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posted by cmn32480 on Friday September 04 2015, @10:50AM   Printer-friendly
from the the-lawyers-got-how-much dept.

From The Register:

Apple, Google, Adobe, and Intel's $415m settlement with Silicon Valley techies over wage-fixing accusations has been formally approved by a judge.

On Thursday, Judge Lucy Koh, sitting in the northern district court of California, gave her approval [PDF] to a deal that will see the tech giants compensate workers for potential lost wages related to their illegal "no-poaching" pact.

[...] After paying off the lawyers, the money will be distributed among the 64,466 class-action members making up the plaintiffs in the case. Another 56 people opted out of the settlement, reserving their right to pursue individual cases.

Apple, Google, Adobe, and Intel were the four remaining holdouts in the case over a large-scale conspiracy by Silicon Valley firms not to poach each others' employees in an effort to slow escalating wages. The pacts were said to involve executives in the companies' highest ranks, including Apple co-founder and longtime CEO Steve Jobs.


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04 2015, @11:36AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04 2015, @11:36AM (#232198)

    Let's look at the conflicting ugly realities.
    Programmers don't WANT to be unionized...
    1) Programmers generally believe in the heroic individual. The Real Programmer, the rock star developer, the hacker (any definitio). All in their own way the idealized individual. And yet, large software companies (even Google, even Apple) do not really work this way.
    2) Many programmers dream of being a founder, or at least a ground floor employee, hitting it big and buying their own island. Even if they aren't on the ground floor, they get stock options... which they have to pay taxes on, and unless you happen to have been an employee of Google, Apple, Microsoft, or Amazon at exactly the right time, stand a good chance of actually losing you money.
    3) Many programmers, admit it or not, look down on unionized employees. They see them as lazy government employees, or blue-collar hicks who say "deez" and "doze." Programmers, to put it bluntly, think they are better than everybody else; and what's more, they see their ability to work twice the number of hours as most people as some sort of badge of honor.
    4) Programmers do tend to earn a good salary. For many programmers, money isn't all that important, as long as they have "enough." Until they have a family to support, and then their definition of "enough" changes (or they are no longer willing to work 80+ hours for no increase in pay). Programmers get pushed into other jobs, sapping them of job satisfaction and sapping the industry of its most experienced workers.

    Since the large companies benefit from all this, they certainly don't discourage any of this way of thinking.

    And yet. It gets uglier.
    1) Overt wage fixing.
    2) H-1B indentured workers are just another form of wage fixing.
    3) Mandatory unpaid overtime, "crunch time," etc. are another form of wage fixing.
    4) When the company does hit it big, they get bought out and usually it's not the programmers who benefit. Remember the post from a couple days ago about Notch? He kept all the money for himself and now he has too much. Oh no.

    See the running theme? Karl Marx couldn't have drawn it up any better. Sure, programmers don't lose their hands in machinery, and they don't have to stand in line at the soup kitchen, but they also are revolutionizing the world, and they aren't getting paid for it.

    The government isn't going to solve it because, every time a well-intentioned politician starts to look at even taking a baby step like maybe slowing the rate of the increase in H-1B visas, corporations make a donation and it gets swept under the rug.

    There has to be a union. The union won't stop you from contributing code to open source, and it won't stop you from being a founder, if that's what you really want. But it will make your life better. Unless you're upper management at a big company.

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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by TheGratefulNet on Friday September 04 2015, @12:21PM

    by TheGratefulNet (659) on Friday September 04 2015, @12:21PM (#232209)

    fully agreed. I was once the golden boy, when I was younger. I always had a good paying job at a famous bay area company. up until I hit 40. then it was quite a different deal. now that I'm over 50, I've gone more than 8 months without a job offer. and I -am- a good software (and hardware) engineer, but I'm local-born, experienced and if a company had to choose between me (who knows his rights and will not be forced to work like a fucking slave for the bossman) and an h1b or even a younger person, they'll pick the guy they can bully and force more work out of for much less pay.

    its all about the pay and the ability to abuse you. it may not seem like that when they woo you and make you feel special, but you know, the 'special' feeling fades very fast and you are now yesterday's news pretty darn quick.

    either we hang together or we hang separately, brothers (and sisters). it really IS true.

    --
    "It is now safe to switch off your computer."
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04 2015, @12:43PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04 2015, @12:43PM (#232214)

    From what I've seen it appears that the ones who really dislike the idea of unionizing are those who don't work in places that require nonsense like "hundreds", like pretty much anywhere outside of the Bay Area.

