22 ms·

Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

• OOPMan 4y ago
  Ah yes, the at-will employment in the US at work I see. In this case, Jobs wills it that some people work for him until he's okay with them leaving and throws his toys out the cot when the people in question feel otherwise. XD
• rootusrootus 4y ago
  Ha, we're totally not building a browser, nope, not us! I suppose perhaps that was true at that moment. When did they start making Chrome?
  • friedman23 4y ago
    > so please update me on what you know here and on what you think we should have as policy. > on another note, it seems silly to have both firefox and safari. perhaps there is some unificaiton strategy that we can get these two to pursue. combined, they certainly have enough marketshare to drive webmasters. Would be absolutely hilarious if these series of calls and emails led to the development of Chrome
    • DonHopkins 4y ago
      Both Chrome and Safari were based on WebKit (which itself started as a fork of KDE's KHTML and KJS libraries), which a lot of other vendors use too. Although Chrome eventually diverged years later with the development of Blink, Chrome was the result of a multi-company, industry-wide unification strategy on WebKit, the core of Safari. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit >WebKit started as a fork of the KHTML and KJS libraries from KDE, and has since been further developed by KDE contributors, Apple, Google, Nokia, Bitstream, BlackBerry, Sony, Igalia, and others. WebKit supports macOS, Windows, Linux, and various other Unix-like operating systems. On April 3, 2013, Google announced that it had forked WebCore, a component of WebKit, to be used in future versions of Google Chrome and the Opera web browser, under the name Blink.
      • neffo 4y ago
        What is sort of interesting is this thread (sort of) suggests they might have been looking at the Mozilla renderer at the same time as the Webkit one. I wonder if the licensing (MPL?) would have allowed that fork to happen. That everyone ended up going with Webkit is a bit sad imo.
        • DonHopkins 4y ago
          Mozilla was in no shape to run on mobile or embedded devices (and still isn't afaik), while WebKit ran quite nicely on mobile and embedded devices, thank you. And as we all know, Android is as important to Google as iOS is to Apple. So there was really no chance of either of them (or any other of the many companies interested in mobile and embedded devices, like TomTom for example) ever building on top of Mozilla/xulrunner.
          • capableweb 4y ago
            > Mozilla was in no shape to run on mobile or embedded devices (and still isn't afaik) Probably true at the time (anno 2007), but since ~2014, FirefoxOS which is an entire mobile OS based on Gecko (called boot2gecko) I think proves that at least the browser engine (not UI) could be used for more than just simple webpages, and on mobile devices. The OS itself was relatively fast, but the public perception of the performance of the OS was very low, as most (if not all devices) running FirefoxOS was very low powered compared to the contemporary flagship models for Android and iPhone.
          • fifilura 4y ago
            The irony here is that the person was in many parts responsible for creating XPCOM at Mozilla which was a major reason for the bloat, jumped ship to Apple/Safari at the early stages. I remember a rigorous article where he dissected Mozilla vs Webkit and explained by why the latter was superior (= less abstractions and no XPCOM). I wouldn't be surprised if that article was the basis for the decision to not go with Mozilla at Apple. Nothing to be held against him for sure, if you have been in this business for this long you are sure to have created stuff that you realize was not optimal. Particularly over-abstractions. Also I would not be surprised if it is that person they are talking about in the mail conversation.
  • dataflow 4y ago
    Wikipedia [1] says "development of the browser began in 2006", though it says they had thought about it as early as 2004. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome#History
  • tobyjsullivan 4y ago
    > So I got another irate call from jobs today. > I don't think we should let that determine our hiring strategy but thought I would let you know. > Basically, he said "if you hire a single one of these people that means war". I'm guessing the idea for Chrome started to crystallize right about here...
• mcenedella 4y ago
  “I got an irate call from Steve Jobs” - honestly, I might consider putting that on my tombstone. What an honor.
  • smegsicle 4y ago
    rather get one from donald knuth
    • noisy_boy 4y ago
      Unlikely to be irate either.
      • hodgesrm 4y ago
        He would probably just make a cool lecture out of your mistake. ;)
      • smegsicle 4y ago
        > retired professor captured in unhinged rant about 'crimes against computer science'
        • noisy_boy 4y ago
          The thought of Knuth on a rampage made me chuckle.
