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Steve Jobs emails Eric Schmidt (2007)
- chrononaut 5y agoContext: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
- MisterPea 5y agoWow, I was unaware of this and was really confused why the sourcer got fired. DOJ helped software engineer salaries tremendously
- shadowgovt 5y agoNot in any way that shows up in the actual statistics.
- MisterPea 5y agoOh really? That's surprising as well, I would've expected top talent to be paid more by jumping around.
- whoisburbansky 5y agoCan't really get raises by jumping around if all the best options collude to keep wages own
- barry-cotter 5y ago> DOJ helped software engineer salaries tremendously No, Facebook did, by just refusing to take part in the cartel. You only need one company to start bidding up salaries for the category of employee they want to move the market if they have a big enough budget. The DOJ didn't even push for a reasonable fine, one measured in years of revenue, or reasonable punishment, like jailtime for executives and HR staff who were in on the conspiracy.
- sillysaurusx 5y agoSource on Facebook refusing to participate? It's one of the few bits of info that makes me like Facebook as a company.
- the_watcher 5y agoFound this from 2014: https://techcrunch.com/2014/03/24/sheryl-sandberg-facebook-refused-no-poaching-agreement-with-google/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/03/24/sheryl-sandberg-facebook-r...
- dilyevsky 5y agoIt is well known and was in the same pile of court discovery leaks
- lupire 5y agoFB has always been good to employees. Much like Microsoft (comparatively).
- fullshark 5y agoWell the employees they deem worthy at least
- speed_spread 5y agoThe number of amoral geniuses purely driven by technical challenge is limited. Businesses making money on the edge of ethics have to treat their employees well to keep them. When there is no "big lofty goal", you need to get people motivated someway. Adtech, fintech, crypto...
- _dark_matter_ 5y agoWhy is this being downvoted? I didn't know it either, and it also improves my perception of FB as a company.
- oautholaf 5y ago
- AlbertCory 5y agoA lot of those recruiters were contract employees. Maybe most of them, if they were doing cold calling like that.
- gautamcgoel 5y agoIsn't this anticompetitive? Doesn't Google have the right to poach whomever they want?
- edge17 5y agoThey do, but the lawsuit was brought by the class of affected employees, not by the companies. The companies were all in on the anti-competitive behaviors
- Animats 5y agoYes. Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, Lucasfilm, and Pixar were all conspiring to keep wages down. Big lawsuit. US$425 million settlement. See link above.
- sneak 5y agoThe conspiracy was estimated to have cheated workers out of 2-3+ billions of dollars of wages. The settlement was less than half a billion. Eric Schmidt enjoyed a long and prosperous career at Google for many years afterward.
- nuclearnice3 5y agoBernie Madoff was sentenced to 150 years for losses of $18 billion of which $14 billon was returned to victims. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Madoff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Madoff
- davidw 5y agoIt is anticompetitive. I have always liked this patio11 bit about "poaching": https://twitter.com/patio11/status/606711798352338944 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/606711798352338944
- NelsonMinar 5y agoYes, it was illegal. But the harm is to employees, not Google. Google was cooperating along with the others so that Apple would not make competing offers to their employees, either.
- abraae 5y agoI wonder if Steve had the lawyers in mind he he wrote it. "I would be very pleased if your recruiting department would stop doing this". The phrase "very pleased" implies to me that there is no pressure whatsoever, but nonetheless it would be great if it happened.
- jldugger 5y agoThis is also the guy who basically wrote a letter to the public / app developers that said 'you can't use flash' so blatently the DoJ, SEC and FTC were roshambo'ing each other to see who got to sue him first.
- fsckboy 5y agoi have no idea why you are downvoted, and surely it's not this, but figured I'd mention, it's "Rochambeau", a name.
- ac42 5y ago> it's "Rochambeau", a name. "Connections to the French surname Rochambeau are a folk etymology" https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rochambeau https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rochambeau
- fsckboy 5y agosuggesting that you know that saying "Rochambeau" is unconnected from the French name Rochambeau is a folk etymology. Saying we can't identify any connection between this word and a person with the same name is closer to the truth.
- jldugger 5y agoBut the same wiki also lists my spelling as correct. So you're really not contributing anything?
- dogorman 5y ago
- edge17 5y agoI think there is a lot of context being left out here, and people who were not in the industry during this time period will wonder whether this is legal or whatever. The answer is, no it is not legal and there was a class action lawsuit. Also, to be clear, the lawsuit was not defending any company's right to hire from anyone they want. The class action lawsuit represented the employees of the companies involved in the anti-competitive behavior.
- H8crilA 5y agoAnd nothing came out of the lawsuit. 9/10, would do it again.
