I used to teach statistics. I'd often use this distribution to illustrate that one shouldn't blindly use summary statistics of a distribution - that mean around 80K doesn't mean that all that many people make near 80K. But what I was secretly hoping was that I could talk someone out of going to law school.
You see this same distribution for business school graduates, and I suspect it has a similar cause.
You can either go to law school (or business school) immediately after finishing your bachelor's degree, or you can go back to school after 5 or so years in the work force. If you have no professional full-time experience, nobody is going to pay you more than $60k or $70k because it will take a few years for you to become a moderately productive employee. You're really no more useful than someone right out of undergrad. But if you have an advanced degree and a few years of proven job experience, you can hit the ground running and as such, employers often pay $150k+.
I bet if you were able to plot salaries and full-time experience on a graph, this would become obvious. That's my hypothesis, anyway.
The difference is almost all big law firms pay first year associates the same amount (within the same city, at least). For the last few years this has been ~160K in NYC/DC/SF. Smaller firms typically pay much, much less.
Getting into big law has little to do with prior experience. It's much more correlated with law school, but I know people who went to second rate schools who got offers to prestigious big law firms. I believe about 25% of employed new graduates go into big law.
This is not the case. The places being 160k are the white shoe firms--the Googles and Facebooks of the legal world. And they hire fresh law school grads with just a few summers' worth of clerkships and internships.
Law school grad here. I agree with the other replies to @exelius. For law, prior work experience does not help, and can even hurt. Those $160k jobs go, for the most part, to students from the top law schools, or top students from the second tier schools. For example, I went to a second-tier law school, and when those $160k firms came to campus for job interviews, they were only interested in interviewing those in the top 5% of the class.
The situation with MBAs and law degrees is quite a bit different. With law, it's not so much about the experience but about the fact that there are too many lawyers chasing too few jobs with the result that hitting it big with a prestigious big-city law firm pays the big bucks and everything else not so much (assuming you can even find a job as a lawyer). And those big-city law firm jobs go disproportionately to top graduates at a handful of top schools and/or to those with connections. The market for MBAs is a lot more diffuse and work experience is much more sought after by the top MBA programs than is the case with law.
Agree in general. However, with MBA programs skewing younger every year, you find people with 2-3 years work experience getting offers from management consulting firms and investment banks at the same salary levels as MBA grads with 5-6 years pre-MBA experience. I think it diverges later on though, especially in consulting. The person with 5-6 years pre-MBA experience tends to climb the rung faster because they have more credibility with clients.
Fair enough. The big management consulting firms and investment banks are sort of the MBA equivalent of the big-city law firm. (Big salaries, long hours, prior experience not especially required--with the caveat you stated.) In general though, the tail of MBA jobs outside of those areas, especially for people who already have some good work experience, is probably a lot healthier than for law these days.
Absolutely; consulting is probably only 25% of the MBA job pool and while they are usually the highest-paid, many people choose to take a slightly lower salary in exchange for not a job that has less travel. Pretty much all of those jobs require long hours as well, but at least you can go home at the end of the night.
What's very annoying about consulting, even at the MBBs is that the total compensation is not higher than in big tech when you include equity, at least for the first 3-4 years. Yet the lifestyle is significantly worse. After you hit Associate Principal (at McKinsey) or Manager (at Bain), then it really leaves big tech behind in terms of compensation.
Yeah, that's absolutely the case with consulting. Young kids just don't have the experience or maturity to be a manager at a consulting firm within a year or two, and so it does take them longer to make promotions. I personally don't think an MBA is particularly valuable if you don't have at least some work experience - you'll still make the same dumb mistakes that everyone makes their first few years working, only there will be a lot more attention on you.
Investment banks are a different world; they're basically an apprenticeship business where no amount of experience doing anything else can teach you how to do the job. They have been taking far fewer MBAs in recent year.
That's good to know. I was deciding between PM at a big tech firm and consulting at a couple of MBBs. Went with the PM route, but sometimes consider going back to consulting, although I'd enter at the same, post-MBA associate level.
I agree that 3-4 years of work experience really helps during the MBA. 6 is too much though (my case) because partying till 5am becomes a lot harder when you're 30 and all your classmates are 26.
This isn't new at all. Everyone in my law school class knew this before going in but still decided to roll the dice.
The major issue here is the US higher ed system which is massively unproductive and by and large a scam.
