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Guy who colluded with other high level corporate officers (see techtopus) to artificially limit the salaries of tens of thousands of highly skilled workers, now

Guy who colluded with other high level corporate officers (see techtopus) to artificially limit the salaries of tens of thousands of highly skilled workers, now asked to advise the government on how to do innovation. For purely moral reasons I'd disqualify him from the position. I suspect he'll find some way to leverage this to benefit himself and/or his friends and won't consider any harm to the public. I don't want this guy in this position.

linkregister 11y ago
I think that his accomplishments may outweigh that transgression, which likely affected 15,000 software developers at most. He did manage to help vastly increase Google employees' personal wealth through a meteoric rise in their stock value. In this case, it's probably best to match the malfeasance with the risk. What do you think he is likely to harm within government program management? Edit: my original estimate of 15k was way off base. A subsequent poster has suggested it was a minimum of 64,000, probably substantially more.
- mnglkhn2 11y ago
  I would say it affected an entire industry. If the salaries have a certain value in SV then everybody else will use those as a signal and adjust their offers accordingly. edit: not really difficult to do, you can compare the salaries per region (averages, median and distributions) pre and post lawsuit.
  - harryh 11y ago
    It's fine to say that, but finding actual data to support that hypothesis is awfully difficult.
- accountatwork 11y ago
  > which likely affected 15,000 software developers at most Where does this number come from? When the wage fixing agreement was canceled, Google immediately issued an across the board raise, and compensation has increase very quickly since then. That's 15k software devs right there, not even considering the second-order effects, which are surely non-zero.
  - linkregister 11y ago
    I made a rough tally of the developers employed by the companies involved in the conspiracy at that time. What do you think is a more accurate count? Can you discuss the second-order effects? They're not apparent to me. Edit: HN isn't allowing me to reply to you. Thanks for correcting my estimate. I was way off.
    - accountatwork 11y ago
      15k barely covers the engineers employed by Google alone at the time. The class action lawsuit covers 64k employees, and that's a subset of the employees affected. If your argument is that Eric Schmidt's entering in the agreement only affected employees at Google, that's clearly false. A single company no-poach agreement would clearly be worthless, so it must be the case that Eric Schmidt's actions affected employees at other companies. If you believe some of the latest news, the agreement spread to enough companies that 1M employees were directly affected: https://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles-wage-fixing-cartel-involved-dozens-more-companies-over-one-million-employees/ https://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles-wage.... Schmidt and Jobs were central in creating the agreement and its spread. As for the second order effects, do you know a hiring manager? Ask them about how competitive offers have changed since the no-poach agreement was canceled. The effect is much larger than just having to keep up with the across the board raise Google gave to their employees when the agreement expired, which was itself non-trivial.
- InclinedPlane 11y ago
  Right. I'm sure that he knew better than they did, it was fine for him to limit their choices through collusion as long as he also took actions which helped some of them a little and himself a lot.
- SixSigma 11y ago
  When your costs don't increase in line with profits then share price rises. The easiest way to do this is wages. In the 1980s it was through massive layoffs.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
JabavuAdams 11y ago
Pixar CEO Ed Catmull was a huge inspiration to me, and it was disappointing that he also participated in the collusion. His book on the Pixar team has a lot of useful info, but it's interesting to read it knowing about the collusion to depress salaries. All I can say is humans are good at compartmentalization. Once some tactic becomes commonplace in an industry, insiders don't even consider it shady any more. We all need to get paid, and as long as we're not the worst offenders, then at least we're not as bad as those other guys, right?
- mnglkhn2 11y ago
  Not that I am ok with it, but the collusion is a double edged sword. Let me explain myself: On one hand it is bad that the employee gets less than the market and the company is willing to pay. And that should absolutely be corrected somehow. On the other hand, now that the salaries have exploded in SV, you can see the transfer happening towards the real estate owners. I can bet on it, that if the salaries go down, the real estate in SV/SF will take a hit. So. the business owner has to face this: if I let the salaries go up, then it will be difficult to bring in entry level people since they won't be able to enter the market. And they'll have to go with shared apartments and other similar arrangements, which is untenable in the long run. Plus, it is not sure the employee will be able to retain much of that salary increase. I know, it sounds paternalistic for the employer to think this and maybe it is better to let the market settle the current salaries/living costs tussle. But my argument is that maybe Catmull had other considerations aside from the business bottom line. The employee pipeline is actually more important.
  - newjersey 11y ago
    Silicon Valley has to take a lead when it comes to working remotely. At the very least, let the well paid people work from a list of co-working spaces around the country or something if renting an office in Portland, Oregon or New York, NY is a problem and you won't have people working from home.
    - imglorp 11y ago
grandalf 11y ago
He's also very supportive of government surveillance and has spent a substantial amount of his career cultivating relationships with officials. All this is thanks to the Microsoft anti-trust lawsuit which led Google to choose someone like Schmidt to ingratiate the company with lawmakers to prevent a similar lawsuit.