    • DonHopkins 4y ago
      John McCarthy trolled me once! When I met him, we were chatting about Stanford, and I mentioned that I really admired that huge radio telescope that you could see around 280 and Page Mill Road in the hills above Stanford. He looked puzzled and confused, and asked "Which huge radio telescope?" I was flustered and explained how you couldn't miss it, right by 280 and Page Mill Road, it's out there in a field, its huge, it's enormous, gigantic I tell you, there's no way you can miss it, bla bla bla... He let me go on and on, describing it, and acted like he had absolutely no idea what I was talking about, like I was crazy for hallucinating a gigantic radio telescope that both of us must have passed zillions of times. Finally he let on and said, "Oh, you mean that SMALL radio telescope???"
• kevingadd 4y ago
  Fascinating to see the amount of coordination at play to suppress wages/etc even while they're trying to poach and compete with each other.
  • jonas21 4y ago
    I don't think they're actually trying to suppress wages. It sounds like they're just willing to do whatever it takes to get Steve Jobs to stop yelling at them and not thinking through the consequences.
    • vlovich123 4y ago
      > We are careful to adhere to non-compete agreements if we have established these with any company. Hiring non competes do exactly this regardless of whatever benefit of the doubt you wish to grant (not to mention it clearly establishes they’ve done this regularly prior to this so it wasn’t even a one off). More importantly, these were already clearly established case law as illegal in California. So these are California employers talking about non competes for Californian employees. I think “not thinking through the consequences” is secondary here. They’re putting in writing that they’re actively breaking the law regularly and not just in this once instance. Of course details matter here so maybe there’s nuance here or they’ve got good lawyers helping them achieve intent without actively crossing the line, but I’ve always been curious why this was a class action and not prosecuted by the state of California. There’s also this [1]: > In fact, Colligan, who left the company in June, sounded a little indignant in his refusal. > “Your proposal that we agree that neither company will hire the other’s employees, regardless of the individual’s desires, is not only wrong, it is likely illegal,” he said, according to the report. So at least one other CEO said “no thanks and what you’re doing here is likely illegal”. [1]: https://www.internetnews.com/it-management/palm-ceo-rebuffed-apples-no-poach-deal-report/ https://www.internetnews.com/it-management/palm-ceo-rebuffed...
      • A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
        I had to do quick refresh of Palm history, but it looks like they did not survive, but it does not indicate to what extent Apple may have been involved in it. Still, it is good to see there are some CEOs that were at least willing to say equivalent of 'not cool'.
• bluehorseray 4y ago
  It would be pretty cool to have Steve Jobs and Sergey Brin fighting over you as an employee, wonder who it was.
  • wahnfrieden 4y ago
    [flagged]
    • kortilla 4y ago
      Whooooosh. The whole point is that you’re even worth the attention of attempted wage suppression by two high level execs. It has nothing to do with fawning over execs.
      • eyelidlessness 4y ago
        It’s an honor to be suppressed by C-levels in two giant corporations! It isn’t fawning over the people who systematically deny me seeking value for my talent, I’m privileged to have both of them fuck me simultaneously!
        • kortilla 4y ago
          You’re still missing the forest for the trees. It’s unrealistic for execs in companies that size to even take a cursory review of why each individual person left the company (and they would be incompetently wasting their time if they did). Anything that involves the attention enough to warrant actual emails makes that employee extraordinary. This is the same whether the outcome is negative or positive.
          • eyelidlessness 4y ago
            The forest was encapsulated in “it’s an honor”, my fellow serf.
    • ramraj07 4y ago
      I’m sure that redacted employee made bank but I doubt they truly got compensated for the value they created for these obscene companies , in part due to these bs negotiations.
• alpb 4y ago
  For those who don't know, this resulted in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L....
  • account-5 4y ago
    For the civil case it's true that only the lawyers made anything worth having.
    • pnw 4y ago
      Isn’t that almost always the case in a class action suit?
      • leetrout 4y ago
        I always felt like it was but apparently there is a real chance of me seeing several hundred dollars over buying the horrible 2018 mac air. Nothing close to the 1800 I shelled out for it which I could never recoup.
