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Facebook Refused No-Poaching Agreement With Google

340 points by byoogle 13y ago

byoogle 13y ago
Money (literally) quote: And what happens next is precisely what is supposed to happen when companies don’t collude to defraud their employees of fair-market wages: Google coughed up more money to improve its retention.
- CoolGuySteve 13y ago
  What's most amazing about this debacle is how clueless the executives seem to be. From the blatantly illegal smoking gun emails, to Google's almost immediate raise after this scandal became public. It's so coarse.
  - nostrademons 13y ago
    When you're an executive, you have many problems. It's pretty common to deal with the immediate one and create a whole host of other ones. One could argue that that's how it should be, because otherwise you're irresponsibly avoiding what you should be doing.
    - sliverstorm 13y ago
      Huh? This just goes back to the whole, fixing the urgent things instead of the important things.
  - asdfologist 13y ago
    I'm not so sure that they're clueless. Even if they lose the lawsuit and pay whatever fines they're slapped with, they might still come out on top, with all the revenues they squeezed out of their workforce during the collusion.
- cbsmith 13y ago
  Except Google didn't really cough up more money. They did increase base pay, but they cut back on bonus targets.
danielweber 13y ago
Well, I have something positive to say about Facebook.
- loceng 13y ago
  It's not really like they had a choice -- they needed to have access to large pools of existing work forces, and agreeing to no-poaching would prevent that.
  - a3n 13y ago
    Yeah, it was merely because they were on the sink side of a serious flow. If it was in the other direction they, being a corporation, could easily have been all over an agreement like that.
  - msabalau 13y ago
    I'm no fan of Facebook, but in the absence of evidence that they acted tactically, it would seem fair to give them credit for understanding that participating in a cartel is both stupid and unethical.
    - loceng 13y ago
      I would err on the side of caution and look at their previous behaviour as a predictor of future behaviour, which leads me to it being more from the side of necessity than anything ethics wise. You know the story of how Facebook was started yes?
  - prawn 13y ago
    Was Apple under Jobs the most explicit threat and perhaps that was likely more intimidating for Google than Facebook? I remember reading Jobs threatening some tit-for-tat?
billyjobob 13y ago
What was that motto? Don't be... ending? Don't be evasive? ... Don't be Evan? No, sorry, it's gone. Can't have been important anyway, or someone would have remembered it.
- badman_ting 13y ago
  I think it was "Let's choose three words that people will beat us over the head with until the end of time every time we so much as throw a gum wrapper on the ground"
  - theonemind 13y ago
    Well, I believe this sort of agreement violates the law and workers' rights. Perhaps people do expect too much of them because of that slogan, but we can condemn any company for illegal, anti-competitive behavior.
  - sharkweek 13y ago
    I don't care if the company's slogan is "HAIL SATAN, EVIL ROCKS AND CUTE ANIMALS SUCK" -- if they're doing something illegal, they deserve to be beaten over the head.
    - badman_ting 13y ago
      Precisely -- they should be taken to task for their unethical and illegal actions, not some cutesy-poo slogan.
      - wavefunction 13y ago
        Don't pick a cutesy-poo slogan as your corporate motto, do the opposite, and not expect to get grief over it. Why pick that slogan in the first place? I know "vision-statements" and things like that don't get a lot of mileage here but character matters.
  - gress 13y ago
    Those three words obtained them disproportionate goodwill, so now they deserve the opposite.
debt 13y ago
Facebook maintains a no-poaching agreement with companies which share the same board members. Is this common enough for it not be a big deal?
- balls187 13y ago
  This is pretty common in startups: it's considered bad form to poach employees from companies that have common investors, and board members of those companies. Sometimes, however, recruiters may not necessarily know and reach out to candidates and violate this unwritten rule. Also depending on the case, boardmembers/investors may look the other way.
  - stanleydrew 13y ago
    So why isn't anyone upset about this practice?
    - balls187 13y ago
      Good question. Think of it as a "gentlepersons" agreement not to actively poach someone from another startup with common investors. Similar to how investors generally don't invest in competitors to their portfolio companies (but it does happen-- See KPCB investing in both INRIX and Waze). It was more of a guideline, rather than a hard fast rule. This agreement didn't prevent people from recruiting friends, or from people actively looking to join another company. Also, if the person is/was unhappy at one startup, the investors would prefer they join another portfolio company rather than not.
