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Emails From Schmidt And Sergey Brin Show Agreements Not To Hire Apple Workers

• gamegoblin 13y ago
  I'm not very knowledgable of this sort of thing -- what have other professions historically done to mitigate this sort of thing? Unions? Licensing boards?
  • htk 13y ago
    Call me a dreamer but creating a startup is one way around this.
    • TheCowboy 13y ago
      One way this problem has usually been prevented is by having a competitive marketplace, so it's not really dreaming to suggest that startups can be part of a solution. But it's tough to shake up markets that tend toward oligopoly, and the big players can simply acquire any threats before they can deliver a punch in order to maintain the status quo.
  • pjc50 13y ago
    Isn't it illegal?
    • bradleyjg 13y ago
      Blatantly, and has been so for a long, long time. I might be able to buy that Brin circa 2005 was unaware of that, but not Jobs, Schmidt, or Whitman. Edit: It's been clear at least since Nichols v. Spencer International Press in 1967, and arguably since Radovich v. National Football League in 1957.
      • kevinthew 13y ago
        Yup. This type of stuff is a major no-no and is taught as such in pretty much every entry-level econ and business class. All of these executives know better and were simply trying to skirt the system. There's going to be a huge settlement over this.
        • hga 13y ago
          And significant recognition of the issue goes back to at least 1776's The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."
          • pekk 13y ago
            Those awful unions. Oh well, back to illegally depressing wages
        • tinco 13y ago
          I don't know the U.S. justice system really well, but from the e-mail it seems E. Schmidt was aware of the illegality of their actions, being worried about being sued and a paper trail. Doesn't that make this an 'aware' and 'intentional' crime, therefore the only resolution would be for him to go to prison for some time? Is it really possible for someone to settle their way out of this with a general prosecutor?
        • hisabness 13y ago
          who will the settlement be with? i.e. who will get the monies?
          • bradleyjg 13y ago
            I believe there were settlements with the Justice Department, there's also a pending class action lawsuit. The class is all of the employees of the relevant companies during the relevant time period. (I.e. Apple, Intel, Google, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and Adobe technical employees from 2005 through 2009.) Unfortunately, the US class action system is somewhat corrupt and in many cases the suing attorneys get the lion's share of the money, while the class members get injunctive relief, a coupon, or a nominal payment. Or sometimes they get nothing at all, and a charity gets the money (this is called a cy pres award). More information about the class action lawsuit: https://www.hightechemployeelawsuit.com https://www.hightechemployeelawsuit.com
  • rayiner 13y ago
    Class action lawsuits. I find this agreement and the Facebook sponsored stories feature baffling. They remind me of when Korean companies have gotten caught up in price fixing and invoked the excuse "we had no idea this would be illegal!"
    • selmnoo 13y ago
      Huh? "Facebook sponsored stories feature"?
      • rayiner 13y ago
        http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/4574644 http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/4574644
        • selmnoo 13y ago
          Oh. Yeah. That's how SV works. (I didn't know about this particular story though... must have missed it). It's basically just another variant of a dark pattern. They're everywhere. It's basically what fast growth is all about. It's about skirting some rule that you know very well is illegal or at least unethical -- and later when you get caught doing it, saying "Ooops!!! I didn't know this was illegal, LOL!" Go to http://darkpatterns.org http://darkpatterns.org to get more examples of dark patterns. Facebook in particular is expert at it, e.g. see http://darkpatterns.org/library/privacy_zuckering http://darkpatterns.org/library/privacy_zuckering - the clear lesson to take away for startups is, don't give a fuck, do whatever unethical shit you can do to attain a large userbase, get big, get funding, and then either a) deny any wrongdoing was ever done, or b) justify it with some excuse like "we were young :)" or "we didn't know!" Sometimes you have to pay a fine, but you can be assured that the fine will be smaller than the profit made/growth achieved by some particular action. It's a winning strategy. p.s.: Here's a fun challenge: try to turn off targeted advertising on an Apple device. Can you do it? (fwiw, it's much easier to do on iOS7 vs iOS6).