        • ineedasername 4y ago
          I just got an $80 check in the mail over a class action regarding the dishwasher (appliance) I had a few years back that broke long before what should have been it’s usable life. Roughly $1000 to replace it. $80 class action settlement. Class actions are a crappy way of extracting the actual cost or damages done by a corporation and then getting those damages into tha hands of people that were on the shit side of the stick in the transactions. But no, I have no grand answer for how to do it any better either.
          • selcuka 4y ago
            If $80 is enough to purchase, say, 2-3 years of extra warranty, then it's a fair amount.
• woodruffw 4y ago
  These are funny, and their humor should be treated of how evidence of malfeasance really reveals itself: not in smoke-filled rooms, but silly emails between CEOs beefing over a talented employee.
  • fragmede 4y ago
    Given the millions of dollars in damages these emails caused, I'm pretty sure they went back to unsubpoenable smoke filled rooms, minus the smoke. Hell, the CEO of Twitter flew especially to Apple HQ to get their advertising spend reinstated. He wouldn't have done that if whatever he needed to say could've been said over email.
    • yamtaddle 4y ago
      I suspect corporate collusion (and a fair amount of arranging corrupt mutual back-scratching for purely personal gain) like this is the bulk of the nefarious activity that actually goes on at all those various weird secret rich-people club meetings/getaways that are in fact real things and often serve as fodder for various far-wilder conspiracy theories.
      • A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
        FWIW, this is the one good thing about loss of privacy and people actually tracking private jet movements of the really wealthy that those are a little bit harder to hide. Not impossible. Just harder.
      • quartesixte 4y ago
        Suspect? This is literally what Country Clubs are for. Ever work on a project for the C-suite that had a lot of urgency, some strange amount of substance and a huge amount of bs that resulted in some huge action/deal but when you sit back and think about it nothing really of value was made? Yeah you just worked on the coverup for the country club deal that got made weeks ago.
    • kortilla 4y ago
• dec0dedab0de 4y ago
  ... it seems silly to have both firefox and safari. perhaps there is some unificaiton strategy that we can get these two to pursue. combined, they certainly have enough marketshare to drive webmasters. --sergey This line of thought seems somewhat nefarious. I suppose you could say it was just to fight back against msie, but in retrospect it feels like a plan to dominate web development.
  • karaterobot 4y ago
    Charitably, his thought at the time seems to be that those two vendors could create a viable competitor to Internet Explorer. People forget how much IE dominated the browser market, and how much that hurt the web. Ultimately Google would create its own browser monopoly, but this statement does not seem to refer to that plan unless you read a lot into it.
    • shadowgovt 4y ago
      Creating their own browser was part of the larger picture: unshackling forward development on the web from the whims of a company that saw the browser as a secondary offering behind their operating system and desktop application platforms. There were a lot of cool ideas in the pipeline (particularly from Mozilla) that were dead in the water if IE didn't buy in. The modern state of the web is partially due to the fact that this kind of backroom dealing finally snapped the market out of IE's hands. At the time of these emails, getting Apple on board with supporting modern features instead of them deciding, like Microsoft, that the web wasn't important was key to that strategy. The kind of damage Apple could have done would have been to forge their own path or to combine forces with Microsoft in the decision-making bodies about web tech.
• ryanmccullagh 4y ago
  18 years ago, wow, that seems like not that long ago, but it's almost 2 decades.