ski 13y ago
It’s worth noting that Facebook was hotter than the sun back in 2008, so for it to continue to recruit from other firms could could have been a reflection of its market position; if you are doing the poaching, why would you disarm? Facebook was much smaller then, and likely had a lot more to gain from poaching than they had to lose.
hemantv 13y ago
The one person I admire the most is Mark for being a rebel in the valley.
- xcntktn 13y ago
  Don't worry, he's got his own strategy to keep programmers' salaries down: http://gawker.com/mark-zuckerbergs-self-serving-immigration-crusade-484912430 http://gawker.com/mark-zuckerbergs-self-serving-immigration-...
  - philwelch 13y ago
    If all he wanted to do was keep programmers' salaries down, he could just as easily open offices in India and China and employ people over there and pay them even less than he would have to pay them if they immigrated to the US. And as a large company that's an advantage Facebook has and their prospective competitors lack. I'm sorry you feel insecure that more immigration might threaten your ability to single-handedly earn three times as much as the median American family, but literally every other human being other than native-born American programmers is better off with this kind of immigration reform.
    - esturk 13y ago
      That would mean Facebook would get the same quality of engineers in India vs. grad students from India that are studying in US. Frankly, this is far from the case. In fact, most grad students from India studying in the US are by far of a higher quality than just a regular engineer in India. From what you've written, you're equating engineers as commodities (as in they are no different from each other), which is quite insulting to the actual engineers here from India and China. They are just better and Facebook knows this. They want the better quality and they are willing to pay more (than those in India) for it, but they won't go so far as to greatly inflate the salary of the entire software engineering occupation in America.
      - philwelch 13y ago
        My point is that, for Facebook's interests alone, they would rather hire the same engineer in India than in the US because after they move to the US you have to pay them more than if they stayed in India. The effect of immigration reform is that more engineers will move to the US, which is against Facebook's interests.
ryguytilidie 13y ago
To be fair, Sandberg saying "we didn't do this" about an illegal thing doesn't necessarily mean that they didn't do this. Also, why would a company much smaller than the others agree to this?
- avdempsey 13y ago
  Losing a talented employee can hurt regardless of the size of the company that snaps them up. A larger company will often have more resources with which to compete in the job market. A smaller company might (illegally) join such an agreement for the same reason that a weaker nation might sign a defensive pact with a stronger one.
  - ryguytilidie 13y ago
    Right, but as a Googler who went to FB, movement was much more common one way than the other. Also, I can say for a fact that Facebook recruiters were using Google org charts to reach out to people, so that's probably why they didn't agree to this, not because they're super awesome nice people.
- chippy 13y ago
  Actually she said "I haven't done this" She didn't use the word "we". She was talking only about herself - not for other people in her company. She was not talking about her knowledge of other people's actions either.
kchoudhu 13y ago
Does anyone know how much money we're talking about here? How much do, say, Google SRE people make after a few years on the job?
- jcdavis 13y ago
  Can't say salaries, but any engineer who joined facebook in 2008 is now safely a multi-millionaire.
- elwell 13y ago
  Avg $126,375 according to GlassDoor for Google SRE
  - jcdavis 13y ago
    Most Glassdoor numbers are out of date.
    - kchoudhu 13y ago
      Man, Glassdoor is making me jealous. Kids with 1-3 years experience making 204K in NYC? BRB, applying to Google SRE.
      - jrockway 13y ago
        Half is taxes and the other half of that is rent for a 1 room apartment. NYC ain't cheap. I have no idea why there are software engineering offices in this city.
        kchoudhu 13y ago
        Tell me about it. Front office technology at one of the larger banks here in NYC -- the only reason we still have jobs is because the desk needs someone in technology to yell at when things go wrong. Your taxes and living observation gels pretty well with my ongoing experience in the city :(
  - 13y ago
diskerror 13y ago
This is a great precedent set by Facebook against a not so great one.I feel that this current trend is quite scary to think about. Taking away someone's opportunity to be employed elsewhere oversteps the line between the employer and the employee's personal life.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
PythonicAlpha 13y ago
