Silicon Valley Tech Wage Suppression

Some of the scope of the Silicon Valley tech wage suppression agreement has expanded recently, and now covers a much more vast section of the tech industry.

"Confidential internal Google and Apple memos, buried within piles of court dockets and reviewed by PandoDaily, clearly show that what began as a secret cartel agreement between Apple’s Steve Jobs and Google’s Eric Schmidt to illegally fix the labor market for hi-tech workers, expanded within a few years to include companies ranging from Dell, IBM, eBay and Microsoft, to Comcast, Clear Channel, Dreamworks, and London-based public relations behemoth WPP. All told, the combined workforces of the companies involved totals well over a million employees."

– Mark Ames, Pando.com

I'm going to pick on Google here, because they represent themselves as a company who bears the unofficial motto of "Don't be Evil". By doing so, they justify people calling them out on it when they do something which is absolutely, 100% evil.

"Don’t be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served — as shareholders and in all other ways — by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains."

– Google in 2004 IPO (page 32, near the top)

I'm not saying any of these other companies come out clean here. Far from it. But the hypocrisy and deception employed here is astounding. I think the only solution is to do the same thing with employee salaries as we've done with CEO salaries: make them more transparent. I think efforts like Glassdoor help to allow employees to more adequately estimate their own worth in a very complex job market. Pay transparency has been shown to account for the rapid increase in CEO pay over the last 20-30 years.

"the drive for [CEO pay] transparency has actually helped fuel the spiraling salaries. For one thing, it gives executives a good idea of how much they can get away with asking for. A more crucial reason, though, has to do with the way boards of directors set salaries. As the corporate-governance experts Charles Elson and Craig Ferrere write in a recent paper, boards at most companies use what’s called “peer benchmarking.” They look at the C.E.O. salaries at peer-group firms, and then peg their C.E.O.’s pay to the fiftieth, seventy-fifth, or ninetieth percentile of the peer group—never lower. This leads to the so-called Lake Wobegon effect: every C.E.O. gets treated as above average. With all the other companies following the same process, salaries ratchet inexorably higher. "

– James Surowieki, The New Yorker, Oct. 2013

TL;DR version: Transparency in pay gradually forces salaries higher, because as the average pay rises with talent, average workers get paid more to account for the rising median pay.

Tech companies of this magnitude are pulling in money hand over fist, and rather than putting that money back into the pockets of the employees who are working to make it happen, they're busy holding it in off-shore accounts, likely hoping for a "repatriation tax holiday" as employed by the Bush administration in 2004. 

Here's the thing, though. If they were to put those funds to work paying their employees more, those same employees would be able to afford more purchases, which grows the economy. The more money employees have, the more they can spend. The more they can spend, the more companies make. The more companies make, the more they can pay their employees. It's a virtuous circle that works to increase everyone's living standard, from the CEO to the janitor.

An Interesting Analysis of Google's Nest Acquisition

The Verge has an interesting article up on Google's acquisition of Nest.

Sad Nest via http://www.wiredprairie.us/

"But outside of the players directly involved in the deal, there was a second, more visceral reaction: disappointment. Nest was the first in a new wave of hardware startups built by engineers and executives eager to apply their experience building smartphones to new markets — a mission captured perfectly by Fadell's irrepressible upstart spirit in interviews and appearances. But by selling Nest seems to have undercut the optimism those companies represented, and perhaps not coincidentally, underlined a growing distrust of Google itself — a distrust shared by regular consumers, tech investors, and privacy advocates alike."

We tend to root for the underdog. It's in our DNA that we, as humans, prefer to see David defeat Goliath. There's something about the 'against all possible odds' style story that resonates with us, makes us feel engaged, and gives us hope. Perhaps because we tend to feel powerless so often when it comes to our daily lives we appreciate it when someone or some group prevails against the big guy.

Google's purchase of Nest for 3.2 billion turns that on its head. The big guy wins. Again. It's a story that almost nobody likes, unless they're the big guy (and in this case, the small guy). From the outside looking in, fans of Nest feel like they've been cheated out of seeing what this little startup can do, and that's going to sting.

It probably also doesn't help that there's a valid reason to distrust a company that sells consumer data having access to data about your home.

Gmail, Google+ and Your Inbox's Privacy

A new "feature" today allows anyone on Google+ to directly message you, unless you specifically opt-out. This means that advertisers, hated rivals, Somali warlords, serial killers or whomever can simply type your name into their 'To:' field and Google will try and send you the mail.

Fortunately, there is a way to stop this from happening. Go to your settings, and midway down the page, you'll see "Email via Google+:"

You'll notice that it's set to the default of 'Anyone on Google+'. Which is to say, a significant portion of the internet's denizens (after many iterations of Google's insistence that anyone using their services be required to have a Google+ account, whether you like it or not).

So what you should probably consider doing is setting that drop-down to 'No one'. Like this:

This sets the options back to the way they were – namely, the person emailing you needs to actually have your email address.

There are some other options here, 'Circles' and 'Extended Circles', which basically mean 'Friends' and 'Friends of Friends', but it's probably worth not bothering with that.

Google Maps

Overall, this is a pretty good offering. For me, it won’t replace the default app for general use, but it will stay loaded for some special use cases. Everything below is based on use cases for an iPhone 5 in San Diego, California.

Pros

• The location data is unquestionably the best around. Google’s invested a lot in its mapping, and it shows.
• The vector tiles are a huge improvement over the previous (iOS 5) maps app.
• The overall design is clean and (mostly) consistant with Google’s other recent offerings like Gmail, Google+, etc. Some of the language differs from Google’s other offerings (two finger swipe to open the menu, for example).
• Streetview. Enough said. Regardless of your view of the mapping data and how it works in your location, no one else is even close to being able to offer this.
• Voice navigation is a welcome addition. The voice is clean, and easily understood. Will likely sound more natural than Siri to most users, at least, it does to me.
• Traffic data is superior to Apple’s maps thus far, in limited use.

Cons

• Biggest issue for me: no ability to integrate with Siri. I don’t use Siri for much, but for navigation while driving, it’s a godsend of a feature. Not being able to voice navigate handsfree while driving makes this a non-starter for me when compared to Apple’s app.
• The performance on my iPhone 5 is unquestionably slower than the default maps app over the same WIFI network. Over LTE, I have the same experience. I suspect this is simply an issue of Google having more data to push to the user.
• The design language is inconsistant. Sometimes it doesn’t use the proper language for iOS (such as when trying to share a destination, which should normally bring up a list of ways to share in a default window), but sometimes it simply doesn’t work the same way Google’s other offerings do. The menu is on the right instead of the left. The button to open menu options is at the bottom right instead of the top left. Etc.
• Obviously, it cannot be used as the default app. This isn’t really a ding against Google’s implementation so much as it’s a problem with the inability to specify different default apps in iOS.
• The sharing options are extremely limited. Locations can only be shared to message, mail or clipboard. Apple maps aren’t much better, but do also include twitter and facebook as default options.
• Yelp’s location reviews are vastly superior to Zaggat in my area (US, San Diego). Your mileage may vary.
• Shake to send feedback is on by default. I’m not sure who thinks that’s a good idea in an app that will be open while attached to a car while driving. You should turn this off no matter what if you use Google Maps.
• No night mode. Why both Apple and Google are both missing this is beyond comprehension. It’s like no one at either of these companies has ever driven with their phone on at night. Bright white screen + car dashboard + driver field of view = crazy.