• themodelplumber 4y ago
  This is interesting to read from the angle of personality dynamics. People underestimate the sense of control that Jobs derived, not from being prophetic or smart, but from making things extremely personal and psychologically stifling for other people. (Musk works in the same way when he gets flustered or fearful.) Jobs talked a lot about seeing the future, but his high-use "like/dislike switch" was really in control most of the time. It's a very emotional way of being. Notice that Brin immediately metabolizes that type of communication as A-OK, and understandable: > he made various veiled threats too though i am not inclined to hold them against him too much > as he seemed beside himself (as eric would say). This particular response shows off a strength which, while impressive in patience, openness to relationship dynamics, etc. is also in some respects similar to the type of person who stays in cults while all of their friends call it quits. Brin likely sees his own strength in nuanced understanding rather than in control-focused decisiveness. It's a logical yin to Steve's yang. I wouldn't be surprised if he saw Steve as a promising or up-and-coming feelings-relater. I.e. "if he could just move past the explosions, which maybe I can help with by talking to him, he could be so expressive and creative" or something like that. Brin is also a bit lower in conscientiousness and a lowered-boundaries person compared to a lot of techies in leadership, but he's also high-creative, high-expressive personality. This is more of a "therapeutic" type of person in general. With an angry Steve Jobs in the room, this kind of person will get steamrolled 99% of the time, no matter the tech in question or the negotiation setup. I believe Brin saw a lot to aspire to in Jobs' _upside_, but shared Jobs' blind spot for diplomacy and truly creative work at a higher level, and was unable to perceive a need to work in that way. On Jobs' part, he was extremely lucky to grow up in a capitalistic society which sees $$$ as something it's happy to exchange for control of a given domain, along with a legend to go in the books of the great man theory. In terms of group values like leadership, what you'll find is a constant communication of vision backed by a huge amount of emotional control technique which is not quite so dynamic as it is whiny. Thanks for posting this op!
  • ramesh31 4y ago
    Jobs was a poet. A brutal, calculating, ruthless businessman, but ultimately a poet. I have no doubt that every important decision in his life was driven primarily by emotion.
• swyx 4y ago
  > Basically, [Steve] said "if you hire a single one of these people that means war". what realistically could steve jobs have done here? its not like he had any legal power to prevent his guys going over, and if he wanted to poach from google just to spite google it’d just be a stupidly expensive affair
  • jjulius 4y ago
    >... it’d just be a stupidly expensive affair And worth it in war, depending on the objective.
  • woodruffw 4y ago
    “Poaching out of spite” is exactly what he’s threatening. And note: “stupidly expensive” for you and me is “stupidly cheap” for companies like Apple and Google.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • brightball 4y ago
    Would have been funny if he gave the names of employees he wanted to depart instead.
  • i2shar 4y ago
    If you scroll down on the original post, there's another techemail from Palm CEO Ed Colligan to Steve Jobs [0] in which he says: "Threatening Palm with a patent lawsuit in response to a decision by one employee to leave Apple is just out of line." So, don't know what Jobs could have done with Google specifically, but safe to assume that it would be something else equally out of line. [0]: https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1422603572814962692 https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1422603572814962692
    • shadowgovt 4y ago
      At the time, Google was the default search engine in Safari, was it not?
  • 4y ago
• softwaredoug 4y ago
  Love these tech emails. Flash forward to 2013 and you can see some historic breadcrumbs about Safari and Chrome in this exchange https://www.techemails.com/p/imessage-for-android https://www.techemails.com/p/imessage-for-android
• tapeworm47 4y ago
  > Basically, he said "if you hire a single one of these people that means war" I feel all the Google bosses wanted was for Steve Jobs to stop yelling. What would Zuckerberg have done? What would Musk have done? Heck, what if Jobs was on the other side of the equation here?
  • tjpnz 4y ago
    >What would Musk have done? When you carry your own toilet paper you've got options.
  • no_wizard 4y ago
    I know Zuckerberg gets a lot of flak nowadays but under his watch Facebook never played the wage suppression game despite ample attempts by others to get him (and thereby FB) to do so.
• KKKKkkkk1 4y ago
  Are Larry and Sergey involved in any cool projects nowadays?
• rubyfan 4y ago
  Reminds me of the Seinfeld episode where George Steinbrenner (Yankees) and Jonny Tyler (Tyler Chicken) get into an argument over George Costanza and start negotiating a deal. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=V-Tspdoouns https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=V-Tspdoouns
  • vxNsr 4y ago
    Of course George ends up getting "eaten alive" by NYC and losing both jobs.
  • appel 4y ago
    Completely unrelated but that YouTube ID is (mildly) interesting in that it's almost pronounceable.
• throwaway892238 4y ago
  This kind of stuff is rampant in all sorts of ways. For example, tech companies regularly discriminate against employees if they think that some customer, vendor, etc would object to the employee and possibly threaten to take their business somewhere else. It results in weird shit like not hiring people from certain countries, competitors, or just people with an alternative lifestyle. Firing for being 'out of the closet' in one way or another also happens, but of course is always covered up with some other excuse (part of what HR is really for).