You don't need 3-years after your 4-year undergraduate degree to become a lawyer. In the UK, where common law comes from, you simply study law as an undergraduate. You finish at 22 and you're not saddled with massive debt and 3 more years of wasting your working age pursuing useless courses (my 2nd and 3rd year of law school were absolutely useless, while the first year was essential. These courses can be incorporated into undergraduate. Everyone else does it this way and they have high quality lawyers, probably better than ours.
This way if you decide you hate being a lawyer (like many do) or you don't get a job at a firm, your legal education is still valuable for other careers in business, strategy, etc. You're still young and don't have to worry about the three extra years and $200k you spent going to law school.
Medicine is the same way in other countries - you go to med school as an undergraduate, with the same benefits that you mention for law school as an undergrad.
I wont disagree that perhaps the US system could use reform/overhaul, but it's a bit more complicated than you describe. When you compare how medical schools and medical school admissions are handled in the US versus how law schools are organized, it's no surprise why law school has a glut of graduates who can't find jobs. I know this because I have enough friend who went on either of those tracks (as well as others). The med school kids all have jobs that pay well-enough, and the law school kids all became disilusioned and moved to other fields (except for the one that went to NYU).
The number of Medical school admissions and future residency positions is pretty well controlled, so this kind of problem doesn't really arise (well, it's complicated but more or less).
On the other hand, any school can spin up a law program and start charging admission, no matter how qualified it is to actually do that. But it's only worthwhile going to law school if you can get into the first tier (Harvard, Yale, Columbia, NYU) or second tier schools. Third and fourth tier are basically a joke. You're throwing your money away. Of course, many people ignore that thinking they'll be different or lucky. And we end up with the kind of issues we see here today.
It's still more complicated, though, because a lot of what people from third and fourth tier schools used to do (sit in giant rooms and review case law for big cases), they are no longer needed for thanks to technology. So the 2000's onward was an awful time to want to be shove yourself through law school hail-mary hoping that just because you're a "lawyer" you'll be OK.
Law schools students got squeezed on both sides, and the pain is real. A profession that used to be much like medicine, where you would do "OK" in life at the very worst is now a commodity product thanks to forces from all sides.
>A profession that used to be much like medicine, where you would do "OK" in life at the very worst is now a commodity product thanks to forces from all sides.
I went to graduate school at a college that had a primarily liberal-arts oriented undergraduate curriculum and I knew a lot of people who graduated with their liberal arts degree and ended up going to law school after finding that their degree wasn't really setting them on the path to a successful career. Not universally of course and a number of my friends did quite well for themselves with just their undergrad degrees but those who did didn't really follow particularly conventional career paths.
So for a reasonable number of people I knew, law school functioned as this sort of default career path for liberal arts undergrads--though a fair number of them didn't stay in the profession long-term.
>On the other hand, any school can spin up a law program and start charging admission, no matter how qualified it is to actually do that.
And a lot of them did, because a successful law school is a license to print money. Tuition is high, and there are no pesky labs or expensive test equipment to maintain.
This is true in most countries. One caveat is that some countries that do it this way (Brazil, and perhaps Japan?) have very stringent entrance exams to enter that major.
The other point is some schools have undergraduate degrees that look like law degrees, and could perhaps serve the function with just a little tweaking. [0] [1] You just can't be a lawyer with them.
The whole thing is part a scam by schools (full priced students that can be served in large classes) and also the profession.
The untouched comment is law school was also a socially acceptable way for intelligent but undirected people to defer their choice of occupation for 3 more years.
Not to pile on or insult US law students, but this is supported by the fact that for a long time in the US all you had to do was pass the bar exam to be a lawyer (now only two states allow this, with major caveats). Law is as difficult an occupation as any, but it really isn't like medicine in that it should require front-loaded special education (early in a medical career your mistakes are less reversible than an early lawyer's, etc). Apprenticing (like the Brits do) should be good enough.
I wouldn't think so. Bay area salaries may be somewhat higher because of cost-of-living and certain high-profile firms may pay more than average even in that market. But you probably don't have anything like the stark salary bifurcation that you have in law where you have the big city associate salaries and everyone else (who may well consider themselves reasonably fortunate to even find a job. any job, as a lawyer).
I don't think so. The higher tier of lawyers is making 2-3x what the lower tier of lawyers is making. I think top end engineers are making 50-100% more than lower tier engineers, but not 200-300% more.