      • colanderman 13y ago
        Presumably the parent is talking about when FB used users' likenesses alongside product endorsements in their friends' feeds, without the user's knowledge.
  • briantakita 13y ago
    Professional organizations, Unions, Licensing. Don't be anybody's employee. You lose much leverage & tend to get stuck by being an employee.
• yuhong 13y ago
  "Brin appears to not know what the nature of the agreement is between the two companies." I still remember a HN thread which suggested that Larry/Sergey fire Eric Schmidt for this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3523513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3523513
  • dangrossman 13y ago
    That's two weeks before the no-hiring agreements were put into place.
• unfamiliar 13y ago
  As I understand it, they were still allowed to hire from each other, they just agreed not to poach employees from each other. That doesn't sound so unreasonable to me.
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
    • rayiner 13y ago
      Because its an anticompetitive attempt to suppress employee wages?!
    • watwut 13y ago
      For the same reason as why big companies can not cooperate prices with each others. If they do, free market can not do its magic. Free market works only if there are many competing independent players, everybody knows everything and everybody can change who he is making business with at any time.
  • dangero 13y ago
    I can see your point. Even without written agreements there are unspoken agreements amongst friends in this regard. For example, if I own a small business, and so does one of my friends, it goes without saying that him poaching my team would feel like a stab in the back. What I find interesting in this whole story is the value that these executives put on the teams they have built. Of all of the things that Steve Jobs could be worried about as the CEO of one of the largest companies in the world, he's spending his time stressing about losing a few engineers to Google? As an engineer this makes me happy, but I still find it a bit surprising. These executives knew an agreement like this would have to be delegated to a vast number of people. To me this means they didn't think it was a big deal. I say that because if they were doing something they viewed as extremely illegal they would have been concerned that someone in the delegation path would blow the whistle. Seems to be a crisis of perspective at that top.
    • com2kid 13y ago
• peeters 13y ago
  This is appalling to read, and it's frightening how blasé they are about blatantly illegal and unethical non-competition. Yet, I think the article misrepresents Schmidt firing the recruiter: >Here, Schmidt relates a phone call he had with eBay CEO Meg Whitman and then orders his own recruiter to be fired because that person tried to poach the COO of eBay. Reading the email, it doesn't seem like the recruiter was fired for trying to poach the COO; it seem like he was fired for lying to the target about the position (as Schmidt calls them, "falsehoods"). Don't forget recruiters usually get a significant finder's fee, and are not above misrepresenting a position to generate interest.
• mschuster91 13y ago
  I am wondering what happens when one mails directly to the mentioned addresses. Or, what 4chan/other trolls could potentially do with it. Publicly disclosing internal matters for the courts is bad enough, but PII like internal mail addresses should be redacted before release!
  • brey 13y ago
    I think it's reasonable to assume that the 'sergey@google.com' mailbox already has something to filter out the crazy.
• aalpbalkan 13y ago
  Here's an earlier story about this: http://www.theverge.com/2012/1/27/2753701/no-poach-scandal-unredacted-steve-jobs-eric-schmidt-paul-otellini http://www.theverge.com/2012/1/27/2753701/no-poach-scandal-u...
• ucha 13y ago
  The same way the SEC opens insider trading investigations based solely on market data - eg. unusual volume of transaction preceding a major unplanned announcement - a government body should mine employment data from LinkedIn for example and investigate cases where there are very few employees switching jobs between large corporations. This is even more unsettling when you realize that Google, Apple and such have employees that generate revenue in the range of a million dollar per head yet pay a average salary that is 10-20% of that. They end up with absurdly large piles of cash that banks and financial institutions never see because they compensate their employees more fairly.
  • mschuster91 13y ago
    How do you quantify in a team how much money a specific employee generates to the company?
    • ucha 13y ago
      I don't know and I doubt that can be done for a large tech company. I only mentioned averages.
    • waterlesscloud 13y ago
      Money not given to the employees doesn't vanish, it's allocated to the owners. So no matter how you do it, you're quantifying how much some people are worth. Sometimes it's the employee, sometimes it's the owners.
      • rbobby 13y ago
        Isn't the case for owners that the quantifying is "what ever is left over"?
