What "wage-fixing" are you talking about? Are you referring to the brief period in which a handful of tech companies colluded to tamp down salaries and cross-recruiting? Because that involved only a tiny percentage of the software developers in the US and had no significant impact on the national average salaries. Or has there been broader wage-fixing that you're aware of?
> Are you referring to the brief period in which a handful of tech companies colluded to tamp down salaries and cross-recruiting?
Ignoring for the moment I don't think four years is very "brief" or eight is only a "handful"[1] (and it may actually be even more[2])
It's a bit naive to think this "had no significant impact on the national average salaries" - some of these companies are/were among the largest and most desirable companies in tech, what they do is going to affect the entire industry.
e.g. if you are a hiring manager at a company not involved and are trying to hire someone who is also considering an offer from an involved company the amount you need to offer to be more attractive is less. This brings down the average you pay, which brings down the average you offer. Likewise companies now competing for candidates also receiving offers from you now have an easier time sweetening their offers, and so forth and so on.
What is naive is to assume without evidence that the actions of a handful of companies that employ a tiny percentage of software developers had a significant impact on average salaries nationwide. In the absence of any such evidence, it makes more sense to assume it had little impact, which is what I do. The example you cite is mere speculation, and one could easily speculate about an opposite effect, i.e., companies that would not ordinarily be able to compete with Google et al could offer candidates more than they otherwise would have, that is, they might be inclined to stretch salary offers for star developers rather than shrink them. But, there's no evidence that either thing happened to any significant extent.
The example is hypothetical, but it is not speculation. A candidate [usually] decides to accept an offer or not on a number of factors. As a hiring manager you are unable to change most of these factors (e.g. you cannot change the tech stack, or the company culture, or the location). What you can change (to make your offer more appealing than others a candidate is considering) is the pay.
If you're considering another offer for X, I can make my offer more attractive by exceeding X. The lower X is the less it cost me to exceed it. If some companies (particularly large and desirable ones) are lowering X that will affect far more than "just" the 64,000 members of the class action.
Correct me if i'm wrong, but didn't the wage fixing affect precisely the programmers to which the essay is referring? It may have been a tiny percentage of programmers, but it was the programmers occupying the best positions at the most desirable companies who were specifically targeted.
Every problem he mentions, except the timezone difference, is exactly the same when you're outsourcing to large IT consulting companies in the US. The only difference is the US companies charge 5x-20x more for their crappy deliverables.
How many people here have worked with a major IT consultancy in the US? How many were satisfied with the process and result? I would be astonished if even 5 out of 100 projects outsourced within the US turn out so well that customers say, "That was great, we can't wait to work with those consultants again."
As a veteran of half a dozen such projects using half a dozen different IT consulting firms, my experience was they were all terrible experiences, with rampant price-gouging (novice programmers billed at $300/hour, "senior" people at $600-1,000/hour), conflicts of interest, poor communication, etc., and the work products in every case were massive total failures (and no, they do not give refunds).
I don't put much stock in this article as a specific critique of India, but as an article about outsourcing in general it's dead-on accurate.
I believe they're attacking the challenge from the opposite direction: Gmail search can be described as "okay" and Google works tirelessly to make the main Google.com search experience worse and worse -- eventually they will succeed in degrading it from its former excellence to a point where its quality matches Gmail's.
There's quite a lot of disability fraud going on, some of it downright shocking.
Example #1: A couple of weeks ago, my brother, an orthopedist, had a 26-year-old man come in for an ankle sprain. In the course of working up the ankle -- mildly sprained, no problem -- he found that the patient doesn't work and is on 100% disability. Why? Because of acne. Yes, acne. Apparently when he was 19 or 20 he had such severe acne that someone deemed him unable to work and he was approved for 100% disability. Even though his skin now is perfectly clear, with some minor acne scarring the only remaining blemish, this man will likely never work a day in his life -- he will be drawing a disability check from the government for the next 60 years.
Example #2: Another brother is a police officer. Or was. He recently retired, at age 52, and now will draw a $70,000/year pension for the next few decades, which is a separate but related issue. But he tells me that -- even though he didn't personally take advantage of this ploy -- it is routine for retiring police officers and firefighters to go to "friendly" doctors and have those doctors certify them as disabled so they can get disability checks in addition to their pensions. It's called "taking the disability topper" or "getting DA'd."
This stuff is very common, especially here in Chicago with the unions running a fairly corrupt machine. I really wish something could be done. We're taxed hard and money is spent in reckless ways by the government like this. Doesn't seem fair to those of us who actually work to make this money.
Worse, there is no solution is site. Who is going to arrest these crooked cops? Other cops? They're on the take as well.
>He recently retired, at age 52, and now will draw a $70,000/year pension for the next few decades
Illinois has a pension crisis we can't get out of because of this. These union handouts and insane pensions that are 100% unaffordable. Right now every man, woman, and child in Illinois owes $26,000 in taxes to pay these pensions out. Who is going to pay this stuff?
Citizens should be able to pursue small qui tam suits against other citizens for things like welfare fraud. It's worked very well for Medicare fraud, I'd like to see it implemented on a micro scale.
> Worse, there is no solution is site. Who is going to arrest these crooked cops? Other cops?
The fraud burden typically lies with the agency that's cutting the checks. Other agencies (IRS, SEC) deal with fraud in their specific areas and do not rely on police except the very specific step of arresting the individual, which in these cases may never happen.