Part of me suspects that there is somewhat of one, just based on various ASK HN's over the years. However, I think it would be much less pronounced because the practice of law is more dependent on interpersonal relationships than the practice of engineering...who your daddy went to school with has less influence on your access to an engineering position at Google than for a job at a white shoe firm.
Or will there be, once the affect of code bootcamp type programs is seen? I think they are a pretty great idea, but it seems like the two most likely outcomes are a bump in more entry-level hiring with lower salaries, or a tougher entry-level market with quite a few disappointed graduates.
Question... could a big cause of the bimodal distribution come from the big divide between graduating from a top school and getting recruited by a prestigious law firm vs the other lower paying jobs such as public defender, private practice ambulance chaser, etc?
Peter Thiel once said that a diploma is a dunce hat if you don't go to a top school.[1] I'd translate that further and say that if you don't get into one of the top-20 law schools (Phoenix Law instead of Harvard Law), you will most likely end up on the lower paying bimodal hump instead of the higher one.
The "dunce" characterization comes into play because those lower tier law schools are still very expensive and even the unranked schools[2] will still require massive loans to finish.
Yes, of course. Top law offices hire heavily from top-tier schools, and they're largely responsible for the upper mode.
> "Peter Thiel once said that a diploma is a dunce hat if you don't go to a top school."
This is the perfect example of someone who lives in separate reality from most people, and extrapolates his rare experiences to the world at large.
Are there entrepreneurial wunderkinds who can extract more value from real world experience than classroom experience? Some, not many (though most of Thiel's cohorts probably fall in this category). And are there majors and degrees and programs that are more likely to result in underemployment or a poor debt-to-earnings ratio? Sure, some.
But the vast majority of people earn significantly more and enjoy a higher standard of living simply by virtue of having a degree. In addition to the financial benefit, many people value the experience of their time spent in college.
Thiel seems entirely disconnected from the reality of most people. That's ok, it's understandable. But calling people dunces for making rational choices given their personal circumstances makes him come off like a total asshat.
> This is the perfect example of someone who lives in
> separate reality from most people, and extrapolates his
> rare experiences to the world at large.
As someone who reads CVs/resumes for a living in the UK, all that putting a low-tier university on your CV tells me - unless you got a first, or an academic prize - is that you fucked up your A-Levels, and then got pushed in to doing a degree because everyone else does them.
In the US there are a whole lot of entry-level jobs for which your resume will get tossed immediately with no four year degree. Any degree. From any school.
A generation ago you could get these jobs straight from high school, but that's not the way it is today.
Again, your personal experience does not extrapolate well to the world at large. This is demonstrated by the fact that it doesn't correlate with statistical evidence. I don't know why this is so difficult for people (even smart people) to see.
You're comparing a desirable degree vs. a low-tier degree in the context of your company and hiring process. That might mean the world to you, but it's irrelevant to determining whether a low-tier degree has value.
Compare low-tier graduates to non-graduates in the economy at large. People holding no degree are vastly more likely to be unemployed or hold a minimum wage, manual labor job. People holding a degree (even a lower tier degree), are much more likely than the no-degree group to have a more desirable job that pays relatively well.
There may be many factors explaining why this disparity exists. But certainly one reason is that many companies currently require an applicant have a college degree even for non-desirable entry-level jobs. If you don't have a degree, you're not even getting your foot in the door. This practice probably makes little sense, but it's the way things currently are, and why holding a low-tier degree is much better than the alternative of holding no degree for most people.
Anyone have insight as to why the upper mode is so unnaturally spikey? Is this somehow a result of law salaries/bonuses being well-publicized in the law community? Maybe collusion between top law firms?
Intern salaries at all big companies hover around 7K-8K/month or so., milk cost around $4/gallon and so on. You do not need collusion to come to the same price.
From nabraham's post [0], it seems that this is actually the result of completely transparent salary information. The firms are all in lockstep because they can all see what each other are paying and adjust to the same number. I'm not sure collusion really applies to that type of scenario, especially when the net result seems to be that employees get paid more, not less. (A raise in salaries at one firm will cause an equivalent raise in others, because they're afraid of missing out on talent.)
How much total compensation are the people making $160K getting? I ask because for many software jobs, salary is only a part of total compensation. I assume that's also true for law, which may make the distribution even more skewed.
