Thank you for pointing out how ridiculous it sounds for people in a field that is as highly paying as ours is, to be complaining about wage suppression. I think a lot of people have gotten pretty out of touch with reality.
Anyways... even if one were so inclined to not share my perspective on this point (that our earnings as an industry are great), you would still need to acknowledge the possibility that this "agreement" might have actually freed up salaries for the wider job pool, instead of coalescing into singularities around a handful of rockstars.
There were no explicit compensation controls in place here. The top engineers at these companies are millionaires. Good engineers, as cromwellian points out, make easily in excess of 200K (sometimes a lot more) with total compensation.
This is about a no-cold-call agreement for employees, with a possible extended no-poaching agreement. This certainly already applied to executives, not just engineers. More-over, it is open to debate whether this actually had a negative effect on the industry as a whole. It might actually have given startups the opportunity to hire decent talent, and may have deflected hiring spending to engineers not already at Google/Apple/etc...
I'm not trying to justify the backroom, in-the-shadows type of dealings that went on here. That certainly came across as a little slimy. I am purely making a commentary on the perception that this somehow had a material effect in depressing the tech industry, engineering wages and/or quality of life.
Anyways... even if one were so inclined to not share my perspective on this point (that our earnings as an industry are great), you would still need to acknowledge the possibility that this "agreement" might have actually freed up salaries for the wider job pool, instead of coalescing into singularities around a handful of rockstars.