• pm90 4y ago
  I don’t understand Jobs’ logic here. Is he just a bully? If Google makes such a great offer that his employee will leave him, shouldn’t he try to make a better offer, or meet with the employee instead of calling Sergey? Say he did get the offer canceled. How would this employee feel about working for a CEO that does this?
  • neycoda 4y ago
    Nope, Steve Jobs, like most elitists, think the free market only applies to their whims.
  • ProAm 4y ago
    > Is he just a bully? LMAO. Yes. And a bad person.
    • eyelidlessness 4y ago
      I think it’s simpler than that. He was an average person. Had a lot of business acumen, particularly well timed vision (after a bunch of poor timing), then he was a really successful guy who was just as flawed as the rest of us.
      • throwaway82388 4y ago
        I think I understand your larger point, but whatever corrections or amendments need to be made to the myth of Jobs, the idea that he was in any way average shouldn’t be one.
        • chc 4y ago
          The dude basically chose to die of treatable cancer in his 50s because he just didn't like the idea of getting medical treatment. That's one of the most odd behaviors I've ever heard of.
          • simondotau 4y ago
• LastTrain 4y ago
  Pity that engineer if Steve talked him into staying, you know he was in Steve’s shit list after that.
• paxys 4y ago
  I have links to this entire saga bookmarked and send them out whenever someone complains about software engineers being overpaid and entitled. At the end of the day they are still the labor class, and just like in any other industry it's the executives/investors/shareholders at these large companies who are enjoying most of the benefits of their work. Even after the poaching lawsuit and settlement practices like non-competes (without garden leave), non-solicitation clauses, salary exempt status, unpaid overtime and unlimited unpaid on-call are all still way too common in software.
  • ygggvbbjiuygvf 4y ago
    What is stopping super duper browser guy from launching his own browser with his own company, reaping all the rewards himself? I really don’t understand your attitude at all.
    • trog 4y ago
      Why not just start a company competing with Apple, Microsoft and Google, you're saying?
    • ethbr0 4y ago
      A few hundred million dollars and an unrelated side business that continually spits out cash.
    • Barrin92 4y ago
      Did you notice the part where Sergey Brin was intimated by Steve Jobs in the email threatening him with war if he starts a browser? Probably that part.
    • avidiax 4y ago
      Are there any independent browser companies? What's the business model? Nobody will pay for a browser. If you work in this area, you need a well funded patron that sees a browser as strategic. A browser is strategic, hence Steve Jobs getting pissed. Starting your own company also requires specialist and generalist skills that a browser engineer doesn't have, and exposes him to risk that won't be worth it to a rock star developer.
• AlbertCory 4y ago
  "Carrie" - anyone know who that is? There was a Carrie Grimes, but she was a statistician, not an executive. This was February 2005, and Chrome wasn't released until 2008. The more you know.
• gzer0 4y ago
  The tech giants ultimately reached a settlement in the amount of $400 million in a lawsuit involving allegations of these dishonest backdoor dealings. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33292364 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33292364 [2] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/04/24/306592297/tech-giants-settle-wage-fixing-lawsuit https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/04/24/306592297...
  • thayne 4y ago
    And financially, it was probably worth it to them.
    • hinkley 4y ago
      I suspect the fines exceed the salaries the employees were 'owed' but are much less than the profits earned from those employees, yes.
      • BHSPitMonkey 4y ago
        > I suspect the fines exceed the salaries the employees were 'owed' Maybe to the specific candidates affected, but this would also have had a stifling effect on compensation across the industry too (and the resulting growth would have lasted for years). This kind of subtle wage fixing pays off in spades.
        • hinkley 4y ago
          Call me crazy, but I don’t think the industry benefits from people bouncing between FAANGs. They have a massively distorted view of the world and that creates massively distorted engineers who have lost the capacity to think about solving a problem for 100,000 people instead of four billion. That’s four and a half orders of magnitude off. The perverse incentive with the anti poaching collusion is to move from FAANG to a startup. Where you are confronted by problems involving 50 servers instead of a million. Normal problems.
