Technology

Tech firms conspire to drive down wages

From How Silicon Valley’s most celebrated CEOs conspired to drive down 100,000 tech engineers’ wages:

In early 2005, as demand for Silicon Valley engineers began booming, Apple’s Steve Jobs sealed a secret and illegal pact with Google’s Eric Schmidt to artificially push their workers wages lower by agreeing not to recruit each other’s employees, sharing wage scale information, and punishing violators.


The secret wage-theft agreements between Apple, Google, Intel, Adobe, Intuit, and Pixar (now owned by Disney) are described in court papers obtained by PandoDaily as “an overarching conspiracy” in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act and the Clayton Antitrust Act, and at times it reads like something lifted straight out of the robber baron era that produced those laws.

And don’t forget how H1B visa’s essentially limit immigrants ability to change jobs for a better salary and drive down non-immigrant wages with a lower salary employees.

Technology

How much do tech companies spend on advertising?

Here’s how much various tech companies spend on advertising. I’ve always thought the quality of a product is an inverse of how much is spent advertising it — if it was great you hardly need to spend much to get someone to buy it.
So, it’s clear Google and Amazon are doing well. Yahoo is slated to increase to $80 million. It’s the “Ad Spending As a Percent of Revenue” that is important. This is from Business Insider:

Technology

Gmail, Apple Mail, and IMAP

I’d noticed my Apple Mail wasn’t always getting new messages in a timely manner. My iPhone would frequently get it before Mail!

  • Setup gmail, apple mail account as per google’s suggestions
  • These imap settings from google combine how gmail works with Apple’s mail. Read the extra details and the settings make sense.
  • It took 25 minutes to download all the email

While I was at it, I went ahead and setup syncing with google calendar. Recently, Google and Apple improved it so it could be two way:

Finally, it turns out that contact info between Apple’s Address book and gmail (and Yahoo!, for that matter) are doable:

Address Book002.png