>The pervasive attempt by large tech companies to suppress wages by diminishing their employees’ rights to choose where they work is not merely selfish in the extreme, but is counter to the very market principles that made these companies so successful to begin with. The "free market" system is just an illusion. When you are on the side of those with the lowest power (e.g. the workforce), the system does not work. So much about the notion, that the "free market" system will correct itself.
CoolGuySteve 13y ago
The worst thing about this oligopoly/cartel is that during the period they were refusing to poach, they accrued billions cash reserves while spending only a little on R&D (which I assume is mostly engineering salaries). Even after the class action lawsuit is settled, it's likely the penalty won't be anywhere near the amount of profit that was illegally captured. Furthermore, think about what these companies would have chosen to work on had engineers been more expensive. Would we have seen more useful products coming out of the valley if staff allocations had worked out differently? When people are cheap, throwing them into doomed ventures like Google Buzz or Apple's awful Samba clone isn't nearly so devastating to whatever middle manager chain dreamed them up.
- cromwellian 13y ago
  Presumably the shortage of labor was still real, and if they needed to hire people, but couldn't poach, then they hired them from the rest of the talent pool. If that's the case, then removing the "cold calls" from the talent search might have had the effect of actually driving up salaries for those not working at these companies, since potentially reduced the supply. If that's the case, then it would not have saved money, rather, it would have had the effect of simply shifting the money from going to existing Google/Apple/etc employees to applicants from smaller firms. That is, it changed the distribution of spending, and probably in a more egalitarian way, distributing the spending over a larger pool, instead of simply fighting over, and raising the wages, of the small group of superstars at the big companies. These companies are spending on R&D and increasing the percentage year over year, they are also spending huge sums of acqui-hires, and hiring faster than the local communities, or their own office space, can handle. You could argue that excessive salaries are actually bad for allocation. Wall Street has infamously brained drained tons of the best and brightest to figure out how to gain small efficiencies in stock trading. What discoveries might have occurred had string theorists not left to go optimize portfolios? One thing I wouldn't call engineers is cheap. You're talking about people making upwards of $150-200k in salary, and probably up to half-million when total compensation is considered. I paid more in taxes last year than my mother earned in several years of working as a cashier. And that's pretty sad. I grew up poor so I have a different perspective on this, but I see a lot of #zeroethWorldProblems whining going on in the valley while the world around them is falling apart. It's useful to have some perspective, and honestly, if these companies are to be fined and sanctioned, I'd rather the money go to poor people, instead of lawyers and techies who need to increase the bid on their studio apartment.
adventured 13y ago
"You can’t just free market part of the time. Good on Facebook for not being party to the shenanigans." I'm always fascinated by what people don't understand about free markets. The author appears to think "free market" means lots of government enforced market controls (which would be an obvious contradiction in terms). In an actual free market, it's not illegal to collude to suppress wages, just like it's not illegal for employees to form unions, leave for other better jobs, or start their own companies to compete and pay superior wages to steal talent. In intentionally overly simplified terms, "free market" means a lack of, or severe limitation of, government controls. How is it possible the author doesn't know that?
- tedks 13y ago
  Good luck starting a union if all the union organizers are fired as soon as management finds out they're unionizing. Good luck starting new companies without any access to capital. Good luck finding a new job in a labor market like today's. (If you want to see how easy it is to "start a union," there are plenty of active campaigns by unions to unionize various companies: Starbucks and Jimmy Johns are the ones that come most quickly to mind. The people running those campaigns would appreciate your help, and you'd learn a valuable lesson about labor politics.)
  - adventured 13y ago
