The problem is not just that the employees have less options where to find a job. The real problem is that the employees don't know about the agreement!<p>If I work at Pixar and prospect Intel for a job, they will tell my boss and my carreer at Pixar will be messed for ever.<p>I had a boss that liked to fire employees who he knew were searching for jobs elsewhere. He would announce in job sites good offers asking for candidates with the skills used in his company, and didn't disclosed the company name. When he got answers from his own employees, he would fire them in the best opportunity. A great way to create a culture of fear.
I can only imagine how hard it is to have fair negotiations when a prospective employee applies at a competing company only to be told "no thanks" simply because of a hush hush agreement between the executives of said companies.<p>This flies counter with Google's "do no evil" statement and certainly doesn't paint a positive posthumous picture of Jobs.
CEO to the Board: I am indispensable; therefore I need the 10s of millions of dollars as compensation.<p>CEO to the employee: You are indispensable; therefore you can't leave for a better paying job.
"If a Pixar employee applies to Intel without being recruited by Intel, contact Pat Gelsinger and explain to him a Pixar employee (provide the candidates name) has applied to Intel without being recruited and he will contact the CEO of Pixar for approval to hire"<p>Scary.
The one argument I get sick of hearing bandied around in cases like these is: "but those companies invested a lot of money in training their employees. How would you like it if you owned a business and trained someone only to have them poached?"<p>In the words of Dwight Shrute: "False!". Most of the employees in question in this case and probably every other case where poaching is worthwhile are autodidacts. These employees are valuable precisely because they work hard to increase their own value. They know that, and they deserve to be paid accordingly by shopping themselves around.<p>It is in the market for autodidacts where actions like these are most damaging to the individuals affected.
This seems like a pretty poor strategy for the involved companies.<p>1) It makes other companies (not involved in the agreement) more attractive, as their salaries will be closer to the salaries offered by the companies involved in the cartel.<p>2) This means that the pool of potential employees is reduced due the agreement, which means that the companies involved in the cartel will have to bear higher recruiting costs.<p>3) These recruiting costs make a mistake in hiring more costly. It gets harder to "test" employees and let them go when they are a bad fit, because expenditures from your HR budget are shifted to the front (on the promise of savings down the line).<p>4) Further, when the cartel breaks (as it will, each company has an incentive to cheat on the other members) the payoff of this inflated recruiting "investment" disappears.
It is getting clearer and cleared that Google is just as any big corporation which will do any illegal and un-ethical thing as long as they are not caught.<p>Now, many of companies started with excellent ethical standards, but that is getting slowly lost as companies grow.<p>I wonder if there is some similar work as "Innovators Dilemma" but about company's ethical standards: explaining why and when a company's become very prone to "fuck ethics" approach.
Everyone is commenting on the "no evil" thing, so I want to give my take on that.<p>Yes, companies are large entities that maximize shareholder profit and therefore talking about "good companies" or "bad companies" is meaningless. But I always understood the "no evil" slogan to be accepting of that. To me, "do no evil" was the mentality that no matter how corporate the company may become, the humans who are part of it wont let anything blatantly horrible happen. The company might become a giant corporate machine, but the human cogs will always retain enough power to stop horrible mistakes.<p>Increasingly, I'm starting to believe that every company mutates into the same corporate mass given enough time. Pick a large corporation with dirty business practices. If you look far back enough in history, it was probably a wonderful place to work with great work ethics.
It just occurred to me that when I told Intel I wouldn't be returning after my internship, HR was very pushy about where I was going. I'm glad I was going to a company outside the agreement or I would probably have had no job.
imagine how fast Congress would get involved if something like this were revealed to exist between basketball or football teams for free agents. If these companies don't want employees to leave they are free to sign long term contracts to lock them up. This is plainly illegal
I'm the CEO of the fastest growing tech company in my geographical region ( off the beaten path ) and I get calls by other CEOs asking for stuff like this very very often. In our case it's because those other CEOs don't want to compete on perk and benefits with us which makes it even more sad.<p>This happens everywhere and at all levels.
Once again I am happy that non-competes are generally not enforced in California. Otherwise, the companies involved wouldn't even need to reach illegal agreements to interfere with the employment free market.
In east Asia, poaching is viewed as bad taste and disloyal. A person has to leave a job first before looking for next job. A company tries to recruit employees from other companies gets blacklisted for a period.<p>But despite of distaste, people does it.
