Whenever this comes up, I get eviscerated on HN, but I don't think Catmull was involved in the mean-spirited conspiracy that union groups are trying to traipse

Whenever this comes up, I get eviscerated on HN, but I don't think Catmull was involved in the mean-spirited conspiracy that union groups are trying to traipse up. I believe he saw those deals, which were absolutely conventional as you can see by the list of participants, not as limiting employees from seeking other employment, but merely discouraging counterproductive bidding wars. One potential interpretation is that this artificially depresses worker salaries as workers are not continuously being auctioned back and forth. Another potential interpretation is that this allows the company to have the stability it needs to function, prevent toxic sentiment among peers who take a bid from one company or the other, potentially leaving others holding the bag for the project. I believe this latter interpretation is the intent of most such agreements, and that the former is rarely considered legitimate (i.e., continuous bidding wars would be too disruptive to be feasible even if there were no formal agreements in place). Such understandings are very common across competitors in all lines of work, whether they're written or not; at a former company, I was personally told by the CEO that we couldn't actively recruit someone who worked at a competitor because we didn't want to risk starting a bidding war over talent and potentially throwing everything off-kilter. Such arrangements are not SV-exclusive, let alone Pixar-exclusive, and they are done out of practicality, not malice. Market value for employees can be correctly surmised without feverish, aggressive overbidding. The incident is frequently misconstrued as a complete block on any cross-hiring. My understanding is that it was simply an agreement forbidding cross-recruiting; a gentleman's agreement that they wouldn't try to start an arbitrary bidding war over the one company's talent if that company wouldn't try to start one over theirs. Employees were still free to seek and obtain employment at any of the major studios independently if they so chose. I think that panicked cries of wage fixing and intentional repression of employment opportunities are not only not credible, but farcical. I'd ask myself why someone is interested in painting an imbalanced and unrepresentative picture such as that. If anything, these agreements are a failure of the contemporary legal and HR departments across every major technology company involved in computer animation. I believe the intent of the executives was nothing more than maintaining a stable workforce. Their lawyers and HR people should have warned them that there was another dormant interpretation that could've been used by exploitative politicians to misrepresent the situation. Last time this came up (that I saw), the Pixar, Apple, and Intel et al chiefs were being compared to Nazis. That is beyond the pale.