    • (Score: 2) by TheGratefulNet on Friday September 04 2015, @01:06PM

      by TheGratefulNet (659) on Friday September 04 2015, @01:06PM (#232228)

      the recruiters and companies do all they can to make you feel 'special' and special people are taught, over and over, that they should feel bad if they 'ask for help' and don't do things on their own. that's the heart of it.

      been there, done that, have the corp tee shirt to prove it.

      I felt very invinceable years ago. I always was well employed and had an easy time getting a great paying job. I didn't think we needed any kind of union, when I was 30 and younger. looking at my own life - at that time - I did NOT need any help, either! and so, I drew a false conclusion that this is how it was for all 'strong, talented' programmers.

      boy, was I wrong!

      years later, I saw the truth. the lies that companies tell to convince you NOT to organize. the tricks they play to keep your wages down or to limit how long you stay at the company for one reason or another.

      you think its ok to be told that the most they will now pay you is 60% of what you made TEN YEARS AGO? that's what I'm seeing right now.

      the reason the companies get away with it is that THEY are organized and we are not! its very simple to understand. not so simple to fix when kids are groomed to think that only the weak need collective bargaining.

      --
      "It is now safe to switch off your computer."
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04 2015, @01:31PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04 2015, @01:31PM (#232234)

        Ok sounds good. When are you going to start it?

        • (Score: 2) by isostatic on Friday September 04 2015, @02:47PM

          by isostatic (365) on Friday September 04 2015, @02:47PM (#232261) Journal

          That's a big change on 15 years ago, this conversation went a different way entirely. The sign of a maturing industry and a wiser readership?

  • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04 2015, @02:00PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04 2015, @02:00PM (#232242)

    Unions suck. Unions enforce another tax for everyone who works in one of their shops, partly so the leaders could be well dressed, well transported and well fed, often at the skyboxes at sold-out sports events.

    Union shops are frequently uncompetitive with nonunion shops. So the union resorts to strong-arm behavior; its members (that would be you) have to work the picket line in front of the nonunion shops, holding up signs about how "BottleCap Software Fails to Meet Community Standards." Boy, what a proud moment of my life that would be.

    Unions mean more layoffs, not fewer, because shops that can't compete (not only against nonunion shops, but against the customer not buying anything) can't afford to have as many salaried workers.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04 2015, @02:54PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04 2015, @02:54PM (#232266)

      The goal of a union (in my head),
      is to keep the bonuses and salaries of the higher-ups in check with that of the rest of the employees.
      It's their job to prevent and react to stories of upper management firing 1000 employees and giving themselves a bonus for that. Its their job to ensure that when it truly is needed for the company to restructure itself, that is done on the higher levels first and any salary decreases are done in the highest levels first.

      In my country and from your tale as well, this is no longer what unions do. The unions themselves have become structured and organized like the very companies and power hungry managers they are meant to counteract.

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Immerman on Friday September 04 2015, @03:02PM

      by Immerman (3985) on Friday September 04 2015, @03:02PM (#232270)

      Which is why doctors, lawyers, and other high-profile professions don't have them, right? Oh wait...

      Unions, like any organization, can get top heavy if the members don't actively resist the tendency, but so long as the executives are soaking up the lion's share of the profits there's a good argument to be made for their existence. Lower CEO pay to only 10x what the guy actually doing the work is making instead of 500x-1000x as is currently common, and THEN we can talk about how it's the union's fault that a shop isn't competitive.

      Sure, spreading the wealth around might not actually grant very large raises, but until it's being done arguing against unions is just propping up the modern "aristocracy".

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04 2015, @04:26PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04 2015, @04:26PM (#232316)

        Which is why doctors, lawyers, and other high-profile professions don't have them, right? Oh wait...

        They have professional organizations, which are quite different.

        • (Score: 3, Touché) by Immerman on Friday September 04 2015, @06:06PM

          by Immerman (3985) on Friday September 04 2015, @06:06PM (#232361)

          Right. Higher dues. Greater restrictions on membership. Absolute veto power over where their members can work. And a legal mandate preventing competition.

          • (Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday September 05 2015, @04:18AM

            by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday September 05 2015, @04:18AM (#232511) Journal
            Those are government-enforced barriers to entry (something which I've long been in favor of completely removing). That's very different from a labor union.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04 2015, @11:14PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04 2015, @11:14PM (#232460)

      Unions protect their employees from predatory managers who feel that minimum wage is too high and you should be working for them for free to make up for it.