Summary of <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/27/us-apple-lawsuit-idUSTRE80Q27420120127" rel="nofollow">http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/27/us-apple-lawsuit-i...</a><p>Kind of ironic that The AOL Way was supposed to be the reason The Verge guys <i>left</i> to start a new blog. It looks like the only thing they were tired of was Engadget's layout. The AOL Way doesn't deserve traffic.
somewhat related. Last week a friend of mine that is growing his recruiting business tried to put me in contact with someone at this firm in NYC, for a position that sounds ideal for me and my background. Once he got to the HR department, and as soon as they saw where i currently work, they told him that they have some agreement about not hiring people from my current company and that was it. They didn't even seem to want to explain the details of said agreement. Now, i definitely didn't sign a contract forbidding me from going to that place. Is this even legal?
I'm surprised just how ruthlessly this was enforced. When Jobs complained to Schmidt, the person who contacted an Apple employee was "terminated within the hour." A Senior Google VP replied: "Appropriate response, thank you. Please make a public example of this termination with the group."<p>Mind you, they have a great incentive. Only a handful of companies recognise 10x (or 100x) developers and they would like to continue paying just 2x for them.
Gee, I didn't know that employees were akin to the King's game, making it a Bad Thing to poach them.<p>In my world, poaching employees == offering them better options in exchange for the value generating capabilities that they bring to the table. Quid pro quo, and if someone else offers a better quo...
That is what is funny about all those people that treat ¨conspiracy theories¨ as nuts. Is like corruption must have a limit just because they have not seen it first hand.
According to <a href="http://assets.sbnation.com/assets/921674/In_Re_High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_-_Unredacted.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://assets.sbnation.com/assets/921674/In_Re_High-Tech_Emp...</a>, the source pdf, defendants are:<p>* Apple<p>* Lucasfilm<p>* Adobe<p>* Intuit<p>* Google<p>* Intel<p>* Pixar<p>Good to know. I shall follow this case with interest.
I am surprised that people are surprised by this.<p>Who do VCs spend their skiing trips with: ramen-fed, sleep-deprived startup founders, or other VCs? Of course, they hang out with each other.<p>Same with executives at large companies. They might be nominally "competitors", but they've already learned that they have more in common with one another than with employees in the companies they run.
Serious question: if an accelerator asks participating startups to not hire employees from one another, does it violate laws governing fair competition?
I would be curios to see a LinkedIn graph showing (and proactively finding) evidence of this whole saga.
That is, I would expect to see less movement of employees with certain talents, between conspiring companies.
I think this Betabeat article is really relevant since it shows that this is happening at the startup level in NYC as well:<p><a href="http://www.betabeat.com/2011/11/17/poaching-etiquette-how-to-love-thy-startup-neighbor-while-coveting-their-devs/" rel="nofollow">http://www.betabeat.com/2011/11/17/poaching-etiquette-how-to...</a><p>This is important because it means that new hires are probably getting less equity than they should be getting. Equity and belief in what the company is building should be enough to not require anti-poaching agreements.
To hell with this "nobody will know so let's do this" mentality - it's twenty fucking twelve in case you haven't noticed, the year when the "all seeing eye" becomes public property.
Here is a different perspective.<p>As an entreppreneur, I would not want my employees poached. I do not miind them seeking out other opportunities, but I would want them to make the move, not an external entity. Poaching can create artificial demand.<p>A satisfied employee an become unsatisfied overnight if he is offered a higher salary elsewhere which you don't/can't match.<p>If I had the way to stop poaching, I will. If my employee wants to seek new opportunities, I will not stop him.<p>The sacking of the person that was doing the recruiting is totally unacceptable to me. He was just doiing his job
So let's say I am running a startup with two employees. A friend of mine is also running a startup and needs to hire people. Is it wrong for me to ask him not to hire my employees?
I think anyone whose opinion of Steve Jobs is changed by this knowledge needs to take a good look in the mirror and ask if they are not the hypocrite. Jobs always was a consumate businessman. Before Apple, even, he was scheming his way through a job, getting Wozniak to do his work and going back on his word to split profits.<p>But isn't that what America is all about? Aren't your shoes, clothes, electronics, etc. made by low wage workers at companies run by men and women who are willing to do anything for an extra dollar? Isn't that capitalism? Isn't that their "fiduciary duty to the shareholders"?<p>In the world of engineering, engineers are a resource just as oil is a resource for an oil company. Do you also get angry when oil companies hire lobbyists to wine-and-dine politicians until they give favorable exploration rights on federal lands to those companies? How is this any different, morally?<p>Ultimately, the really hard question is: would we have the iPod, iPhone, MacBook Air, iPad if Jobs had <i>not</i> done what he did?