    • no_butterscotch 4y ago
• pknomad 4y ago
  "I'm sure you realize the asymmetry in financial resources of our respective companies when you say: 'We'll both just end up paying a lot of lawyers a lot of money'". Wew.
• mcemilg 4y ago
  I am always wondering how these recruiter knows that "He is absolutely one of the best in the world at Browser technology" and how to be in this level in any area of expertise.
  • forgotmypw17 4y ago
    I would look at what areas you're already above average on, pick the ones you enjoy working in, and then dig into them for a few years non-stop.
• UIUC_06 4y ago
  Rather than think of REDACTED as "labor" it might be more helpful to think of him as a star NBA player. The term "labor" applies more to the players in the D-league. If you're Steve Ballmer and you want Giannis Antetokounmpo on your team, you can't just call him and offer more money. They have regulations around that. So it shouldn't be surprising that Jobs & Brin have conversations about REDACTED. If it was an engineer with one year experience working under REDACTED, it wouldn't escalate to that level, at least until Google hired five of them.
  • saagarjha 4y ago
    There are regulations around not having these conversations.
• ineedasername 4y ago
  >”So a compromise would be to continue with the offer we have made (to [REDACTED]) but not to make offers to any of the others unless they get permission from Apple.”* This is just so absolutely shitty behavior. It’s bamazing they were willing to talk about it so openly in email format. You get to be so great at your job only to risk being blackballed by hush hush non compete handshake agreements? Unions don’t go nearly far enough to balance out this power asymmetry. I don’t know what would. Honestly I don’t know what could without knock on effects with their own awful potentials to hamper competition and innovation. Hugely punitive repercussions when this sort of things comes to light might be a step in the right direction though.
  • onethought 4y ago
    I mean, you took it out of context the line before said: I don’t think we should change our hiring policy based on this. The line after said: let’s discuss before you make other offers.
    • ineedasername 4y ago
      I think the context does not support your response. Because while they may have stated that it shouldn’t change their hiring practices, the rest of the conversation fully indicates that it did or would in fact be a consideration in their future hiring practices. So what they stated as far as hiring practice policy does not match up to what they said their practices might be going forward. There is a mismatch here. I of course do not know from what is presented how that actually played out. Whether or not the hiring practice policy of not changing the policy is what prevailed, or whether or not they did in fact render hiring decisions on the basis of the implied noncompete agreements that may have been made.
      • onethought 4y ago
        It was the final email from Brin that said that… so from the context that was the end of the discussion. Or did I miss something?
  • deleted 4y ago
• travisgriggs 4y ago
  I have two cynical thoughts after reading this: - Imagine a world where the value add people got together and horse traded our managers around. - How realistic even is the “programmer celebrity” anymore? It seems like the “this is the guy” (e.g. one of the best browser guys) happens less anymore. Are there people out there now that are the crème de la crème of k8s configurators? Top class QUIC implementers? Number one ad-tech hackers? It just seems that the things we used to lionize our star developers for were a lot easier to get excited about. It was like we were making a better new world. Now I just feel like a paving stone in a surveillance economy.
  • selcuka 4y ago
    Those celebrities only matter for big companies that develop a products that require deep specialisation. Your startup won't need the "crème de la crème of k8s configurator" but Kubernetes team might want to hire a specific developer with some second-to-none knowledge of internal workings of containers.
• bloodyplonker22 4y ago
  >anyhow, i told him we were not building a browser and that to my knowledge we were not systematically going after the safari team in particular. and that we should talk about various opportunities. i also said i would follow up and check on our recruiting strategies wrt apple and safari. he seemed soothed. This reminded me of the scene in "The Pirates of Silicon Valley" where Bill Gates reassured Steve that he was not building an operating system and Steve was soothed, only to be extremely enraged later when he found out it was all a lie.
• wanderingmind 4y ago
  All this stopped not because of any class action, but one company Meta will not play along with the cabal. Zuck raised the salary so much he started poaching left and right from other tech giants. Google and Apple had no choice but to match the salaries to retain and hire top talent. For all the fault of Meta, they knew the worth of employees and have always tried to give them a good bargain.
  • paxys 4y ago
    Umm no the practice stopped because of antitrust action against these companies by the DoJ. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L....