    • ForHackernews 13y ago
      Does it matter whether you get the granularity down to a single individual? If a 10 person team builds a product that delivers $100 million in revenue for a company, and the team members are paid $90k on average...then they're pretty underpaid.
• benihana 13y ago
  Wait a second. These emails[1] (not the commentary around them) seem to say that the big tech companies in the valley agree not to recruit employees of other companies. There's a big difference between recruit and hire. It seems to me like they've all agreed it's pointless to just poach each other's employees. Eric Schmidt says the practices are zero sum. In my opinion this is exactly correct. If all the big companies just move each other's employees around, nobody benefits. If instead they all agree to look outside of the talent that's already been recruited, everyone (including developers) benefits. New talent keeps coming in, and developers not in big tech companies have a shot at working at places their parents will recognize. 1. http://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles-wage-fixing-cartel-involved-dozens-more-companies-over-one-million-employees/ http://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles-wage-...
  • MBlume 13y ago
    Nope, recruiting doesn't just move employees around, it drives up developer salaries.
    • rwissmann 13y ago
      Exactly. People wonder why salaries are so high in finance. Part of that is intense recruiting competition. Finance pays out a fantastic amount of profits to the people generating them, i.e. the employees, rather than just the shareholders.
      • stanleydrew 13y ago
        Except salaries aren't high in finance. Bonuses are high, and are usually based on performance.
        • walshemj 13y ago
          Um less so now as the campaign against bonuses in the city has led to increases in contractual pay :-)
  • 13y ago
• andy_ppp 13y ago
  Ah... So it was always "Be Evil" and fuck over your employees. It always amazes me that these people love free markets, until it's expensive and then they break the law deliberately to pay slightly less than the fair market price to the best and brightest. Effectively stealing from their employees to give to their shareholders just blows my mind.
  • doktrin 13y ago
    It's important to not gloss over Apple's role in this. Based on the emails that I have seen, they were the driving force behind these agreements. Yes, Google's "don't be evil" mantra is tempting low hanging fruit. They dropped the ball here, but so did most of the valley. Nobody should be getting free passes in the court of public opinion.
    • andy_ppp 13y ago
      Very true... I feel that if workers tried to steal billions of dollars from the rich they would get thrown in jail. The other way around and we're _trained_ to believe that's preposterous.
      • n09n 13y ago
        >I feel that if workers tried to steal billions of dollars from the rich they would get thrown in jail Why is that? All evidence points to the contrary. Take for instance, the collapse of the housing market a few years ago. Not only were the borrowers not jailed, most people even blame the bankers.
        • wavefunction 13y ago
          The bankers' entire business of lending is predicated on their understanding of risk and proper extension of credit dependent on that risk. To extend credit as they did to people who were obviously not credit-worthy is to abandon the main responsibility of their profession and for what? Short term personal gains via "performance bonuses" based on volume? The bankers deserve blame and jail time for endangering the entire economy with their short-sighted greed.
• ForHackernews 13y ago
  From 2006 > he was sure we were building a browser and were trying to get the Safari team Well he wasn't wrong... When did work start on Chrome? First release was in 2008.
  • jfoster 13y ago
    ... and "i told him we were not building a browser". I can see 3 possibilities: 1. That was a lie. Perhaps I'm naive, but I would expect him to say that he's not going to discuss the Google product line-up. 2. They were not building a browser, but Steve's accusation got them thinking about building a browser. 3. They were not building a browser, but later decided to build a browser.
    • mike_hearn 13y ago
      Er, did you read the email? Brin explicitly says they have people working on Firefox and were thinking of making a modified version of it, but hadn't made the final call yet.
• thrownaway2424 13y ago
  Interesting choice of subjects in the headline. I see that Saint Steven's reputation is still off-limits. My reading of the first two emails is that Jobs was a raging asshole in every facet of life and business.
• stretchwithme 13y ago
  I personally don't care if employers agree not to hire each other's employees. People are free to make agreements if they want to, just as employees are free to not work for them. There's nothing immoral about it. Are you free to use the power of the state to try an boost your salary? I don't think you should be able to do that. But apparently many people do.