If you trust the Economist [0] it's been 7.5-15K in recent years. It's very supply/demand driven, and firms tend to move in lockstep. It goes up to 100K and beyond for the senior-most non-partners. The big raise comes (like most professional services firms) in jumping from the senior-most non-partner to the junior-most partner (owner).
There are a handful of firms that beat the market scale, but even more firms that pay less than market (mostly through below-market bonuses, rather than through below-market salaries).
fair enough--your numbers are well documented and are a better representation of the "average" big law firm. I was more pointing to the best of the best. I believe the top firms produce about 6MM profits per partner, though the profits aren't equally distributed among the partners
It's mostly because for them it's so expensive to get a steady flow of clients. Kind of like how freelance programmers can charge $150/hr for dev work, but times two because it's much harder for a lawyer to get ongoing work from new clients. I started a whole company around this problem (Lawdingo.com - yc w13) and we're trying to get the rates down to the level you mentioned by handing all the logistics of getting lawyers a consistent flow of new clients.
They also have very high overhead costs. Most law firms have very nice offices in very prominent parts of the city. This is not cheap so they need to charge a very high price to just remain in business.
From an economic perspective, you can imagine that a lawyer can typically bill 2000 hours per year. If the lawyer's salary + benefits + retirement contribution is 150k per year, they would need $75 per hour to cover this cost. Since the lawyer is working for a big firm which has high overhead costs and a goal of returning profit to their partners, the amount that they bill typically 3X their hourly salary (3X $75 = $225). This is why it is so expensive to hire an attorney. For large corporations, this fee is reasonable since they have millions of dollars at stake in an M&A transaction, IPO deal, or patent litigation. For regular working folks, this is often unaffordable. Due to the bifurcation of the potential clients (big business vs. everyone else), there is also a bifurcation on attorney salaries.
That sort of makes sense, except that pricing should follow supply and demand, not marketing costs. There should be lawyers willing to work for less when the market is oversupplied and salaries drop.
The story gets more interesting - the legal field is one of the few where salary information is totally transparent. If you know the law firm name and how long a person has worked there you can look up their salary. [1] Partner salary is also published, but only the average for all partners. In 1998 a group of lawyers started posting salaries in a Yahoo Group called Greedy Associates. [2] Many firms, upon seeing competitor salary information, felt the need to move in lock-step for fear of losing out top talent because of salary. This created a faster increase in lawyer salaries in the last 10 years then in any other time in history. In 1998 the firms that were paying $90K are now paying $165k. [3] Today, firms publish the data themselves so they can control the message.
Similar to lawyers, it would be interesting if instead of relying on Wealthfront and AngelList, engineers at Google, Facebook, Apple, etc started openly contributing their salary information to increase wages to 2-3x that of engineers at less selective employers and create this bi-modal distribution in tech.
You seem to be postulating a pretty massive market failure if some incremental transparency around salaries at a few Silicon Valley firms would increase salaries to that degree.
It's a very different environment from law firms. Big, prestigious firms can pay first-year associates so much because they can bill them out to corporate clients in a way that the small-town lawyer who handles personal real estate transactions can't. I did some work for one of the well-known NY law firms a while back and the cost of the part of the project I was associated with must have been staggering. I know what I was paid and it was a lot and that was a tiny slice of the entire project.
By contrast, it's not clear to me why more salary transparency at Apple, Google, and Facebook would trigger this bidding war that would cause them to pay so much more than everyone else in the industry. After all, they're already considered desirable employers even with wages that are (I assume) somewhat above market but not ridiculously so.
> You seem to be postulating a pretty massive market failure if some incremental transparency around salaries at a few Silicon Valley firms would increase salaries to that degree.
We know for a fact there was massive market distortion by deliberate employer action; that would arguably have an effect similar to that of massive market failure.
We know there was a lawsuit related to employer collusion that supposedly depressed salaries. How much is a matter of debate given that the salaries in question are pretty high by any measure. So I question whether there was a "massive" market distortion.
The parent argument was that a different form of what some might also call collusion--publishing salaries in the context of setting the going rate as large law firms apparently do--would instead massively (2-3x) increase salaries at those same firms.