- benevol 11y ago
  Mass surveillance is in Google's/Schmidt's DNA. It's their business model: More surveillance => most precise profiles on Internet users => most precise ad targeting => higher margin => more $$$
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - api 11y ago
    If anything private sector driven surveillance can be creepier-- it's a total "wild west" without even the pretense of public oversight and virtually no regulation. Only the most insanely creepy things like capturing video from your house and using it for analytics might run afoul of the law, and even there you'd have to prove it and prove harm and it would likely be civil not criminal. The NSA and CIA at least technically answer to the public and are subject to regulations about what they can do with the data. To quote Steve Rambam from HOPE: "If you're angry about what the NSA is doing, you should be furious about what Google and Facebook are doing." IMHO the Amazon Echo and similar beyond-Orwellian devices will someday be looked back upon with the same amount of "what were they thinking?!!?!" as stuff like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core To continue with the nuclear analogy: I've been predicting a privacy/security "Chernobyl" event related to mobile and/or IoT for many years now. It'll be something like a corporate whistleblower revealing that a company has been running all ambient sound from all customers' houses through speech to text for over a year, then putting it all in a database and selling access more or less indiscriminately. Customers, it will come out, will include organized crime, foreign governments, etc., and some of the data will turn out to be from the homes of US Government Secret and Top Secret clearance employees, CXO level corporate personnel, police, etc. Only a matter of time. I'm counting the days.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
sbochins 11y ago
Wow, even if it was only 15k developers (which it wasn't) that is still very bad. Does he have to screw over 1 million people? 1 billion people? Seems like a very low bar we're setting here.
- tanv_nadkarni 11y ago
  Imagine a company has a policy that says "we wont hire black people". Does the number really matter whether 1 person was turned down or 20k ? Google discriminating against a person for their past employment without being upfront about is pure evil.
id 11y ago
I mainly remember him for saying this: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”
- hyperliner 11y ago
  Because you got nothing to hide! Right? Rriiiiigggghhttt /sarcasm
  - tempodox 11y ago
    Everybody has something to hide. It's called privacy.
    - hyperliner 11y ago
      People did not get my sarcasm. That was my whole point.
- bottled_poe 11y ago
  Because we all know that popular opinion is always right.
  - bottled_poe 11y ago
    To the down voters: Your sarcasm and irony sensors may be due for a tune-up.
TheOsiris 11y ago
I think this is just a stepping stone for Eric until he head's the Trump Admin's Trust and Safety Council. After all, if you're a good person you have nothing to fear
- code4life 11y ago
  Aha! So maybe Trump does have a way to turn off the internet!
  - gnarbarian 11y ago
    he probably has someone unplug his router.
csberg 11y ago
If you're against hiring public officers and advisers based on moral turpitude, there'd be a non-existent stack left to hire from.
- mulmen 11y ago
  Is this actually true? Are you saying that every person in the world is morally bankrupt? We hire corrupt officials because people allow it. I fail to see what this defeatist attitude solves. Apathy is the enemy of democracy.
  - code4life 11y ago
    American government was intended to be limited. That would limit the number of people, and the power that they have in government. Today, our government is huge, and has a lot of power. This means that often times the people that get into government aren't doing it as a servant to the people, but instead as a service to themselves. We need more servants. Viewing this reality and calling it Apathy or not Apathy is a perspective. We are all free to our perspective, and I think the wider variety, the better.
  - shawn-butler 11y ago
    "I do not believe with the Rochefoucaults and the Montaignes that fourteen out of fifteen men are rogues. I believe a great abatement from that proportion may be made in favor of general honesty. But I have always found that rogues would be uppermost, and I do not know that the proportion is too strong for the higher orders and for those who, rising above the swinish multitude, always contrive to nestle themselves into the places of power and profit. These rogues set out with stealing the people's good opinion, and then steal from them the right of withdrawing it, by contriving laws and associations against the power of the people themselves." --Thomas Jefferson to Mann Page, 1795. ME 9:306
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
aresant 11y ago
Just to color with the facts - which only underscore your point: "In one incident, after receiving a complaint from Steve Jobs of Apple, Schmidt sent an email to Google's HR people saying; "I believe we have a policy of no recruiting from Apple and this is a direct inbound request. Can you get this stopped and let me know why this is happening? I will need to send a response back to Apple quickly so please let me know as soon as you can. Thanks Eric". Schmidt's email led to a recruiter for Google being "terminated within the hour" for not having adhered to the illegal scheme. Under Schmidt, there was a "Do Not Call list" of companies Google would avoid recruiting from.[37] According to a court filing, another email exchange shows Google's human resources director asking Schmidt about sharing its no-cold call agreements with competitors. Schmidt responded that he preferred it be shared "verbally, since I don't want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later?".[36] Way beyond bad behavior or accidental participant. Flat out collusion. (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt
- jtuente 11y ago
