It's not just about Google, et al. At this scale, it affects the workers down the chain. Maybe the Google employees were getting $250K instead of $500K, which meant that companies downstream could get away with offering less, because they didn't have to get in a bidding war with those upstream.
Something this big clearly had effects on salaries across the board, at a scale where its difficult to casually judge the exact effects. Would wages everywhere be higher if it wasn't for this? I don't know, but I don't think we can rule out the possibility.
The thing is, it takes some incredible network effects that require a company at scale or an extremely fat market to generate this kind of money per employee, it's not like most smaller companies are holding back.
At that point, the infrastructure of the company is creating a lot of that value - the same engineer at another company would not generate nearly the same amount of revenue.
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It's not just about Google, et al. At this scale, it affects the workers down the chain. Maybe the Google employees were getting $250K instead of $500K, which meant that companies downstream could get away with offering less, because they didn't have to get in a bidding war with those upstream.
Something this big clearly had effects on salaries across the board, at a scale where its difficult to casually judge the exact effects. Would wages everywhere be higher if it wasn't for this? I don't know, but I don't think we can rule out the possibility.
The thing is, it takes some incredible network effects that require a company at scale or an extremely fat market to generate this kind of money per employee, it's not like most smaller companies are holding back.
At that point, the infrastructure of the company is creating a lot of that value - the same engineer at another company would not generate nearly the same amount of revenue.