There is no artificial wage suppression. While it could be argued that the common business arrangement of no-poach agreements could potentially have that effect

There is no artificial wage suppression. While it could be argued that the common business arrangement of no-poach agreements could potentially have that effect, it's certainly not the only (and probably not even a significant) factor. In VFX, as in game dev, there is far more supply of people desperate to get those gigs than there is demand. That's why your take-home pay doubles when you switch to something less alluring, not a competitor's agreement not to recruit. Catmull has to look at the big picture, i.e., "Is our company going to operate well if competitors are constantly sending out emails to our employees and offering them 120% salary to switch jobs? Since it'd be equally disruptive if we did this to them and no work would ever be accomplished in this sector, let's just have a truce where we don't actively pursue one another's talent, and then we can stop destroying each others' projects with these counterproductive bidding wars." Continuity and seniority is very important to the smooth operation of a company. VFX projects take years to complete and they're probably more sensitive to high churn than other types of projects, so the concern is even more justified in this sector than in the general sense. If the company can't see the big picture and find a way to be productive within that climate, far worse than not getting cold calls from the recruiting department of the competitor, everyone will be out of work. I know it's fun to hate on executives and believe me, I know they very frequently deserve every bit of it. But there is validity to the perspective that concerns for overall corporate performance must be take into the balance. I gotta say I agree with Catmull. I understand that specifically the VFX people are trying to blow this up into some massive offense, but I simply do not see it. As I stated in other comments, this is a very common arrangement that is in no way limited to VFX, Silicon Valley, or tech. It's great that Catmull has the backbone to refuse to apologize when someone is trying to shame him into submission. This is a surprisingly rare attribute these days.