  • dippyskoodlez 13y ago
    It's a little different when these are the primary tech giants in the field even offering those positions and they work together to keep your position at a lower salary. "Not work for them" would mean leaving the industry.
  • doktrin 13y ago
    > People are free to make agreements if they want to, just as employees are free to not work for them. No, they're not. This is anti-competitive wage suppression. It's illegal. > Are you free to use the power of the state to try an boost your salary? I don't think you should be able to do that. But apparently many people do. Pretty sure that's illegal too.
    • n09n 13y ago
      You're pretty sure raising the minimum wage is illegal?
      • doktrin 13y ago
        The original statement clearly implied government corruption. After all, those raising the minimum wage don't earn it themselves. Thus, they're not "using the power of the state to boost their salary".
        • stretchwithme 13y ago
          What I was referring to was trying to prevent people from making agreements that make it easier to keep their employees. Putting a stop to that would be using the state as a way to make more money. And, yes, those lobbying for something are a different group than those approving. But I bet if I lobby for something you don't like that gets implemented, I'd be responsible for it, if not wholly responsible.
• firstOrder 13y ago
  > Meg called to talk about our hiring practices. Here is what she said. Google is the talk of the valley because we are driving salaries up across the board. Then Eric Schmidt says: > I would prefer Omid do it verbally since I don't want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later So Silicon Valley execs were illegally conspiring to drive down wages, and who knows how much more was done outside of the paper trail mentioned. Then we have an article discussion yesterday and blog posts etc. in the past few weeks about how companies can't find great engineers, and how we need immigration law changes that blocks Mexicans etc. but brings in more engineers to drive down engineer wages etc. Maybe if CEO's weren't illegally conspiring to drive wages below their market value, there wouldn't be a so-called "engineer shortage"? I mean it's risible. They conspire illegally to drive down wages, then whine that not enough people want to work in this field where wages have been artificially and illegally deflated.
  • Vardhan 13y ago
    It's all propaganda. There's no engineering shortage. They're all just trying to flood the market with more engineers from all around the world. It's all propaganda plastered with a nice marmalade of feel goody "let's help the immigrants", or "everything great about our country came from immigrants", or other such variants of rhetoric. It's actually very smart, because it plays to the tune that people dance to. That said immigration policies do need to change, and immigration is indeed a good thing for this country. Attracting talent is a lot of what makes this country great, but we need to be careful with the fine print of such policies as to not destroy our own economy.
    • untog 13y ago
      There's no engineering shortage. They're all just trying to flood the market with more engineers from all around the world. You could argue that this is the actual natural order of things. Let the free market decide the value of an engineer, not arbitrary government regulation. It is the Silicon Valley way, after all.
      • samstave 13y ago
• emcfarlane 13y ago
  This is the free market. People choose what they think they are worth. If you don't think Google is paying you enough, quit. Deals with companies to avoid poaching have a cost themselves. This doesn't need more government interaction this needs people to value their work, to think.
  • wavefunction 13y ago
    This is by definition not the free market. You need to go back to remedial free market school. I suggest one course of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (pay attention to Book 2, Chapter 2 especially) to start. If the issue doesn't clear up within the week, please seek further guidance from a licensed professional.
    • emcfarlane 13y ago
      Employees have to think of themselves as an asset with their employer aiming to minimize costs. Salaries are a negotiation with risk involved. It is a free market, with many competing companies aiming to reduce costs. Does a free market mean all companies can't communicate? The companies are still free to hire whoever they want. People are still free to work for whoever they want. Thanks for the book suggestion, please feel free to quote more books without debating my comments.
      • camus2 13y ago
        > with many competing companies obviously these companies were not competiting hiring engineers... > People are still free to work for whoever they want. whatever.
        • emcfarlane 13y ago
          > obviously these companies were not competiting hiring engineers... ... They are competing for engineers! Why would they make these agreements? To benefit the company. Benefit/cost analysis.
  • 13y ago
• doczoidberg 13y ago
  This is good news for every entrepeneur who is developer. Why? Because it shows that you are worth more than companies pay for you!