- edge17 5y agoReally curious what exactly were you expecting to come out of it?
- H8crilA 5y agoA cash penalty is always good, if it's big enough it's capable of making change pretty efficiently. Hits the bosses of the bosses of the bosses, that is the shareholders; then shit rolls down and throws some assholes off the feeder (a "reorg"). In fact there isn't really any other efficient way of making changes to organizations from the outside, other than putting the right people in prison, which would definitely be too much here.
- type_Ben_struct 5y agoSeems like a gross overreaction to fire the recruiter in question.
- vlovich123 5y agoThere was a secret (illegal) anti-poaching deal. The firing was in line with that. If you didn't then there's no deal.
- type_Ben_struct 5y agoAsking the recruiter not to do this again would be a more reasonable approach
- igetspam 5y agoNot having a coordinated effort to effectively avoid wage inflation due to competition would be a more reasonable approach too. Then again, the law says this wasn't a reasonable course.
- type_Ben_struct 5y agoI’m not disagreeing with you, but my point still stands.
- vehementi 5y agoNo, it crucially doesn't. Any action whatsoever, a warning, anything, against this recruiter on the basis of their ILLEGAL COLLUSION is wrong
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- rusteh1 5y agoAs a non-American I'm always surprised at how quickly people are fired there. I cannot imagine such a severe action been taking in any country I've worked in, thanks to robust workers rights.
- fsckboy 5y agothere might be a correlation to how quickly companies form, projects start, and innovation progresses in America (entrepreneurship) compared to Europe, and how the robust workers' rights might figure into making companies reluctant to hire a batch of workers that they can't easily terminate.
- hnlmorg 5y agoAny such correlation wouldn't be down to causation imo. I've always assumed the American attitude of "Do first, ask forgiveness later" was the more likely candidate for many of Silicon Valley's success stories. It's also worth noting that there's plenty of innovation happening in Europe too. edit: I'll add a little more detail as to why I don't agree with your theory: in Europe you can still make employees redundant relatively easily. So if a company hires 100 employees then realises it's not cost effective, it can easily make 80 of them redundant. The catch is you cannot rehire for the same roles (basically you cannot make someone redundant to get around firing them), but given the purpose of your thought experiment was to cull staff after initial growth, redundancy works perfectly fine here. Europe also has such as thing as short term contracts. Not contractors, though we obviously have that too, but FTEs that are hired for 6 months / 1 year rather than indefinitely. I'm sure America has this too. So there isn't really any need to hire people with the intention of firing them shortly after. In fact any company that does this would get a pretty bad reputation pretty quickly. That's true for America too. I've also seen people fired at short notice in the UK too so it's not like it can't happen in Europe even with greater worker rights. Heck, I was unfairly fired from one job -- but I hated the job anyway so it wasn't worth my time taking the company to court. Instead I used that energy to find a job I did like.
- fsckboy 5y ago
- f0e4c2f7 5y agoWow this twitter account is amazing. I was unfamiliar with it.
- orf 5y ago:)
- nostromo 5y agoYet again Jobs comes off as a sociopath.
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- unobatbayar 5y agoOne man's opinion.
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- 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y agoBelow, there's an email from Sergey Brin to google's exec team about another call from Steve Jobs on the same kind of topic. But there's a kind of funny line at the end: > on another note, it seems silly to have both firefox and safari. perhaps there is some unification stretegy that we can get these two to pursue. Which of course brings to mind the ol' "Standards" xkcd: https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
- judge2020 5y agoStandards are great until they get too complex, making the price for interoperability steep and forcing every implementation to pay for it (in actual money/time). There's a reason there are very few browsers.
- barbazoo 5y agoI find the ":) Steve" just disgusting. Someone got terminated and everybody gets a pat on their back. Well done everybody.
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- walrus01 5y agoI'm immediately skeptical of anyone I meet in the tech industry who doesn't think Steve Jobs was an absolute raging asshole. Yes, he accomplished some interesting product shipments. But the number of direct first person anecdotes of him being a complete dick to people is too great to ignore. I'm writing this from a Macbook Air. One of the reasons why I use MacOS is because it's based on the NeXT heritage. There was some amazing stuff there. But Steve was just not a nice person.
- elisbce 5y agoAnd why does he have to be nice to the people around him? To be a leader, he needs to say things other people can't say, or won't say. He is brutal, yes, but without this brutality, the products or teams or the company would be mediocre. Everyone is happy with nice words, but nice words don't always get you nice products and results.
- bananabreakfast 5y agoNearly all great leaders in history can be described as "not a nice person". It doesn't redeem them. Nor does it redeem Jobs. But being an asshole doesn't, in any way, diminish one's outsized impact on society.
