Here's what's saddest to me about this. There isn't really a labor shortage. These companies colluded for years on salary and poaching to make it possible to selectively hire from choice schools and people with a certain "pedigree" -- which artificially limited the pool of people they felt were "acceptable"...which drove up the salary of people from this pool which of course caused them to want to collude to keep wages down. This is why discriminatory hiring practices are bad for everybody.
Now years later Google, using the power of massive data, has figured out that it didn't really matter all that much that they were hiring from this artificially limited pool. Which means it didn't matter all that much to start with for any of these companies.
If they hadn't colluded on pay and poaching, but stayed selective, they would have been eventually forced to either reach outside this selective pool and end the "shortage" or suck up the higher wages.
Basically the market would have resolved the issue of higher wages for them.
Now years later Google, using the power of massive data, has figured out that it didn't really matter all that much that they were hiring from this artificially limited pool. Which means it didn't matter all that much to start with for any of these companies.
If they hadn't colluded on pay and poaching, but stayed selective, they would have been eventually forced to either reach outside this selective pool and end the "shortage" or suck up the higher wages.
Basically the market would have resolved the issue of higher wages for them.