How Apple, Google, and other tech companies conspired against their own workers
So I was at one of these companies when the scandal broke.  I didn&#x27;t get screwed quite so much as my coworkers, since I&#x27;d only been working there for a year or so.  The settlement was a joke - I got about $1100, but my compensation increased by roughly $100K&#x2F;year the year after the cartel broke, and kept rising.  Can&#x27;t say I&#x27;m terribly pleased about either the wage-fixing or the settlement, but...<p>My wife works in philanthropy, and one of her jobs is investing in homeless shelters.  We were talking the other day about how the Bay Area&#x27;s housing&#x2F;homelessness crisis is a <i>direct</i> consequence of the collapse of the high-tech wage-fixing cartel.  Before 2010, the wage distribution from one of these huge companies was that founders and VCs would make billions, ~1000 early employees would end up with millions, and the rest of the employees live comfortable upper-middle-class lifestyles.  The ~1000 employees who could cash out pre-IPO stock options would bid up prices in Hillsborough&#x2F;Atherton&#x2F;PacHeights&#x2F;Woodside to ~$5M, but the rest of the Bay Area would be priced at what an ordinary professional could afford.  After the cartel broke, the compensation structure changed so we have ~100K engineers each making ~$300-400K&#x2F;year.  That&#x27;s enough to buy <i>all</i> the available housing inventory in the region.  So now house prices in Mountain View and Sunnyvale go from $800K -&gt; $2.4M, and you must be a dual-tech-income family to afford a house.<p>I say this not to imply that the cartel was a good thing (cartels are bad, and I&#x27;d much rather the solution be greater wage equality for everyone and building more housing so everyone can stay in the area), but to highlight the problem of unintended consequences.  I&#x27;ve seen many people ask &quot;Why don&#x27;t companies hire remote workers at Silicon Valley wages?&quot; and in the same breath say &quot;Because I would never move to the third-world hellhole that the Bay Area has become&quot;, not realizing that if they <i>did</i> hire remote workers, <i>the same thing would happen in their communities</i>.  Inflation is the flip side of higher wages; when everybody gets paid more, everything costs more.