  • umbs 4y ago
    Netflix also played a huge role in raising salary bar. Anecdote: In 2008, I was working at Ericsson in San Jose, as a junior software engineer on edge routers. I was paid ~$140K (bonus + RSU). We heard that very senior engineers were paid around $180K. Cisco was sought after place in our industry (Networking). They would pay ~$225K for senior engineers. (all numbers are unverified and rumors). Then one of my peer at Ericsson, a junior engineer, had an offer from Netflix and told during lunch break, his total comp was $250K, all cash (no RSU). I can still remember the gasps that followed. I have read the book "No Rules Rules. Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention" [0]. It's fascinating the number of times Netflix pivoted and rewrote many rules. They discuss their philosophy on compensation in the book. They played important role in raising the salary bar. [0] https://www.amazon.com/No-Rules-Netflix-Culture-Reinvention-ebook/dp/B081Y3R657/ref=sr_1_1?crid=20M4J0OHIXJJB&keywords=no+rules+rules+netflix+and+the+culture+of+reinvention&qid=1672727377&sprefix=no+rule%2Caps%2C357&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/No-Rules-Netflix-Culture-Reinvention-...
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
    • deleted 4y ago
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• krick 4y ago
  > on another note, it seems silly to have both firefox and safari. perhaps there is some unificaiton strategy that we can get these two to pursue. combined, they certainly have enough marketshare to drive webmasters. Now that was funny. (Google Chrome was release in 2008 BTW. 3 years later.)
• hota_mazi 4y ago
  It's pretty amazing to me that one of the richest people on the planet (at the time anyway) and arguably one of the most successful tech people ever (Sergey Brin) not only did not see anything wrong with putting all of this illegal stuff down in writing, but he's actually unable to use proper capitalization.
  • HeckFeck 4y ago
    capitalisation is unminimalistic - stevej
• dang 4y ago
  There have been a bunch of HN threads about this over the years but I haven't found them. If anyone wants to look, we can make a list!
• holografix 4y ago
  I love how an absolute cunt Steve Jobs was! Mostly because there are so many publicly documented examples of his cuntness that I’m sure are not unique to him but that we seldom find out about other CEOs.
• habibur 4y ago
  > steve told me he was cool with us hiring anyone who came to us but was angry about systematic solicitation At least not as unfair as I initially thought.
• electrondood 4y ago
  Does Sergey Brin not use the shift key, or did Google just remove all of them because it's a Googley thing to do?
  • furyofantares 4y ago
    that's how we used to talk on the internet
  • easeout 4y ago
    Before typing with our thumbs made autocapitalization a popular feature, we were roughly as lazy, and it meant no caps at all. ;)
• pfoof 4y ago
  But they both used webkit lol
• znpy 4y ago
  Another datapoint for “jobs was an asshole”. Literally going out of your way to prevent your employees from having a career if you’re not involved. Such an abusive behaviour. I’m not happy he’s dead, but I’m glad he’s gone.
• podunkPDX 4y ago
  Damn, do I enjoy ediscovery.
• faangiq 4y ago
  Guess what - nothing changed they all still do this.
• maxehmookau 4y ago
  Is "billionaires not using correct capitalization and punctuation to appear too important" a thing? Elon Musk seems to do the same thing, and it always surprises me.
  • tsimionescu 4y ago
    Good grammar, capitalization, punctuation, and vocabulary are class signifiers. These become pretty irrelevant at the highest echelons of class, and intentionally breaking them starts being a sign of personal style.
    • WoodenChair 4y ago
      > Good grammar, capitalization, punctuation, and vocabulary are class signifiers. These become pretty irrelevant at the highest echelons of class, and intentionally breaking them starts being a sign of personal style. Over analysis if I’ve ever seen it. Not using capitalization was just a part of 90s Internet culture which both Musk and Brin grew up in.
      • maxehmookau 4y ago
        Not sure I buy that. Interesting take though. I grew up in 1990s internet culture, but culture changes and it's now the 2020s. I also no longer ask people for their MSNs or consume much of my content in the medium of Macromedia Flash videos. > intentionally breaking them starts being a sign of personal style This sounds more likely for someone as self-absorbed as a tech billionaire.