    Good luck starting new companies? Why yes indeed in fact. I'm very well versed on the history of the free market in America for example, circa 19th and early 20th century. There was no problem in starting companies - in fact it was a boom time for entrepreneurialism - despite the extremely low level of regulation. If there was a market opportunity to make money, capital was available. For every juggernaut there were numerous others that wanted to chop that juggernaut down to size. JP Morgan, Rockefeller, Carnegie, they all had countless large enemies willing to finance competitors. Why should it be easy in a free market to start a union inside of a company? Free markets don't guarantee you have a right to a job or a right to start a union at a company. In a case where the employees don't own the company, assuming they're strictly labor, they agree to work there and get paid for it, or they can quit. That's a free market for labor. You also don't have to work at a company to attempt to organize its labor in a free market. (also I should note, my intentions aren't to have a debate on the pros and cons of free market economics, but rather to describe what a free market for labor actually is)
iamshariq 13y ago
How did people come to the conclusion that these companies had the agreement to reduce wages? It seems like they had this agreement - only because they hated their employees being poached on. It's not price fixing. It's self preservation. Sure it had a side effect of keeping wages low - but that was not their goal. None of them are short on money. I'm not saying what they did was right - but lets not frame it in a context that makes it look like they did this to not let employees have more money. When in reality - they did it to stop others from stealing their employees.
- batiudrami 13y ago
  You say 'reducing wages' as though it's a side effect, but in reality it and preventing poaching are one and the same. If companies wanted to keep their emploeyees from being poached, they could pay them more and offer them better conditions. They could have conversations with employees about what it would take to keep them with the company. By having anti-poaching agreements, they avoid having to do that.
- pvarangot 13y ago
  > It's not price fixing. > It's self preservation. It's both. One of them is illegal.
- djur 13y ago
  You can't "steal" employees. They're people, not property. They have agency. These agreements exist solely to limit the opportunities of the people who work for these companies. At the bare minimum they should have been public, so people who decided to take a job at one of the companies knew they'd be restricted in their ability to find work elsewhere.
- asdfologist 13y ago
  Email from Schmidt asking his people at Google to stop poaching: "Google is the talk of the valley because we are driving up salaries across the board."
ryandrake 13y ago
I think we should stop using the word "poach" when describing these job changes. Use of this word suggests that we (technology workers) are the property of our employer, and that other employers are "stealing" that property away. I don't consider myself akin to a cow owned by my previous employer, stolen by my current one. I hope you don't either. My relationship with my employer is one of equals, freely and mutually entered into, and does not imply any ownership of my person. Hate to be the PC police, but I personally feel offended by the use of this word, and I'm surprised that more people aren't. I'd like to propose using a more neutral phrase, like "hire away" to describe this practice, instead of "poach". I hope, upon reflection about their own role in the employer-employee relationship, others might come to this conclusion and stop using this word as well.
- Eliezer 13y ago
  "Seduce"
- asdfologist 13y ago
  The word has evolved to mean much more than that narrow definition. Language is a living thing.
  - jrockway 13y ago
    The word has not evolved past the negative connotations. Poach implies that someone is being wronged, but you being offered a higher salary for your skills is not wrong.
    - asdfologist 13y ago
      Everything you said is true and yet does not imply the parent's conclusion. You're making the point that poaching someone is not unethical despite the word's tone, while the parent is claiming that using the word "poach" makes someone sound like property. You're conflating those two claims.
- pjbrunet 13y ago
  That bothered me too.
bane 13y ago
Here's what's saddest to me about this. There isn't really a labor shortage. These companies colluded for years on salary and poaching to make it possible to selectively hire from choice schools and people with a certain "pedigree" -- which artificially limited the pool of people they felt were "acceptable"...which drove up the salary of people from this pool which of course caused them to want to collude to keep wages down. This is why discriminatory hiring practices are bad for everybody. Now years later Google, using the power of massive data, has figured out that it didn't really matter all that much that they were hiring from this artificially limited pool. Which means it didn't matter all that much to start with for any of these companies. If they hadn't colluded on pay and poaching, but stayed selective, they would have been eventually forced to either reach outside this selective pool and end the "shortage" or suck up the higher wages. Basically the market would have resolved the issue of higher wages for them.
mik3y 13y ago