  There's some critically missing information here that muddies the water and I would like some clarification. >there was a "Do Not Call list" of companies Google would avoid recruiting from. >no-cold call agreements with competitors This explicitly means that the colluding companies would not try to cold-call recruit from each other. These companies are large employers and provide thousands of jobs, cool. This does not say that they would refuse to hire anyone that worked for a colluding company. So if someone was working for Apple for a wage they were satisfied with (after all they agreed to the wage when they accepted the position), then Google would not try to call them. If that someone decided to apply to Google and try to get a job there because they wanted a higher salary, then would this collusion work against that person? Or would Google consider them for employment as they would consider any other professional? The effects on wages for the profession aren't what I'm asking about; I'm asking only about this situation.
  - smokinn 11y ago
    It was much worse than just a do-not-call. The evidence states that the defendants agreed not to poach employees from each other or give them offers if they voluntarily applied, and to notify the current employers of any employees trying to switch between them. They also agreed not to enter into bidding wars and to limit the potential for employees to negotiate for higher salaries. http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/19/damning-evidence-emerges-in-google-apple-no-poach-antitrust-lawsuit/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/19/damning-evidence-emerges-in...
fixermark 11y ago
> Guy who colluded with other high level corporate officers (see techtopus) Okay, but I don't see what an e-commerce long-term strategic partner has to do with salary-fixing...
peyton 11y ago
I was under the impression this agreement, at least initially, was to prevent anticompetitive poaching. Suppose Apple wants to dominate search. One way to do so is to poach every Google search engineer by offering to triple their salaries. These companies agreed not to do that. Yeah, it's illegal, but what options did these executive have? California effectively bans noncompete clauses. And there's enough money in the system and teams are typically small enough that dismantling a competitor is feasible. Google Engineer Sarah shouldn't be paid triple Google Engineer Jessie just because she works on a product that's valuable to Competitor X. Edit: original post not clear enough. Reproducing a reply below: >The problem was with using money to prevent your competitors from doing business. Doing so subverts the free market. Suppose every time a competitor rented office space, you bought the building and evicted them. Suppose Walmart opens a store in SoMa that sells groceries at a tenth of what surrounding stores sell, then jacks prices when those stores fold. To ELI5: you run a lemonade stand. Your neighbor Susie also has a lemonade stand. Susie's mom doesn't like your parents and wants you to fail, so she pays the store $500 to not sell you lemonades. Yeah, the market price of exclusive lemonade rights is now $500, but unreasonable sums are being spent to prevent competition. Something's wrong. There are laws against most anticompetitive practices, but not all. Part of the motivation behind the poaching agreement was filling a gap. You could dismantle a competitor by paying everyone and anyone in their product's critical path to simply not work there anymore. The solution, an antipoaching agreement, was illegal.
- kuschku 11y ago
  > Google Engineer Sarah shouldn't be paid triple Google Engineer Jessie just because she works on a product that's valuable to Competitor X. So, instead of a Demand-Supply based free market for jobs, you want the same wages for everyone? I’m sorry, but even for me as a left-leaning european that’s too socialistic.
  - peyton 11y ago
    Hmm, I don't think the original post was clear enough. The problem was with using money to prevent your competitors from doing business. Doing so subverts the free market. Suppose every time a competitor rented office space, you bought the building and evicted them. Suppose Walmart opens a store in SoMa that sells groceries at a tenth of what surrounding stores sell, then jacks prices when those stores fold. To ELI5: you run a lemonade stand. Your neighbor Susie also has a lemonade stand. Susie's mom doesn't like your parents and wants you to fail, so she pays the store $500 to not sell you lemonades. Yeah, the market price of exclusive lemonade rights is now $500, but unreasonable sums are being spent to prevent competition. Something's wrong. There are laws against most anticompetitive practices, but not all. Part of the motivation behind the poaching agreement was filling a gap. This was illegal.
profeta 11y ago
more recently didn't he lobbied for drone laws two years ago after he saw one flying near his property?
eewffwe 11y ago
Could it be as simple as the tech giants didn't want a wage war whereby the highest payer would simply monopolize the talent market?
- jsmeaton 11y ago
  So manipulating the market to artificially keep salaries low? Can you see the problem/illegality here?
  - eewffwe 11y ago
    It's silly how people view this situation here. If one company has the resources to manipulate the market, they will do so outside the talent pool. Apple could buy up most patents and restrict anybody from using them. THEN, you would see the problem. But when it's human resource, you want the free market to be free.
- rqebmm 11y ago
  Of course that's their incentive. And because it benefits a few and distorts the market, collusion was made against the law.
tanv_nadkarni 11y ago
I think that quality was probably THE reason why he was hired for such a position. Hypthetically: Pentagon builds some massive surveillance program for US government which is blatantly illegal and in violation of constitution. You need someone who can get it done without leading a paper trail, help friends in government and then lie when confronted. Eric clearly has all those qualities.
rand1012 11y ago
But you have to be morally corrupt to hold a position like this.
yuhong 11y ago
I wonder if it would have been possible for Eric Schmidt to report it.

