Silicon Valley’s Coddled Caste System Has Been Exposed
By Kevin Roose
nymag.com
( Are you on an executive track, Ten? )
"I'm not surprised at all," the ex-Googler told me.
I'd asked him about the class-action lawsuit that had been filed on behalf of roughly 64,000 tech employees (including him) against firms like Google, Apple, Intel, and Adobe. The suit alleged that the executives at these firms – people like Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidt, and Sergey Brin – had colluded with each other to form no-poaching agreements, thereby keeping their employees from jumping ship to competing firms.
It had long been an open secret in the tech industry that certain companies had made these backroom arrangements to keep their most valuable employees in place. But until recently, nobody knew how explicit the deals were, or that the executives involved had put the details in ink.
The ex-Googler, who made $250,000 plus stock options in his last year as an engineer at Google, admits that he doesn't need any money that results from the lawsuit, especially because the settlement that was struck on Thursday – a reported $300 million payout, the details of which won't be known for several months – will only net him at most a few thousand dollars. He's not even particularly angry about the illegal no-poaching policies, since they hadn't resulted in any material harm to his career.
"I never felt as though we were unfairly compensated," he said. "Our salaries are, and were, absurd."
The news of the Silicon Valley wage-collusion suit – written about most prominently by PandoDaily's Mark Ames – hasn't made much news outside the tech industry. But the lawsuit has already had at least one lasting effect – it has exposed the two-tier caste system within the top ranks of tech. There are the executives, who talk (and defer) to each other frequently and set the terms of engagement across the tech industry. And then there are the worker bees – the engineers, designers, and middle-managers who are seen as valuable yet replaceable, who are essentially high-cost commodities, and who are routinely left out of some of the most important decisions surrounding their careers.
The coddled image of the start-up worker doesn't quite mesh with a victim narrative. But there are real grievances here..... |