In late 2008, Facebook seemed to ramping up hiring (and recruiting aggressively, with good reason, from Google). Any "truce" would have been severely one-sided for Facebook. I'm sure they weren't worried about bleeding employees to Google if they said no, especially when you remember $GOOG was near a 3-year low and FB growth was exploding..
kagali 13y ago
Proof positive that there is no shortage of people - just companies paying a living wage.
drawkbox 13y ago
Platforms are getting a little bit like mini kingdoms these days, feudal in nature, from the castles of the Altos. 5-10 years before we have a moat around a campus, a technological one though that blocks all non-essential communication while you are Under the Dome, then, apartments, pretty soon "bring out your dead" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grbSQ6O6kbs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grbSQ6O6kbs).
StefanKarpinski 13y ago
I recall wondering at the time why, if there was such a shortage of talented developers, newly minted lawyers were still making several times as much as good programmers. Now we know part of the reason why: Apple, Goole, Adobe and all the other big names in tech – except, apparently Facebook – were illegally colluding to pay talented devs less money. Since this was discovered, industry pay scales have gone up, while law salaries have dropped – now it's much closer. The thing that bothers me the most is that this illegal collusion suppressed wages for the entire software industry, robbing us all of money that lined the pockets of these companies. The plaintiffs in this case are by far not the only ones who were affected – Apple, Google, et al. stole tens of thousands of dollars per year from each person who was working in the software industry for the better part of a decade and the vast majority of us aren't going to get any of that back.
- judk 13y ago
  Huh? College hires at Google got paid same or more ($100+K plus equity) than new JD lawyers ($150k).
  - StefanKarpinski 13y ago
    In 2005? And Google hires aren't really the right point of comparison – that's the very top of the tech market, which you're comparing to typical starting lawyers. New hires at top law firms did and still do make significantly more than that. A better point of comparison is the middle of each market, which is where lawyers were getting paid multiple x developers. By suppressing the top of the market, these companies were pushing the pay scale down across the entire industry, not just at the top. That's precisely what I think it's so shitty.
    - logical42 13y ago
      This is incorrect actually. Pay for lawyers forms a bimodal distribution, where graduates from the top ten law schools tend to occupy most of the high end of the distribution while everyone else tends to fall in the lower end.
mantrax3 13y ago
Programming is not like being a cash register attendant at the supermarket (no offense to these workers intended). For programmers, getting into the workflow of a company, their existing codebase, becoming efficient, it may take months. Shipping a product may (and typically does) take over a year. The lifetime of a product may be over a decade. And if a developer quits mid-way through a project, they may derail the entire project, while someone else has to spend the time, step into their shoes and continue their work. I honestly can't imagine the morality of someone who would just abandon their project, their baby, so to speak, and go work somewhere else at the first call from another company offering more money. Did they take the first job out of desperation? We're talking top-of-the-top companies here. I doubt so. Poaching employees like this is also very unfair to every company spending a lot of resources to find the right employees, to build the right teams from other channels, only to have the competition cold call them and take them away after the former company has done the hard work. There's also the problem of trade secrets. An employee who has spent some time at, say, Apple, learns a lot about their product plans, processes, methods, and so on. Getting those employees means that one way or another you get access to these carefully kept trade secrets implicitly, if not explicitly. Keeping wages down is bad, but employees who keep shifting jobs, leaving a trail of destruction behind them is also bad. How do we resolve both sides of the issue so everyone is happy?
- Derander 13y ago
  The standard argument is that people shift jobs so much because it's the most reliable way to get a large pay raise. If companies stopped making it necessary to hop jobs in order to make closer to what you're worth, then it might help retention.
- sgustard 13y ago
  Give me a contract with a guaranteed salary and no risk of being fired, for one thing. At-risk employment cuts both ways.
- Curmudgel 13y ago