The disability topper was a huge scandal for the Long Island Rail Road in recent years:
<< About 600 Long Island Rail Road retirees will lose their disability benefits after a federal agency voted last week to halt the payments, amid a sweeping investigation into what prosecutors have called a major disability fraud scheme, according to agency documents and officials.
The agency, the United States Railroad Retirement Board, which over more than a decade granted disability benefits to hundreds of railroad retirees based on fraudulent medical evidence with little scrutiny, took the action on Thursday during a five-minute meeting at its headquarters in Chicago. The vote approved procedures under which the board will cut off the benefits, which, officials said, are costing the agency $2 million a month. >>
A bunch of the people involved have gone to prison over this fraud:
<< The first terminations came several weeks after the doctor who submitted what prosecutors have said was the bogus medical evidence underlying the applications of the roughly 600 retired railroad workers pleaded guilty in federal court in Manhattan to fraud and conspiracy. The doctor, Peter J. Ajemian, told the judge in January that the retirees were not in fact disabled. …
Dr. Ajemian, who was sentenced to eight years in prison, is among 24 people — including retirees, another doctor and two facilitators — who since 2011 have pleaded guilty to federal charges resulting from of the investigation. Charges against eight other people indicted in the case are pending, and the investigation by the F.B.I. and federal prosecutors in Manhattan, officials have said, is continuing. >>
It's pretty disgusting that those that are supposed to be stopping crimes are knowingly and intentionally committing fraud to get additional money from the state. Between this and the recent civil asset forfeiture scandals, I'm amazed people aren't more outraged.
I would argue that police are inherently no more ethical than the average reasonable citizen.
The solution of course is transparency. Stop treating police as holier than thou. They're just government workers. "Trust but verify" works wonders for keeping people honest. Good people as well as bad, because it removes temptation.
Outrage requires awareness as a first step. Our mainstream sources of journalism are often too preoccupied with party talking points when covering welfare programs to get to the real issues of corruption, fraud, and systemic brokenness underneath. It seems to be slowly changing, however. Articles like this one are a good start.
(1) Switch to the Colemak keyboard layout -- it significantly reduces the work your fingers have to do.
(2) Vary your mousing devices/behaviors. I love Kensington trackballs, and they're much easier on my wrist than a mouse, but after awhile I get pain in my thumb (because with a trackball you typically use your thumb to left-click rather than your index finger), so I switch back to a mouse for a few weeks. Vertical mice are also nice and I occasionally use one for a change. You can also move your mouse/trackball to the other side of the keyboard and use your non-dominant hand -- it takes a few days to rewire your brain, but it's another good way to change up your mousing behavior.
(3) Consider buying a USB numeric keypad, placing it on the non-dominant side of your keyboard, and using macro software to program the keys for common actions (e.g., scrolling).
It's a good thing Chris Hughes likes to break things, because he's irreparably broken The New Republic.
The people who read TNR (myself included) do so specifically because it's been a bastion of traditional journalism, and moreover we read it for specific writers & contributing editors, and since they've all resigned now, TNR is dead.
Outside of a very small sliver of the population nobody's ever even heard of the The New Republic — it's not a brand name that Hughes can gut and remodel. The New Republic is not a brand that anyone cares about; we cared about the content, the writers and the editors.
I can see no way for TNR to carry on as a viable operation. As a TNR reader for more than 30 years, it makes me rather sad.
Not being a regular reader, I was a bit startled go there for the firsttime in a while and find a website that looks like Buzzfeed. I hope the existing editorial team or some more thoughtful soul can pony up enough capital to launch The Even Newer Republic or something along those lines.
That quote from Guy Vidra about how he can't bring himself to read past 500 words of any article should haunt him for the remainder of his career.
The friction escalated with the arrival of Vidra, who is said to have complained to Foer that the magazine was boring and that he couldn’t bring himself to read past the first 500 words of an article.
The more likely meaning here is that Vidra couldn't read more than 500 words of a boring TNR article.
Thanks for the correction - I typed that in a hurry and you're quite right that he was making a comment about the journalism at TNR rather than articles in general. All the same, I don't think it speaks well of him to make such a comment to a staff that specializes in long-form journalism.
This is a good clarification. The other issue is that Vidra's previous employer was Yahoo (Head of Yahoo News). This may have limited his ability to read beyond 500 words, too, who knows.
That is especially scary. Several years back, I could get decent news from yahoo, and they had a balanced group of opinion writers....., then poof! After reading this article I am guessing Vidra might have orchestrated that change too.
I wouldn't worry about it; I'm sure they'll pivot, build mobile-first something that people want, scale like a startup, and then be validated by the market when they profitably exit.
Ahh yes... mobile first... because Mobile Is The Future(tm) this week. Last week Cloud Was The Future(tm). Tomorrow it'll be Internet of Things and mobile will be old and busted and nobody will ever pitch a mobile startup again.
too slanted to be journalism, its like reading the opinion page of any local newspaper. So if that is the last bastion of journalism then journalism died a long time ago.
I'm so tired of whiny babies screaming because they can't have everything their precious little selves desire for free, free, FREE!
Now the whiny babies are also developing potty-mouths, which is not an improvement.
I look forward to this infant's continuing series of articles, including "Fuck You, Netflix," "Fuck You, Spotify," "Fuck You, Apple," "Fuck You, Every Business On Earth."