linkregister 11y ago

I think that his accomplishments may outweigh that transgression, which likely affected 15,000 software developers at most. He did manage to help vastly increase Google employees' personal wealth through a meteoric rise in their stock value. In this case, it's probably best to match the malfeasance with the risk. What do you think he is likely to harm within government program management? Edit: my original estimate of 15k was way off base. A subsequent poster has suggested it was a minimum of 64,000, probably substantially more.

mnglkhn2 11y ago
I would say it affected an entire industry. If the salaries have a certain value in SV then everybody else will use those as a signal and adjust their offers accordingly. edit: not really difficult to do, you can compare the salaries per region (averages, median and distributions) pre and post lawsuit.
- harryh 11y ago
  It's fine to say that, but finding actual data to support that hypothesis is awfully difficult.
accountatwork 11y ago
> which likely affected 15,000 software developers at most Where does this number come from? When the wage fixing agreement was canceled, Google immediately issued an across the board raise, and compensation has increase very quickly since then. That's 15k software devs right there, not even considering the second-order effects, which are surely non-zero.
- linkregister 11y ago
  I made a rough tally of the developers employed by the companies involved in the conspiracy at that time. What do you think is a more accurate count? Can you discuss the second-order effects? They're not apparent to me. Edit: HN isn't allowing me to reply to you. Thanks for correcting my estimate. I was way off.
  - accountatwork 11y ago
    15k barely covers the engineers employed by Google alone at the time. The class action lawsuit covers 64k employees, and that's a subset of the employees affected. If your argument is that Eric Schmidt's entering in the agreement only affected employees at Google, that's clearly false. A single company no-poach agreement would clearly be worthless, so it must be the case that Eric Schmidt's actions affected employees at other companies. If you believe some of the latest news, the agreement spread to enough companies that 1M employees were directly affected: https://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles-wage-fixing-cartel-involved-dozens-more-companies-over-one-million-employees/ https://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles-wage.... Schmidt and Jobs were central in creating the agreement and its spread. As for the second order effects, do you know a hiring manager? Ask them about how competitive offers have changed since the no-poach agreement was canceled. The effect is much larger than just having to keep up with the across the board raise Google gave to their employees when the agreement expired, which was itself non-trivial.
InclinedPlane 11y ago
Right. I'm sure that he knew better than they did, it was fine for him to limit their choices through collusion as long as he also took actions which helped some of them a little and himself a lot.
SixSigma 11y ago
When your costs don't increase in line with profits then share price rises. The easiest way to do this is wages. In the 1980s it was through massive layoffs.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