  > I honestly can't imagine the morality of someone who would just abandon their project, their baby, so to speak, and go work somewhere else at the first call from another company offering more money. Employees (most of the time) don't own the work that they produce for the company, and they themselves are not property of the company. Unless they are contractually obligated to stay at a company for a certain amount of time, there is no reason for them to work for less than they are worth and reject an offer that would make them happier. Employees have good reasons for switching jobs. If they feel dedicated to their current job then they always have the option to stay. >Poaching employees like this is also very unfair to every company... Employees are human beings, not chattel. You started off by doubting the morality of people who switch jobs, but now you make it seem as the are powerless to choose where they work and must always leave for a company that offers more money. >spending a lot of resources to find the right employees, to build the right teams from other channels, only to have the competition cold call them and take them away after the former company has done the hard work. Not every employee will switch jobs because he or she received a better offer. And if finding another employee is so costly, then matching the new offer would probably save them money. >There's also the problem of trade secrets. An employee who has spent some time at, say, Apple, learns a lot about their product plans, processes, methods, and so on. Getting those employees means that one way or another you get access to these carefully kept trade secrets implicitly, if not explicitly. That's what the legal system is for. > Keeping wages down is bad, but employees who keep shifting jobs, leaving a trail of destruction behind them is also bad.How do we resolve both sides of the issue so everyone is happy? Pay the employees what they're worth.
jjallen 13y ago
Of course Facebook refused! They were hiring many more employees than Google was as a percentage of the starting employee base because of the insane growth they were undergoing. They were building a business, they had to keep poaching. I don't think Facebook should get much credit for not participating, when they couldn't have. Also, from a more game theoretical approach, they were a free rider on the collusion - they could have outed the collusion if they were that benevolent, since they clearly knew what was happening. Why didn't they publicize the blatantly wrong agreements at the time?
- rwallace 13y ago
  The fact that it was in Facebook's interest to do the right thing doesn't change the fact that when it came to it, they did the right thing and Google, for all their "don't be evil" talk, did the wrong thing. That's what really matters in the end. And I don't particularly like having to say this, because I've been a Google fan ever since I switched to their search engine from AltaVista, whereas I think the world would be a better place if Facebook shut down their servers and deleted their database tomorrow. But yes, damn it, Facebook does deserve credit here.
  - lsaferite 13y ago
    Well, by not exposing the situation, they were complicit and therefore just as 'evil' as the rest. I'm sure some lawyer somewhere could argue conspiracy if they felt the urge.
  - jjallen 13y ago
    They would deserve credit if they acted against their best interests by making it known what was going on at the time, but they knew they were benefiting from lower than otherwise salaries due to the collusion.
outside1234 13y ago
i mean, come of, of course they did. it was going to be like 99:1 in Facebook's direction. this isn't any shining beacon of ethics.
outside1234 13y ago
Ten things we know to be true... ...make that nine things we know to be true...
weixiyen 13y ago
so basically every company did the most logical thing for their own best interests.
AaronFriel 13y ago
There's a flip side to this no poaching agreement, evidenced by Facebook's position: Is there a benefit to this agreement depressing wages in that, for startups, obtaining competent developers was cheaper than it would have been otherwise?
- jasonwocky 13y ago
  Well, sure, there was a benefit to the startups' founders and funders.
ojbyrne 13y ago
The most offensive thing about these stories is that those same people who conspire to drive down employee salaries then go to their executive compensation committees where they conspire to drive up executive salaries.
higherpurpose 13y ago
Is this a surprise? Facebook has been hiring Google employees for a while...
xiaoma 13y ago
Even without facebook, there would likely have been another mega-successful startup springing up and ruining the hiring collusion. As long as incumbents can't create a regulatory or legal moat (e.g. patents), I don't think these kinds of salary depressing tactics will work for more than a few years at a time.
eyeareque 13y ago
I remember my friend At Google telling me that he just got a big raise and that the raises were happening across the company. I wondered what cause googled to do this, but quickly assumed it was because Facebook was sucking talent away from google. At the time googlers were paid less than other companies too. Facebook might look good in this instance but remember they were growing really fast at this time so it would have seriously hurt them to agree to any hiring pacts.