I'm not sure openly publishing salaries is collusion, which usually is a (secret) attempt by a few players to set prices for everyone. Like in the law firm example, all this affects only the top companies. Also, different structures can create economics outcomes that vary by 2-3x, no market failure needed. Take a look at a small example like Hired.com - firms openly bidding on engineers has resulted in salaries that seem to be 50-100% higher than those achieved absent such a structure.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 114 ms ] threadYou can either go to law school (or business school) immediately after finishing your bachelor's degree, or you can go back to school after 5 or so years in the work force. If you have no professional full-time experience, nobody is going to pay you more than $60k or $70k because it will take a few years for you to become a moderately productive employee. You're really no more useful than someone right out of undergrad. But if you have an advanced degree and a few years of proven job experience, you can hit the ground running and as such, employers often pay $150k+.
I bet if you were able to plot salaries and full-time experience on a graph, this would become obvious. That's my hypothesis, anyway.
Getting into big law has little to do with prior experience. It's much more correlated with law school, but I know people who went to second rate schools who got offers to prestigious big law firms. I believe about 25% of employed new graduates go into big law.
Investment banks are a different world; they're basically an apprenticeship business where no amount of experience doing anything else can teach you how to do the job. They have been taking far fewer MBAs in recent year.
I agree that 3-4 years of work experience really helps during the MBA. 6 is too much though (my case) because partying till 5am becomes a lot harder when you're 30 and all your classmates are 26.
The major issue here is the US higher ed system which is massively unproductive and by and large a scam.
You don't need 3-years after your 4-year undergraduate degree to become a lawyer. In the UK, where common law comes from, you simply study law as an undergraduate. You finish at 22 and you're not saddled with massive debt and 3 more years of wasting your working age pursuing useless courses (my 2nd and 3rd year of law school were absolutely useless, while the first year was essential. These courses can be incorporated into undergraduate. Everyone else does it this way and they have high quality lawyers, probably better than ours.
This way if you decide you hate being a lawyer (like many do) or you don't get a job at a firm, your legal education is still valuable for other careers in business, strategy, etc. You're still young and don't have to worry about the three extra years and $200k you spent going to law school.
The number of Medical school admissions and future residency positions is pretty well controlled, so this kind of problem doesn't really arise (well, it's complicated but more or less).
On the other hand, any school can spin up a law program and start charging admission, no matter how qualified it is to actually do that. But it's only worthwhile going to law school if you can get into the first tier (Harvard, Yale, Columbia, NYU) or second tier schools. Third and fourth tier are basically a joke. You're throwing your money away. Of course, many people ignore that thinking they'll be different or lucky. And we end up with the kind of issues we see here today.
It's still more complicated, though, because a lot of what people from third and fourth tier schools used to do (sit in giant rooms and review case law for big cases), they are no longer needed for thanks to technology. So the 2000's onward was an awful time to want to be shove yourself through law school hail-mary hoping that just because you're a "lawyer" you'll be OK.
Law schools students got squeezed on both sides, and the pain is real. A profession that used to be much like medicine, where you would do "OK" in life at the very worst is now a commodity product thanks to forces from all sides.
I went to graduate school at a college that had a primarily liberal-arts oriented undergraduate curriculum and I knew a lot of people who graduated with their liberal arts degree and ended up going to law school after finding that their degree wasn't really setting them on the path to a successful career. Not universally of course and a number of my friends did quite well for themselves with just their undergrad degrees but those who did didn't really follow particularly conventional career paths.
So for a reasonable number of people I knew, law school functioned as this sort of default career path for liberal arts undergrads--though a fair number of them didn't stay in the profession long-term.
And a lot of them did, because a successful law school is a license to print money. Tuition is high, and there are no pesky labs or expensive test equipment to maintain.
The other point is some schools have undergraduate degrees that look like law degrees, and could perhaps serve the function with just a little tweaking. [0] [1] You just can't be a lawyer with them.
The whole thing is part a scam by schools (full priced students that can be served in large classes) and also the profession.
The untouched comment is law school was also a socially acceptable way for intelligent but undirected people to defer their choice of occupation for 3 more years.
[0] http://collegecatalog.uchicago.edu/thecollege/lawlettersands...
[1] http://catalog.yale.edu/ycps/subjects-of-instruction/ethics-...
Peter Thiel once said that a diploma is a dunce hat if you don't go to a top school.[1] I'd translate that further and say that if you don't get into one of the top-20 law schools (Phoenix Law instead of Harvard Law), you will most likely end up on the lower paying bimodal hump instead of the higher one.
The "dunce" characterization comes into play because those lower tier law schools are still very expensive and even the unranked schools[2] will still require massive loans to finish.