JabavuAdams 11y ago

Pixar CEO Ed Catmull was a huge inspiration to me, and it was disappointing that he also participated in the collusion. His book on the Pixar team has a lot of useful info, but it's interesting to read it knowing about the collusion to depress salaries. All I can say is humans are good at compartmentalization. Once some tactic becomes commonplace in an industry, insiders don't even consider it shady any more. We all need to get paid, and as long as we're not the worst offenders, then at least we're not as bad as those other guys, right?

mnglkhn2 11y ago
Not that I am ok with it, but the collusion is a double edged sword. Let me explain myself: On one hand it is bad that the employee gets less than the market and the company is willing to pay. And that should absolutely be corrected somehow. On the other hand, now that the salaries have exploded in SV, you can see the transfer happening towards the real estate owners. I can bet on it, that if the salaries go down, the real estate in SV/SF will take a hit. So. the business owner has to face this: if I let the salaries go up, then it will be difficult to bring in entry level people since they won't be able to enter the market. And they'll have to go with shared apartments and other similar arrangements, which is untenable in the long run. Plus, it is not sure the employee will be able to retain much of that salary increase. I know, it sounds paternalistic for the employer to think this and maybe it is better to let the market settle the current salaries/living costs tussle. But my argument is that maybe Catmull had other considerations aside from the business bottom line. The employee pipeline is actually more important.
- newjersey 11y ago
  Silicon Valley has to take a lead when it comes to working remotely. At the very least, let the well paid people work from a list of co-working spaces around the country or something if renting an office in Portland, Oregon or New York, NY is a problem and you won't have people working from home.
  - imglorp 11y ago

grandalf 11y ago

He's also very supportive of government surveillance and has spent a substantial amount of his career cultivating relationships with officials. All this is thanks to the Microsoft anti-trust lawsuit which led Google to choose someone like Schmidt to ingratiate the company with lawmakers to prevent a similar lawsuit.

benevol 11y ago
Mass surveillance is in Google's/Schmidt's DNA. It's their business model: More surveillance => most precise profiles on Internet users => most precise ad targeting => higher margin => more $$$
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- api 11y ago
  If anything private sector driven surveillance can be creepier-- it's a total "wild west" without even the pretense of public oversight and virtually no regulation. Only the most insanely creepy things like capturing video from your house and using it for analytics might run afoul of the law, and even there you'd have to prove it and prove harm and it would likely be civil not criminal. The NSA and CIA at least technically answer to the public and are subject to regulations about what they can do with the data. To quote Steve Rambam from HOPE: "If you're angry about what the NSA is doing, you should be furious about what Google and Facebook are doing." IMHO the Amazon Echo and similar beyond-Orwellian devices will someday be looked back upon with the same amount of "what were they thinking?!!?!" as stuff like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core To continue with the nuclear analogy: I've been predicting a privacy/security "Chernobyl" event related to mobile and/or IoT for many years now. It'll be something like a corporate whistleblower revealing that a company has been running all ambient sound from all customers' houses through speech to text for over a year, then putting it all in a database and selling access more or less indiscriminately. Customers, it will come out, will include organized crime, foreign governments, etc., and some of the data will turn out to be from the homes of US Government Secret and Top Secret clearance employees, CXO level corporate personnel, police, etc. Only a matter of time. I'm counting the days.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

sbochins 11y ago

Wow, even if it was only 15k developers (which it wasn't) that is still very bad. Does he have to screw over 1 million people? 1 billion people? Seems like a very low bar we're setting here.