friendzis 13y ago
You all keep trashing companies for no-poaching agreements because it lowers your wages. Let's look at this from perspective of employer. There are costs associated with obtaining well performing employee: * Hiring: people spend their hours filtering prospective employees. Usually HR does that, but bigger companies have separate hiring department. Expensive. * Idling: newly recruited employee rarely has intimate knowledge of all technologies, systems used inside a company and surely has no idea how they are tied together. This takes some months to grasp. Recruits often wreak havoc and as a result produce very little net worth. And you greedy recruits want your 6 figure salary for your havoc. * Training: employees are trained. Be it actual courses, conferences or just unsuccessful internal startup its still training. And having a team work on a doomed to be killed project for a year is again expensive. In order to compensate for these no-worth-generating expenses employers are left with 2 choices: lower the salary or invent a way to keep the employee. Lower salaries are usually not an option because, well, who you will hire then in the first place when rivals often much better packages? Companies are left with an option to try and keep the employees. In intimate atmosphere of Silicon Valey it is hard to keep employee salaries/benefits and skills a secret, therefore it is much easier and cheaper to contact employee of a rivaling company and offer a better mutually agreed package. You either agree not to poach and let prospective employees go through your normal hiring process or chain employees with timed contracts. So just think that no-poaching agreements might be the thing keeping your salaries that high.
mavdi 13y ago
Yet another reason for every semi-talented programmer to become a consultant. They rob you of less money that way. I'm certainly going to write to my MP about this. I think you should too. In fact I think every programmer out there should be involved in bringing a class action case against them.
nctalaviya 13y ago
someone ahead of Google
chippy 13y ago
Sheryl Sandberg only spoke for herself. She did not mention her knowledge of what other people in Facebook did. She only said that she, personally, didn't agree to the agreement on behalf of the company. She did not say that Facebook didn't have an agreement, only that she did not ever agree to one. This is an important fact when looking at the evidence. She is only going to say enough of what she needs to say in terms of the lawsuit. The burden of proof of the law suit has to prove that Facebook had one - she could only speak about her own involvement. There was nothing about the other people at the top of the company - and in Law - nothing equals nothing.
- revelation 13y ago
  Abstract away from the people. At the time, it was simply not in Facebooks best interest to enter into such an agreement - at their ridiculous growth, they got lots of money and needed to put it into top talent, which means they need to aggressively recruit. If you then enter into an agreement not to recruit from many top companies in the valley - that hurts your chances. It's not that Facebook is the only ethical company in this, it is just that at the time there was no upside for them in it.
0800899g 13y ago
Pay fixing and chomski
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
s3r3nity 13y ago
Where are the calls for boycotting Google for doing something blatantly "evil" and illegal? Kudos for Facebook for doing the right thing here. I'm just curious what ramifications this has, if any.
drivingmenuts 13y ago
"Don't be evil." More like "Don't get caught."
1010011010 13y ago
So Google refused to hire Apple employees, but presumably didn't refuse to hire Microsoft employees. What a bad move for their culture.
j_m_b 13y ago
Could this have more to do with the fact that PHP/Javascript is the primary language used at Facebook whereas it is pretty much language-spaghetti at Google? Perhaps Zuckerberg figured that his technical culture didn't leave much for Google to poach yet he wanted to soak up some talent from the likes of Google. I kid, I kid!
dclowd9901 13y ago
When I talk to other developers about this stuff and H1B exploitation, we all seem categorically not in favor of collusion. These companies were started by software developers. What the hell happens in the process of running a company where you justify this kind of morality shift?
- jpasden 13y ago
  Getting rich?
- cgore 13y ago
  Where did you get the idea that software developers are the very definition of moral paragons?
pyrrhotech 13y ago
Engineers are still paid way too low for the massive value they add to these companies.
the_watcher 13y ago
Looks like Facebook identified a market inefficiency, and chose to bet on their ability to attract/acquire/retain talent over taking the defensive stance that Google and Apple did. Bravo to Facebook.
diminoten 13y ago
I still don't get why this is news now, and not like 3 or 4 years ago. I knew about this back then, and I'm some random nobody. Is it because there's proof now?