- paxys 5y agoI know that their was a (laughable) settlement for the employees whose wages were depressed because of this, but I wonder if the fired recruiters had a case as well.
- igetspam 5y agoYeah... It was rather unimpressive. I think it ended up being about a week or two of pay. So inconsequential that I don't recall.
- judge2020 5y agoProbably yes, given recruiters are supposed to recruit and need to actually find people lest they get a bad performance review. It might have been policy to not cold call/cold email people, but culture could have dictated otherwise to meet quotas. > their was a (laughable) settlement for the employees whose wages were depressed because of this There also used to be tens of millions in wages paid out to people employed by cigarette companies. The conduct of the industry, and the individual employees themselves, will generally impact how people see them and thus how employable they are over time.
- paulpauper 5y agogee..I wodner what steve jobs' email is? Or eric's . It goes to show how redacted info can actually reveal it.
- arthurcolle 5y agothink it was sjobs@apple.com - not sure he's doing much emailing these days. Eric Schmidt's was eschmidt@google.com
- monocasa 5y agoSteve Job's email was pretty public. He was fairly known for replying to randos off the cuff.
- paulpauper 5y ago>As of October 31, 2013, Intuit, Pixar and Lucasfilm have reached a tentative settlement agreement. Pixar and Lucasfilm agreed to pay $9 million in damages, and Intuit agreed to pay $11 million in damages.[9] In May 2014, Judge Lucy Koh approved the $20 million settlement between Lucasfilm, Pixar, and Intuit and their employees. Class members in this settlement, which involved fewer than 8% of the 65,000 employees affected, will receive around $3,840 each.[14] That's it. Seems so small. That is like a week's worth of pay. It goes to show how class action suits only enrich lawyers, in the end.
- NelsonMinar 5y agoI opted out of my check in the settlement. Part of why it was so small is the law firm representing the plaintiffs apparently were more interested in a quick settlement than reasonable compensation. The settlement you quote there wasn't the final one; that was the one rejected as being embarrassingly too small. The final settlement in 2015 was larger, but still very small. For me it was the personal abuse of trust that really stuck with me. Folks I worked with and respected colluded to keep my wages and the wages of my colleagues low. Illegally. I don't think they ever apologized for it either.
- tofuahdude 5y agoJust curious, what was the benefit of opting out?
- krustymeathead 5y agoIf you opt into the class settlement, you absolve the defendant of all liability so you can't sue them yourself in the future (for the same issue). If you don't join the class, you can still sue the defendant separate from the class. Not sure if that was the reason for the commenter above opting out, though.
- bowmessage 5y agothe lawyers got to split a bit more money
- durnygbur 5y agoYou know what gives an enormous satisfaction? Responding to Glogle recruiters "I can afford false negatives in my current job search, thanks no thanks". Screw you all Glaplle, Schmarmazon and others... and you folks stop being so desperate.
- mensetmanusman 5y agoI felt sad for the person who was fired for trying to pay people what they are worth.
- JoBrad 5y agoSide thought: it always annoys me when people change a subject line. I think I get it - it’s like a subliminal or contextual message. But it still seems odd and off, sort of.
- alex_young 5y agoUsed to be: Re: See this: WAS: Fwd: Re: Original subject
- jay_kyburz 5y agoI'm going to go against the grain here and point out that in Sergey's email he says that Steve is fine with Google hiring Apple staff if the employee initiates the contact with Google. (ie apply for the job) I don't think its unreasonable for two business owners to be upset about actively attacking each others business. I think if Apple and Google had agreed to not interview or hire staff that worked at each others company then that would be crossing a line. IN this case they are harming their own business by not hiring the best candidate for the job.
- k__ 5y agoFunny, how people love capitalism as long as they're the only ones benefiting from it.
- baby 5y agoReminds me of Charles Hoskinson (Cardano) who ranted about some competitor trying to pouch his employees. Somewhere in this interview with Lex: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKh8hjJNhWc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKh8hjJNhWc
- Sunspark 5y agoI am not impressed by Google's response here. I am not so sure that this recruiter deserved termination. They were hired to find personnel. I haven't seen this "do not call" policy, but it seems unnecessarily restrictive to not allow people to put out feelers and instead require them to sit and wait for candidates to come to them. There is more that is not known in this story, it's possible Google recruiting had a manager that was putting pressure on them to find perfect candidates or else and they were feeling desperate. Bad managers exist in every company, Google would not be an exception to this and rules go out the window when executive gets involved, as happened here. It really is ludicrous when you read it. Google fired someone they hired to find people, for trying to find people just because it would please the CEO at another company that Eric was on the board of directors of. Conflict of interest.