tanv_nadkarni 11y ago
Imagine a company has a policy that says "we wont hire black people". Does the number really matter whether 1 person was turned down or 20k ? Google discriminating against a person for their past employment without being upfront about is pure evil.

id 11y ago

I mainly remember him for saying this: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

hyperliner 11y ago
Because you got nothing to hide! Right? Rriiiiigggghhttt /sarcasm
- tempodox 11y ago
  Everybody has something to hide. It's called privacy.
  - hyperliner 11y ago
    People did not get my sarcasm. That was my whole point.
bottled_poe 11y ago
Because we all know that popular opinion is always right.
- bottled_poe 11y ago
  To the down voters: Your sarcasm and irony sensors may be due for a tune-up.

TheOsiris 11y ago

I think this is just a stepping stone for Eric until he head's the Trump Admin's Trust and Safety Council. After all, if you're a good person you have nothing to fear

code4life 11y ago
Aha! So maybe Trump does have a way to turn off the internet!
- gnarbarian 11y ago
  he probably has someone unplug his router.

csberg 11y ago

If you're against hiring public officers and advisers based on moral turpitude, there'd be a non-existent stack left to hire from.

mulmen 11y ago
Is this actually true? Are you saying that every person in the world is morally bankrupt? We hire corrupt officials because people allow it. I fail to see what this defeatist attitude solves. Apathy is the enemy of democracy.
- code4life 11y ago
  American government was intended to be limited. That would limit the number of people, and the power that they have in government. Today, our government is huge, and has a lot of power. This means that often times the people that get into government aren't doing it as a servant to the people, but instead as a service to themselves. We need more servants. Viewing this reality and calling it Apathy or not Apathy is a perspective. We are all free to our perspective, and I think the wider variety, the better.
- shawn-butler 11y ago
  "I do not believe with the Rochefoucaults and the Montaignes that fourteen out of fifteen men are rogues. I believe a great abatement from that proportion may be made in favor of general honesty. But I have always found that rogues would be uppermost, and I do not know that the proportion is too strong for the higher orders and for those who, rising above the swinish multitude, always contrive to nestle themselves into the places of power and profit. These rogues set out with stealing the people's good opinion, and then steal from them the right of withdrawing it, by contriving laws and associations against the power of the people themselves." --Thomas Jefferson to Mann Page, 1795. ME 9:306
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

aresant 11y ago

Just to color with the facts - which only underscore your point: "In one incident, after receiving a complaint from Steve Jobs of Apple, Schmidt sent an email to Google's HR people saying; "I believe we have a policy of no recruiting from Apple and this is a direct inbound request. Can you get this stopped and let me know why this is happening? I will need to send a response back to Apple quickly so please let me know as soon as you can. Thanks Eric". Schmidt's email led to a recruiter for Google being "terminated within the hour" for not having adhered to the illegal scheme. Under Schmidt, there was a "Do Not Call list" of companies Google would avoid recruiting from.[37] According to a court filing, another email exchange shows Google's human resources director asking Schmidt about sharing its no-cold call agreements with competitors. Schmidt responded that he preferred it be shared "verbally, since I don't want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later?".[36] Way beyond bad behavior or accidental participant. Flat out collusion. (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt

jtuente 11y ago
There's some critically missing information here that muddies the water and I would like some clarification. >there was a "Do Not Call list" of companies Google would avoid recruiting from. >no-cold call agreements with competitors This explicitly means that the colluding companies would not try to cold-call recruit from each other. These companies are large employers and provide thousands of jobs, cool. This does not say that they would refuse to hire anyone that worked for a colluding company. So if someone was working for Apple for a wage they were satisfied with (after all they agreed to the wage when they accepted the position), then Google would not try to call them. If that someone decided to apply to Google and try to get a job there because they wanted a higher salary, then would this collusion work against that person? Or would Google consider them for employment as they would consider any other professional? The effects on wages for the profession aren't what I'm asking about; I'm asking only about this situation.
- smokinn 11y ago
  It was much worse than just a do-not-call. The evidence states that the defendants agreed not to poach employees from each other or give them offers if they voluntarily applied, and to notify the current employers of any employees trying to switch between them. They also agreed not to enter into bidding wars and to limit the potential for employees to negotiate for higher salaries. http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/19/damning-evidence-emerges-in-google-apple-no-poach-antitrust-lawsuit/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/19/damning-evidence-emerges-in...