• pazimzadeh 13y ago
  It's interesting that Microsoft is barely mentioned here. Perhaps it's just because they are not in the Bay area?
  • ucha 13y ago
    They are. Have a look at the last document.
• cromwellian 13y ago
  The behavior seems slimy (otherwise there'd be no need to be all cloak-and-dagger about it), but the interpretation seems sensationalist (Pando: "Price Fixing!"). As far as I can tell from the evidence, this was a 'no cold call' agreement, not an agreement not to hire people who apply or to set their wages, perhaps with the exception of high level managers or executives, most of whom, if they wanted to demand higher salary, could leak or threaten to leave for another company, and who are often under other constraints. In fact, it's not even clear this is about wages per say, but the disruption that comes from breaking up team and concerns over intellectual property/trade secrets leaking. I'd be pissed if I applied for another job and was turned down purely because of my previous employer. But I'm not phased by avoiding cold calls. I still get loads of emails trying to recruit me and they're mostly annoying. If I decide to switch jobs, it'll be because I initiate it, not because of HR reps phoning me. If you were around during the last dot-com boom, you may remember the ridiculous poaching that went on, startups offering insane signing bonuses and other perks, employees changing jobs after only a few months on the job. I worked for a company once that had $100+ million in Softbank funding, and funneled a huge amount of it through headhunters which received a bounty on each hire, and were incentived to bribe prospects to quit their current job. I'm not sure this is healthy for the industry as a whole. There's already an apparent bubble in asset prices and cost of living in the Bay Area, and while it seems good for some tech workers in the short term to have salaries pumped through the roof, I'm not sure it's good for the overall tech economy, or the economy in general. I'm somewhat sympathetic to the notion that companies want to avoid aggressive and invasive poaching on each other's workforces, it could turn into mutually assured destruction. If I had a startup, I'd be pissed of someone came along (and poached my employees instead of an acqui-hire) that I spent significant amounts of resources recruiting and training. To read some of the press articles, you'd think this was the Grapes of Wrath or something, that poor tech workers, the ones who drive around in luxury busses and pay $3000-5000/mo for studio apartments in SF, are woefully under compensated. I wonder if this was a story about Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan conspiring to keep down the compensation of Wall Street money managers through no poach agreements, we'd have the same coverage. Here's analogy. Let's say there is an employee marketplace. Employers list jobs for offer and salary. Employees list skills, availability, and asking salary. If the employers don't conspire to artificially restrict the offers and salary prices listed, would we say this is a competitive market with no price fixing? Ok, now let's say that besides listing the jobs and prices, Employers activity solicit buyers. With stocks regulated because of issues (http://www.sec.gov/answers/cold.htm http://www.sec.gov/answers/cold.htm). But let's say employers cold call the employees and tell them to 'buy' a particular offer. Then at some point, the companies cease using sales forces to go out and cold call people to buy these offers. Instead, employees must come to the market of their own accord and bid on them. Is this really price fixing? If all brokers stopped calling you trying to get you to "Buy XYZW", you wouldn't consider them trying to manipulate the price of XYWZ.
• zaxxon 13y ago
  Just gonna throw my perspective out there, since I was a firsthand witness to this stuff. I started at Google in 2005 as an ordinary software engineer, and I've not yet left them. Back then, Google recruiters were constantly bugging employees for referrals. But this "no poaching" thing wasn't some weird dirty secret among execs -- it was just sort of a common knowledge thing, and nobody seemed to think it was a big deal. "Oh, we have a gentleman's agreement with Apple not to poach them and vice versa -- so give us the names of your friends to reach out to, but not if they already work at Apple." AFAICT, the reason I (and my coworkers) never thought of this policy as illegal is probably for two reasons: 1. Hey, poaching back and forth would create a lot of disruption and churn and mess up both companies' ability to get things done. Let's not start a pointless war. 2. We, as programmers, are ridiculously overpaid already. How could anyone possibly be "taking advantage" of us at these salaries? The notion seemed as absurd as a Programmer's Labor Union! Again, the idea was not to poach, not to avoid hiring. If somebody from Apple applied for a Google job of their own will, that was fine. In hindsight, I /guess/ I understand how this looks like evil collusion to keep salaries down... but really it seemed like common sense and civility at the time. At least that's how it was sold to us. It was sort of like the nuclear policy of Mutually Assured Destruction: "the only way to win is not to play." It's the same attitude that still explains why giant companies don't (typically) begin patent wars -- there's no point if everyone ends up destroying each other.
