Yes, it absolutely was. Well documented, complete with Justice Department litigation and settlements.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

BTW, Facebook didn't participate, and was by some measures, one of the reasons the collusion didn't continue to succeed.

Salaries were suppressed until after the litigation that my sibling comment by compiler-guy cited. Salaries did not begin to take off until ~2011.

How overpaid are employees relative to the amount of money they are bringing into the company?

How much money a company makes should not matter. You get paid by how hard you are to replace and how important your task is to continued revenue.

You can make your company $1 billion a day, and save countless lives, but if you can be replaced easily, do you expect to get paid much?

> how important your task is to continued revenue

Yes, that's what I meant by how much money you bring into the company.

If you bring in $1B a day (and save countless lives) and I can easily hire another employee just like you, why wouldn't I have done so already? Perhaps that is your point?

Be that as it may, how overpaid do you think tech employees are compared to the cost of replacing them?

much more relative to the average worker in many other industries

You're neglecting the most crucial variable here: profit margin. These engineers are super cheap.

Year over year wage increases relative to all workers and competition for labor in the tech sector are the signals you want to use. Total mergers and acquisitions and number of discontinued software products would be good secondary signals.