I wonder how much small firms/startups have /benefited/ from this arrangement. By artificially reducing demand for labor, big tech firms have effectively made it more profitable for smaller firms to compete against them.
It's a approximately a zero sum game in the cartel. That was my point. If the price goes down the demand goes up. So the total demand for programmers increase (the demand for the other companies programmers decrease, of-course).
That, along with regulatory enforcement, was basically what broke the collusion scheme. Facebook as a growing company did not want to play ball, and aggressively poached from the other tech companies with bigger offers, forcing them to raise their compensation to retain employees.