  • nerfhammer 13y ago
    "Google is the talk of the valley because we are driving salaries up across the board." "I would prefer Omid do it verbally since I don't want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later" It's evil collusion to keep salaries down. Not discussing your compensation is another example of something we've been sold on as "common sense and civility" though it's illegal to restrict it.
  • ryanobjc 13y ago
    I worked there as well. The problem is that the kind of selective agreements are a form of market collusion that is enshrined as illegal in anti trust law. So even if it "makes sense" it also infers with market dynamics. Finally, the notion that this was an individual thing and there were no class impact is not so. The reason is that these companies have "brackets" for pay. If you are at a certain job title you make $X - $Y and corresponding amounts for options etc. These companies are also very interested in equity among the employees so if prices start rising they will have to draw up the low end affecting prices across the board. To the doubters, I point to the Facebook/google incident. Google was forced to give across the board 10% raises to every single employee because Facebook wasn't willing to sign anti poaching agreements. It's interesting that arguments essentially from das kapital are being raised here. Wages vs productivity. Intrinsic ideas of fairness are universal (and possible primate, studies showed). Google is in a weak position here.
• pasbesoin 13y ago
  Employers "conspire" to hold down wages -- "bad". Employees "conspire" to raise wages (unions) -- "bad". Keep in mind the multiple dimensions upon which "privilege" acts -- including those of perception. In other words, you think people should be "free" as "individuals" to earn whatever they are worth. Well, at its simplest, that is what you are going to get. You are ALSO going to get employers to work against this. Welcome to "libertarianism". In other other words, I'm suggesting that we are all members of society, and that our personal interests do not lie solely in our own, personal remuneration.
• zxexz 13y ago
  Whatever happened to "Don't be evil" :(
• yonran 13y ago
  The collusion allegations sound serious, but I believe the pando.com article has a couple misunderstandings and is overly sensationalist: 1. It is not illegal for a company to have its own “Do Not Cold Call” list. If you know that poaching your allies’ employees is likely to jeopardize the joint projects, you may choose not to poach your allies’ employees. If you know that poaching your competitor’s employees will likely provoke them to poach your own employees, you may both choose to avoid the mutually assured destruction. As far as I know, it is only illegal to collude with your competitor to make such a list. But it appears that Google did have illegal agreements. 2. One of the quotes from a Google memo, “Most companies have non-solicit agreements which would limit or prohibit a candidate from asking a coworker to interview with us as well,” appears to have nothing to do with anticompetitive behavior. Instead, it probably refers to non-solicit agreements that employees often must agree to when joining a company that prohibit the employee from poaching one of their coworkers for a time after leaving the company. The memo warns not to pressure employees to violate contracts they have signed with their prior employers.
• lucidrains 13y ago
  Meanwhile in medicine we need the AMA to keep physicians in short supply so the wages stay high...
• zacinbusiness 13y ago
  I'm confused about this entire situation. If I own a company in the US then it's my right to not hire from someone else's company if I so choose, yes? And in the case of tech giants then there is a lot of proprietary tech knowledge that can exist in an engineer's brain that may make him or her a very strategic hire for my competition. So, if I'm paying an engineer $100K and Google sees fit to hire them away for $200K then, sure, it's in the engineer's interest to tell me because then I would need to offer $250K to keep them. And this isn't because they have suddenly become more valuable, or because the engineer has suddenly developed new skills, it's simply a game of strategy and money that could potentially hurt both businesses. So, it makes sense to me that companies would agree to skip the drama, and just agree not to poach talent from each other. And, honestly, how many Apple designers, Google engineers, or EBay executives have gone hungry because of these non-compete agreements? When you're playing in that league then you are already extremely well compensated. So, is it simply a matter if principal? Why exactly is it illegal? These are honest questions.
