If https://outtalent.com/us50/ is to be believed, SWE engineers look pretty concentrated at the top ~5 companies and their subsidiaries. Do you think that data is incorrect?
Concretely, I would claim that >80% of the most skilled software engineers in the US work at <10 companies. Edit: I thought about it more and I think this is actually more like 65% at the 10 biggest companies, but that doesn’t change my central claims.
I also disagree with your claim that they are not a cartel. I think the biggest tech companies collude to fix wages so that they are sufficiently higher than every other company’s salaries to stifle competition, while also limiting race dynamics to maintain profits. I think this is done in the form of selectively enforced non-competes, illegal non-poaching agreements, and other shady practices. This has been alleged in court and the companies just settle every time, e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/01/technology/engineers-allege-hiring-collusion-in-silicon-valley.html?unlocked_article_code=1.uk4.A5Sn.q5fVDfF_q8Wk&smid=url-share
For those disagreeing--
1. I continue to believe that tech companies derive much of their economic power from cornering the skilled engineering labor market,
2. this is highly threatened by the advent of AI capable of coding,
3. and thus many big tech companies have massive economic incentives to limit the general public’s access to models that can code well.
If I changed my mind about any of those 3 points, I would change my mind about the main post. Rather than downvoting, or in addition to it, can you please explain which part you disagree with and why? It will be more productive for everyone and I am open to changing my mind.
Sorry, I can elaborate better on the situation. The big tech companies know that they can pay way more than smaller competitors, so they do. But then that group of megacorp tech (Google, Amazon, Meta, etc.) collude with each other to prevent runaway race dynamics. This is how they’re able to optimize their costs with the constraint of salaries being high enough to stifle competition. Here, I was just offering evidence for my claim that big tech is a monopsonistic cartel in the SWE labor market, it isn’t really evidence one way or another for the claims I make in the original post.