fixermark 11y ago

> Guy who colluded with other high level corporate officers (see techtopus) Okay, but I don't see what an e-commerce long-term strategic partner has to do with salary-fixing...

peyton 11y ago

I was under the impression this agreement, at least initially, was to prevent anticompetitive poaching. Suppose Apple wants to dominate search. One way to do so is to poach every Google search engineer by offering to triple their salaries. These companies agreed not to do that. Yeah, it's illegal, but what options did these executive have? California effectively bans noncompete clauses. And there's enough money in the system and teams are typically small enough that dismantling a competitor is feasible. Google Engineer Sarah shouldn't be paid triple Google Engineer Jessie just because she works on a product that's valuable to Competitor X. Edit: original post not clear enough. Reproducing a reply below: >The problem was with using money to prevent your competitors from doing business. Doing so subverts the free market. Suppose every time a competitor rented office space, you bought the building and evicted them. Suppose Walmart opens a store in SoMa that sells groceries at a tenth of what surrounding stores sell, then jacks prices when those stores fold. To ELI5: you run a lemonade stand. Your neighbor Susie also has a lemonade stand. Susie's mom doesn't like your parents and wants you to fail, so she pays the store $500 to not sell you lemonades. Yeah, the market price of exclusive lemonade rights is now $500, but unreasonable sums are being spent to prevent competition. Something's wrong. There are laws against most anticompetitive practices, but not all. Part of the motivation behind the poaching agreement was filling a gap. You could dismantle a competitor by paying everyone and anyone in their product's critical path to simply not work there anymore. The solution, an antipoaching agreement, was illegal.

kuschku 11y ago
> Google Engineer Sarah shouldn't be paid triple Google Engineer Jessie just because she works on a product that's valuable to Competitor X. So, instead of a Demand-Supply based free market for jobs, you want the same wages for everyone? I’m sorry, but even for me as a left-leaning european that’s too socialistic.
- peyton 11y ago
  Hmm, I don't think the original post was clear enough. The problem was with using money to prevent your competitors from doing business. Doing so subverts the free market. Suppose every time a competitor rented office space, you bought the building and evicted them. Suppose Walmart opens a store in SoMa that sells groceries at a tenth of what surrounding stores sell, then jacks prices when those stores fold. To ELI5: you run a lemonade stand. Your neighbor Susie also has a lemonade stand. Susie's mom doesn't like your parents and wants you to fail, so she pays the store $500 to not sell you lemonades. Yeah, the market price of exclusive lemonade rights is now $500, but unreasonable sums are being spent to prevent competition. Something's wrong. There are laws against most anticompetitive practices, but not all. Part of the motivation behind the poaching agreement was filling a gap. This was illegal.

profeta 11y ago

more recently didn't he lobbied for drone laws two years ago after he saw one flying near his property?

eewffwe 11y ago

Could it be as simple as the tech giants didn't want a wage war whereby the highest payer would simply monopolize the talent market?

jsmeaton 11y ago
So manipulating the market to artificially keep salaries low? Can you see the problem/illegality here?
- eewffwe 11y ago
  It's silly how people view this situation here. If one company has the resources to manipulate the market, they will do so outside the talent pool. Apple could buy up most patents and restrict anybody from using them. THEN, you would see the problem. But when it's human resource, you want the free market to be free.
rqebmm 11y ago
Of course that's their incentive. And because it benefits a few and distorts the market, collusion was made against the law.

tanv_nadkarni 11y ago

I think that quality was probably THE reason why he was hired for such a position. Hypthetically: Pentagon builds some massive surveillance program for US government which is blatantly illegal and in violation of constitution. You need someone who can get it done without leading a paper trail, help friends in government and then lie when confronted. Eric clearly has all those qualities.

rand1012 11y ago

But you have to be morally corrupt to hold a position like this.

yuhong 11y ago

I wonder if it would have been possible for Eric Schmidt to report it.