  • asdfologist 13y ago
    It's illegal for the same reason that it's illegal for companies to collude to fix prices. You could apply your same arguments.
    • zacinbusiness 13y ago
      I guess so. But also it doesn't seem that companies are artificially keeping wages low. I mean if an engineer at a tech company isn't happy with his salary then he wouldn't have taken it in the first place, right? It's not the same as a person taking a job at a grocery store because they simply don't have other options. Top talent gets head hunted all the time. So if they want a better salary couldn't they just go somewhere else that pays it, as long as it's not a company that's part of the agreement?
      • asdfologist 13y ago
        Not necessarily. Keep in mind that the wages at the big tech companies affect wages at other firms. If the big techs drive down wages, then wages will go down at the smaller firms as well.
• aaronbrethorst 13y ago
  To quote Stringer Bell. Again. "[I]s you taking notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy?" Setting aside issues of ethics and legality, I cannot believe that any of these people would ever commit any of this to electronic record.
  • therobot24 13y ago
    one of the best quotes from the series what's more astounding is that eric deliberately says in an email to send the message orally so they don't get sued
• briantakita 13y ago
  Since this has market-wide effects, it seems fair to compensate all engineers working in the bay area during that time period.
• curiousquestion 13y ago
  Watch talk by Lawrence Lessig SCALE 12x: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3O1MC1AqvM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3O1MC1AqvM
• naveenspark 13y ago
  Not sure why this is ruffling so many feathers. There are thousands of great tech companys to work for that aren't on any Google, Apple or EBay "no-hire" list and vice versa. I fail to see how a few big companys agreeing not to poach talent from each other artificially reduces the total compensation ceiling industry wide.
  • skaevola 13y ago
    It was more than a couple of top tech companies: http://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles-wage-fixing-cartel-involved-dozens-more-companies-over-one-million-employees/ http://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles-wage-...
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• higherpurpose 13y ago
  Maybe this will bring end-to-end encrypted e-mails to Gmail, so that when they do discuss such things in the future, it's all encrypted properly? One can hope.
  • fixermark 13y ago
    I'd have to check my US law, but I'm pretty sure that a major corporation encrypting its internal emails and then trying to claim to a court that it can't produce documents under warrant because they're encrypted doesn't let the e-mail owners "win..." It gets them thrown in jail for contempt of court. If you want some evidence to back that hypothesis: the e-mails you're talking about right now are encrypted. They're encrypted inside Google's servers. But it doesn't matter in the face of a court order. It's not like the Justice Department accessed these files that are being reported on with wireshark.
  • stefek99 13y ago
    I cannot believe they were discussing such sensitive issues in plain text! I'd be worried to admit that I signed up for free pack of crisps from two different emails breaking T&C My tweet: https://twitter.com/stefek99/status/448045158836097024 https://twitter.com/stefek99/status/448045158836097024 What the hell were they thinking? I just wonder if anyone will go to prison... And how will stakeholders / stock market react?
• lucb1e 13y ago
  I remember having heard news about companies not hiring from each other a few years ago, I don't know for what exactly. I suppose to not try and steal each other's knowledge by buying people. I'm not sure which companies it were back then, but Apple and Google are very likely candidates. What changed? Why is this news now?
