plummeting because of this agreement between the companies. You contradict yourself by the end when you say "EVERYONE gets paid market rate" It is NOT market rate if all companies in the market got together and decided not to offer higher wages to someone to incentivize them to come work for them. That is what a CARTEL would do but with lower wages.

[lectrick]

I... don't disagree. And I lean libertarian (which is to say, things should remain unchecked). I'm just saying that in this particular instance, it may not have resulted in as "net" a bad, as is being suggested.

[palakchokshi]

The beauty of free markets (when they actually work) is that the unchecked salaries would have been corrected by the market when they reached an unsustainable level (like it did in the previous dot com bust). Regarding people who refuse to face reality that their prior salary is not reflected in current market rates, well that's the person's own problem and can't be taken into consideration in arguing for suppressed wages via cartel behavior. Personally I would like to get the maximum money I can get for the work I'm doing. :)