      In my last four jobs, I've worked probably two or three thousand hours of unpaid and unrecorded overtime. I'm given the option of quitting if I don't want to do it, or I can just work it.

      That's what unions prevent. That's why I'm joining the union. I'm tired of the multimillionaire owner giving mate's rates to all his friends and then writing it down as a tax loss, but cutting my pay to make sure that he doesn't actually lose anything. Why should I give him money for hours I work?

  • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday September 04 2015, @02:22PM

    by Thexalon (636) on Friday September 04 2015, @02:22PM (#232250)

    1) Programmers generally believe in the heroic individual. The Real Programmer, the rock star developer, the hacker (any definition). All in their own way the idealized individual. And yet, large software companies (even Google, even Apple) do not really work this way.

    You can be even stronger than that, because the best software developers throughout human history worked collaboratively: Alan Turing, Grace Hopper, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, etc etc. About the only "soloist" I can think of that has had anything close to their level of success and influence was Donald Knuth.

    Oh, and most did not make boatloads of cash.

    2) Many programmers dream of being a founder, or at least a ground floor employee, hitting it big and buying their own island.

    Which, to be fair, does happen to approximately 0.01% of us. Which is much better odds than most professions, where it happens to approximately 0.00001% of us. But you might have noticed that the other 99.99% don't get that way, and the difference between those 0.01% and 99.99% is mostly dumb luck and guesswork (e.g. I met a guy at an alumni event at my alma mater who had had the option of working with Sergei and Larry as Google employee #4, but decided that graphics work was more his forte than search engines - he's doing well at Pixar, but nowhere near as well as he could have financially).

    3) ... Programmers ... see their ability to work twice the number of hours as most people as some sort of badge of honor.

    And that's called being taken for a ride. I'm really trying to figure out why anyone would buy that complete nonsense.

    4) Programmers do tend to earn a good salary.

    Well, yes and no. Very few are starving, but when you look at typical salaries and divide it by an 80-hour work week instead of the usual 40 suddenly it doesn't look as good. Also, the cost of living in the areas with the peak salaries (e.g. the Bay Area) are so high that $250K there doesn't buy as much as $50K in other parts of the country.

    If it makes the anti-union folks feel better, we could call it a "professional association" instead of a union. Membership would be by examination and paying some modest dues, there would be rules about what companies could do when they hired association members, targeting mandatory overtime, on-call duties (I have at multiple times in my career been required as part of my job duties to be able and willing to log in and work at all times, including 3 AM on Sunday morning), and of course minimum salary requirements. And this would be a good time to make such a move as a profession, because companies are desperate to hire programmers.

    What also matters, that you haven't mentioned but is worth bringing up, is that when your employer brings in H1-B guys to replace you, hate the boss who decided to do that, not the immigrant. The immigrant didn't take your job away, your boss did in order to lower salary costs (illegal, but that's a big part of why they do it) and ensure that they have an employee who cannot quit due to the threat of immediate deportation. The other political change programmers should be looking for is to eliminate a provision of current labor law that states that computer programmers are always considered exempt from overtime pay (this was put in place in 1996 as part of a deal to get a minimum wage increase).

    Also relevant: A lot of libertarians see the government as bossing them around. But if you are employed your manager can and will use the threat of firing you to set parameters for you about when you sleep, when you wake up, what you do most of the day, what you can say, what clothing you wear, approximately where you can reside (commuting distance + within your price range), in many cases what you ingest (with drug testing and various health programs that lower their insurance premiums), and of course what you are thinking about an awful lot of the time. So the idea that the government employees who you barely see are oppressing you more than somebody who's standing right there telling you what to do seems remarkably silly.

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
  • (Score: 2, Disagree) by curunir_wolf on Friday September 04 2015, @03:19PM

    by curunir_wolf (4772) on Friday September 04 2015, @03:19PM (#232281)

    Actually, most programmers do not want to be involved in a union for the same reason they prefer contract work: They do no like bosses micromanaging their work. Being in a union is the worst of both worlds, because now you have TWO bosses - one that's giving you as small a paycheck as they can get away with, and another extracting a cut from that paycheck.

    A regular paycheck is a convenient way to keep up with your basic living expenses, but the daily grind that most companies (and unions) expect you to put up with for it sucks.

    --
    I am a crackpot