• abalone 13y ago
  Like many of you I am one of the engineers that's covered by the suit and may stand to benefit from it. Having said that, I want to play devil's advocate for a second. It's just my natural reaction when the press embeds big unquestioned assumptions in reporting for the sake of sensationalism -- namely that this is obviously "illegal" and nefarious behavior. Because, after all, it kept down wages for people like me who might otherwise have been more actively recruited. If your reaction is OF COURSE IT'S ILLEGAL, just hold on a second. Try to think about the counterargument rationally, even if it's against your personal interests. (That's what I'm doing.) There do exist many precedents for agreements and restrictions on seemingly "competitive" behavior that is deemed "unfair". Let's consider a related example from another domain: countries "dumping" cheap goods into foreign markets. For example, China is accused of "dumping" subsidized steel into the U.S. market, which hurts the industry here. The U.S. steel industry works with the government to put in place tariffs that block the practice. So is the U.S. steel industry being anti-competitive here? Have they engaged in an anti-competitive pact with the U.S. government conspiring to keep up the price of steel here? Well, on the surface, yes they have. But the distinction is that "dumping" is meant to describe a particular form of competition that is short term and unsustainable in nature and designed primarily to destroy competing business. It is meant to isolate a specific practice that actually hurts competition in the long run. So, what about the practice of poaching employees from competitors? Well think about it for a minute. What is the value of a Safari engineer to Google's nascent Chrome team? The truth is, it's a lot more than just that engineer's skillset. There's also the value of undercutting Apple's Safari development. That's HUGELY valuable to a competitor. So, I just wanted to put it out there that at first blush at least, that the practice of "poaching" may actually have an anticompetitive angle. Just like with "dumping", you have to look beyond the immediate act (restricting/boosting prices) and examine the particular practice it's attempting to curtail.
  • ThomPete 13y ago
    The main problem is that this is done behind your back. Thats your life they are basically agreeing to control. There should be no issue in people hiring from each other and thus no need to make agreements behind everyones backs.
• kaonashi 13y ago
  I'd like to see criminal prosecutions here.
• fatjokes 13y ago
  I have to say, the only person that disappoints me in all of this is Sergey Brin. I guess I kind of expected everybody else to be a douche, but he's fostered this free-thinking Tony Stark/Ironman persona and this just makes him seem like a coward, who caved the instant Steve Jobs came-a-ranting.
• nicolethenerd 13y ago
  Genuine question - I see a lot of references to the fact that this practice is "illegal", but what law is it violating?
  • fecak 13y ago
    Antitrust law such as Sherman. http://www.justice.gov/atr/about/antitrust-laws.html http://www.justice.gov/atr/about/antitrust-laws.html
• mavdi 13y ago
  Well hello Sergey Brin.
• confluence 13y ago
  This is real theft. I applaud my free market overlords for such setting fine examples of Machiavellin psychopathy and systematic duplicity, where they on the one hand lament the "shortage" of engineers and the failure of the education system, whilst simultaneously depressing the wages that should have been demanded from the fruits of that self same system. Fuck. These. Assholes.
• bignoggins 13y ago
  a
• nppc 13y ago
  Now lets talk about "Don't be Evil!"
• radoslawc 13y ago
  Genentech (http://www.gene.com/ http://www.gene.com/) is also on "do not cold call" list. How this company is related to google's business profile?
• zpk 13y ago
  Don't be evil,...except when it comes to hiring & labor practices.
• walshemj 13y ago
  So how many Google share holders does it take to put a motion of "no confidence in the board" on the order paper at the next Google AGM.
  • thrillgore 13y ago
    Given the amount of specializes stock that Larry and Sergey hold (over the other shareholders, essentially giving them the reigns for the time being), it's a futile effort.
    • walshemj 13y ago
      But makes the issue public and shows up the nature of the "dodgy" stock classes. And it woudl mean that the board woudl have to stand up and either defend what they did or admit they are law breakers. BTW the FTSE threw out a company with restrictive stock classes out of one of its index's only last year - the Daily Mail trust.
• w_t_payne 13y ago
  Since our employers are clearly not above playing juvenile dirty tricks, what's to stop us engineers returning the favor? Other professions (Doctors, Lawyers) use legislation to restrict the supply of labor and drive up prices, so why should software engineers be any different? We currently make ourselves vulnerable to manipulation and abuse in a way that no other profession has been stupid enough to do for centuries. We should lobby aggressively for legislation requiring professional accreditation for practicing software engineers, as well as for the provision of training and documentation services. We need to shut down the technical MOOCs, as well as efforts like stack overflow and code academy. All of these things, whilst seemingly noble, do our profession grievous harm.
• peterwwillis 13y ago
  "Additionally, there are no restrictions at any level for engineering candidates." Basically their agreed upon policy says that they can hire any engineers they want, but you better not hire one of our managers! What an indictment of the higher value attributed to managers over engineers.