- ecshafer 5y agoGoogle, Apple, and others in the valley at the time were illegally colluding to keep salaries low. Its awful the person was fired.
- AlbertCory 5y agoOnce again: you have to put the word "fired" in context. In all likelihood, they were contractors, liable to be let go at any second. But yeah, it was illegal and that's why there was a class action.
- Sunspark 5y agoWhere I live, the banks talk to each other to make sure that they're paying roughly the same for a given type of position. Every time I or others complained about our perceived low pay, they said that they don't give cost of living increases and that they compare with their peers and that they are not out-of-line with what the other banks are doing. Well you know.. this kind of collusion is called price fixing.
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- foota 5y ago
- Valkhyr 5y agoBeing told a person got fired because of you. Your response: ":)" Man, Steve Jobs sure had a lot of admirable qualities, but sometimes he was just a fcking asshole.
- throwdecro 5y ago> sometimes he was just a... Why qualify it with "sometimes"? I think it's safe to assume that the way a person behaves in private, among their peers, shows more about their essential character than how they behave when doing public relations. The Schmidt and Jobs on display in the email are the essential Schmidt and Jobs. The admirable qualities are the stage show.
- mensetmanusman 5y agoThis is always an interesting debate. Is someone closer to their true self when they are drunk? Tired? On a power trip?
- niyikiza 5y agoThat's an interesting question. The cynic argues that everyone is on a PR mission and that our true self is when we are in a moment of weakness. The idealist argues that those moments are rare and far in between, and shouldn't define us. But at the heart of the debate is the question of whether there is a "true self" at all. Maybe people do just what people do. I suspect we try to characterize people because we're attempting to build a Bayesian Model that can help us predict someone's next move. And all that is going to depend on our 'prior' and 'base rate'. In this perspective, there is no "true self" that will be observed by everyone on the planet.
- drvdevd 5y agoIt's important to consider the context here. What seems significant, in lieu of the eventual exposure of their wage fixing scheme, was what Steve Jobs didn't say in his response. Read the emoji as "that works" rather than just "I'm pleased".
- koolba 5y agoThe difference between then and now is that it’s now ingrained in the tech savvy executives that you cannot put anything in writing that would be construed as collusion. At best we’ll see “Call me to discuss” or “Lets get together to understand”. It’s not going to end because it hasn’t ended. Only the paper trail for the astute has ended.
- r00fus 5y agoI always thought - if I was a savvy executive, I wouldn't even speak directly - simply work through subordinates doing all the wrangling.
- asquabventured 5y agoThe mafia would be so proud
- kamaal 5y agoPretty much any upper body of a serious organisation would work that way. A tad bit of detachment needs to exist between doing things, and making decisions about doing things, and making policies about doing things, and judging if things were done right. This is also called 'separation of powers/concerns' in modern political lingo. Or you will end up in all kinds of 'action paralysis' situations, and you would also end up dragging your emotions into these things which will have unintended consequences. The worse that could happen is the whole organisation could reduce to doing things for the self preservation of top individual(s) and not the organisation or people/interests they serve.
- rsanek 5y agoThat's why we passed RICO
- jareklupinski 5y agothey also have finally realized why politicians and finance folk hang out at the clubs where recording devices are prohibited :^)
- Devasta 5y agoAnd still people will balk at the suggestion that developers should unionize.
- CamperBob2 5y agoGotta wonder why Jobs was so upset over random headhunter spam. Isn't it obvious that's what this message was? Everybody whose email address is publicly visible gets a dozen of these a month, don't they? If Jobs had bothered to check his spam folder, I'll bet he would've found a couple of messages trying to recruit him to Google. Yes, there was an illegal, unethical deal in place, but I wouldn't think this message alone would trigger such a conversation at the highest levels.
- Lammy 5y agoDoes the initial forwarded message imply that the SRE who received the recruiter's offer forwarded it to Stebe, or that it was picked up surreptitiously as it passed through Apple's email system to the intended recipient? I just can't imagine any SRE getting so pissed off at receiving a recruiter mail that they would forward it to their CEO.
- carrja99 5y agoYou'd be surprised.
- flavius29663 5y agoMaybe they forwarded the email to HR, but they don't have such a leverage as the big boss has...
- hiergiltdiestfu 5y agoin context, it would've been _much_ funnier if it had been jobs@apple.com instead of steve@apple.com
- goodspeed 5y ago2 tech leaders talk as if personnel were property... oh wait, they are!
- replwoacause 5y agoThe Google employee probably wasn’t even fired. That was just said to placate Jobs.