[1]http://money.cnn.com/2014/09/16/investing/peter-thiel-apple-...
[2]http://www.azsummitlaw.edu/admissions/tuition-and-financial-...
> "Peter Thiel once said that a diploma is a dunce hat if you don't go to a top school."
This is the perfect example of someone who lives in separate reality from most people, and extrapolates his rare experiences to the world at large.
Are there entrepreneurial wunderkinds who can extract more value from real world experience than classroom experience? Some, not many (though most of Thiel's cohorts probably fall in this category). And are there majors and degrees and programs that are more likely to result in underemployment or a poor debt-to-earnings ratio? Sure, some.
But the vast majority of people earn significantly more and enjoy a higher standard of living simply by virtue of having a degree. In addition to the financial benefit, many people value the experience of their time spent in college.
Thiel seems entirely disconnected from the reality of most people. That's ok, it's understandable. But calling people dunces for making rational choices given their personal circumstances makes him come off like a total asshat.
A generation ago you could get these jobs straight from high school, but that's not the way it is today.
You're comparing a desirable degree vs. a low-tier degree in the context of your company and hiring process. That might mean the world to you, but it's irrelevant to determining whether a low-tier degree has value.
Compare low-tier graduates to non-graduates in the economy at large. People holding no degree are vastly more likely to be unemployed or hold a minimum wage, manual labor job. People holding a degree (even a lower tier degree), are much more likely than the no-degree group to have a more desirable job that pays relatively well.
There may be many factors explaining why this disparity exists. But certainly one reason is that many companies currently require an applicant have a college degree even for non-desirable entry-level jobs. If you don't have a degree, you're not even getting your foot in the door. This practice probably makes little sense, but it's the way things currently are, and why holding a low-tier degree is much better than the alternative of holding no degree for most people.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9448562
[0] http://www.economist.com/news/business/21636751-why-big-end-...
There are a handful of firms that beat the market scale, but even more firms that pay less than market (mostly through below-market bonuses, rather than through below-market salaries).
First-year partners aren't likely to make 1MM+, but rather something in the range of 300k-700k (http://www.quora.com/What-does-the-average-junior-partner-at...). Average compensation of all partners in 2012 was 681k (http://abovethelaw.com/2012/09/new-data-on-law-firm-partner-...).
From an economic perspective, you can imagine that a lawyer can typically bill 2000 hours per year. If the lawyer's salary + benefits + retirement contribution is 150k per year, they would need $75 per hour to cover this cost. Since the lawyer is working for a big firm which has high overhead costs and a goal of returning profit to their partners, the amount that they bill typically 3X their hourly salary (3X $75 = $225). This is why it is so expensive to hire an attorney. For large corporations, this fee is reasonable since they have millions of dollars at stake in an M&A transaction, IPO deal, or patent litigation. For regular working folks, this is often unaffordable. Due to the bifurcation of the potential clients (big business vs. everyone else), there is also a bifurcation on attorney salaries.
Similar to lawyers, it would be interesting if instead of relying on Wealthfront and AngelList, engineers at Google, Facebook, Apple, etc started openly contributing their salary information to increase wages to 2-3x that of engineers at less selective employers and create this bi-modal distribution in tech.
[1] http://www.lawfirmstats.com/firms/ [2] https://books.google.com/books?id=IY4ieeVyer4C&pg=PA18&lpg=P... [3] http://www.bizjournals.com/phoenix/stories/1998/10/05/newsco...
It's a very different environment from law firms. Big, prestigious firms can pay first-year associates so much because they can bill them out to corporate clients in a way that the small-town lawyer who handles personal real estate transactions can't. I did some work for one of the well-known NY law firms a while back and the cost of the part of the project I was associated with must have been staggering. I know what I was paid and it was a lot and that was a tiny slice of the entire project.
By contrast, it's not clear to me why more salary transparency at Apple, Google, and Facebook would trigger this bidding war that would cause them to pay so much more than everyone else in the industry. After all, they're already considered desirable employers even with wages that are (I assume) somewhat above market but not ridiculously so.
We know for a fact there was massive market distortion by deliberate employer action; that would arguably have an effect similar to that of massive market failure.
The parent argument was that a different form of what some might also call collusion--publishing salaries in the context of setting the going rate as large law firms apparently do--would instead massively (2-3x) increase salaries at those same firms.