• meindnoch 4y ago
  Disgusting.
• SG- 4y ago
  Who’s the programmer they’re referring to in this? Did he end up going to Google and work on Chrome after this?
• trollied 4y ago
  Certainly a blast from the past seeing the word "webmaster"!
  • easeout 4y ago
    I feel like the term was already out of fashion by then, too.
• wodenokoto 4y ago
  Do we know who “redacted” is? I’ve heard stories that Google set up development office in Denmark because one of their V8 developers wanted to move home and he was “that good” that it was worth setting up an office just to keep him on staff.
  • kriz9 4y ago
    Lars Bak? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_Bak_(computer_programmer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_Bak_(computer_programmer)
    • complex_exp 4y ago
      He never worked in Apple, no?
    • wodenokoto 4y ago
      Must be the guy I’m thinking of as the story is so close to the urban legend I’ve heard. And as sibling comment suggest, it can’t be the person discussed in the emails.
  • Lammy 4y ago
    It doesn’t say if “redacted” accepted an offer, so possibly Don Melton, Dave Hyatt, or Ken Kocienda? None of them left Apple until much later, so this is just speculation in descending order of assumed-Stebe-irateness. These February 2005 emails make for an interesting timeframe since that was the year of the Apple/Google default search engine deal. I can’t find a more exact date for the search deal than “2005”, so it’s possible both were under negotiation simultaneously with no cause/effect relationship, but it sure is an interesting coincidence https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/25/technology/apple-google-search-antitrust.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/25/technology/apple-google-s...
    • mlajtos 4y ago
      By matching the font with the original screenshot, none of the names fit. "Don Melton" & "Dave Hyatt" are too short, "Ken Kocienda" is too long. "David Hyatt" is pretty close, could be him judging by the emails.
• jwr 4y ago
  > "anyhow, i told him we were not building a browser" :-)
  • breck 4y ago
    v8 came out in 2008, so this doesn't conflict with that. Though perhaps Sergey was like "if Jobs is really this worried about a browser, maybe we should build a browser". :-)
• phn 4y ago
  Imagine how different the world would be if Google really went with the "enhanced version" of Firefox instead if building Chrome.
  • Lammy 4y ago
    There’s no guarantee an independent Firefox could have survived “Embrace, Enhance, ???” at all. Maybe this timeline isn’t so bad since Chrome being what it is means there are actual good reasons to choose Mozilla’s Firefox :)
    • phn 4y ago
      For sure, I'm not saying it'd be better or worse. It's just hard to imagine a world without Chrome.
• 0xbadc0de5 4y ago
  Dear management: By the time an employee is interviewing and receiving offers, it's almost always too late. Whatever issue(s) led to their pursuit of other opportunities probably won't be resolved by simply matching an offer and will certainly be exacerbated by trying to torpedo their efforts.
  • advisedwang 4y ago
    It wasn't really about that one employee (or even the whole team). That is one leader saying to another "don't do this or we'll be force to actually compete on how much we pay employees" (ie "go to war")
• edwnj 4y ago
  [dead]
• SillyUsername 4y ago
  Why didn't Brin just ignore Jobs calls and have him put through to a secretary? Any good call centre worker knows you don't deal with irate people directly as they cannot be reasoned with, and (imho) their aggressive behaviour should not be rewarded.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • uninformed 4y ago
    quid pro quo
  • HDThoreaun 4y ago
    They had an agreement that they wouldn’t do this. If being ignored the call jobs would hire google employees, especially considering how much of a grudge he holds.
• wkat4242 4y ago
  Weird that someone so high up doesn't bother to use capitalisation at all. It seems so messy. Edit: Not sure why the downvotes? I am referring to Sergey Brin's email, he doesn't use any capitals in that email. It just looks very careless.
• knuckleheadsmif 4y ago
  I had the pleasure of having dinner around 1990, with my team of 6 from Apple, at Steve’s Woodside residence with Steve trying to recruit us into coming to NeXT. One of the team alerted Apple lawyers and Steve started the evening reading a non-poaching letter from Apple’s lawyers to Steve. That out of the way the dinner was mainly an evening of Steve asking a lot about Apple as it became obvious he still was emotionally invested in the company. None of us went to NeXT.