340 points by byoogle 13y ago

Money (literally) quote: And what happens next is precisely what is supposed to happen when companies don’t collude to defraud their employees of fair-market wages: Google coughed up more money to improve its retention.

CoolGuySteve 13y ago
What's most amazing about this debacle is how clueless the executives seem to be. From the blatantly illegal smoking gun emails, to Google's almost immediate raise after this scandal became public. It's so coarse.
- nostrademons 13y ago
  When you're an executive, you have many problems. It's pretty common to deal with the immediate one and create a whole host of other ones. One could argue that that's how it should be, because otherwise you're irresponsibly avoiding what you should be doing.
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    Huh? This just goes back to the whole, fixing the urgent things instead of the important things.
- asdfologist 13y ago
  I'm not so sure that they're clueless. Even if they lose the lawsuit and pay whatever fines they're slapped with, they might still come out on top, with all the revenues they squeezed out of their workforce during the collusion.
cbsmith 13y ago
Except Google didn't really cough up more money. They did increase base pay, but they cut back on bonus targets.

danielweber 13y ago

Well, I have something positive to say about Facebook.

loceng 13y ago
It's not really like they had a choice -- they needed to have access to large pools of existing work forces, and agreeing to no-poaching would prevent that.
- a3n 13y ago
  Yeah, it was merely because they were on the sink side of a serious flow. If it was in the other direction they, being a corporation, could easily have been all over an agreement like that.
- msabalau 13y ago
  I'm no fan of Facebook, but in the absence of evidence that they acted tactically, it would seem fair to give them credit for understanding that participating in a cartel is both stupid and unethical.
  - loceng 13y ago
    I would err on the side of caution and look at their previous behaviour as a predictor of future behaviour, which leads me to it being more from the side of necessity than anything ethics wise. You know the story of how Facebook was started yes?
- prawn 13y ago
  Was Apple under Jobs the most explicit threat and perhaps that was likely more intimidating for Google than Facebook? I remember reading Jobs threatening some tit-for-tat?

billyjobob 13y ago

What was that motto? Don't be... ending? Don't be evasive? ... Don't be Evan? No, sorry, it's gone. Can't have been important anyway, or someone would have remembered it.

badman_ting 13y ago
I think it was "Let's choose three words that people will beat us over the head with until the end of time every time we so much as throw a gum wrapper on the ground"
- theonemind 13y ago
  Well, I believe this sort of agreement violates the law and workers' rights. Perhaps people do expect too much of them because of that slogan, but we can condemn any company for illegal, anti-competitive behavior.
- sharkweek 13y ago
  I don't care if the company's slogan is "HAIL SATAN, EVIL ROCKS AND CUTE ANIMALS SUCK" -- if they're doing something illegal, they deserve to be beaten over the head.
  - badman_ting 13y ago
    Precisely -- they should be taken to task for their unethical and illegal actions, not some cutesy-poo slogan.
    - wavefunction 13y ago
      Don't pick a cutesy-poo slogan as your corporate motto, do the opposite, and not expect to get grief over it. Why pick that slogan in the first place? I know "vision-statements" and things like that don't get a lot of mileage here but character matters.
- gress 13y ago
  Those three words obtained them disproportionate goodwill, so now they deserve the opposite.

debt 13y ago

Facebook maintains a no-poaching agreement with companies which share the same board members. Is this common enough for it not be a big deal?

balls187 13y ago
This is pretty common in startups: it's considered bad form to poach employees from companies that have common investors, and board members of those companies. Sometimes, however, recruiters may not necessarily know and reach out to candidates and violate this unwritten rule. Also depending on the case, boardmembers/investors may look the other way.
- stanleydrew 13y ago
  So why isn't anyone upset about this practice?
  - balls187 13y ago
    Good question. Think of it as a "gentlepersons" agreement not to actively poach someone from another startup with common investors. Similar to how investors generally don't invest in competitors to their portfolio companies (but it does happen-- See KPCB investing in both INRIX and Waze). It was more of a guideline, rather than a hard fast rule. This agreement didn't prevent people from recruiting friends, or from people actively looking to join another company. Also, if the person is/was unhappy at one startup, the investors would prefer they join another portfolio company rather than not.

ski 13y ago

It’s worth noting that Facebook was hotter than the sun back in 2008, so for it to continue to recruit from other firms could could have been a reflection of its market position; if you are doing the poaching, why would you disarm? Facebook was much smaller then, and likely had a lot more to gain from poaching than they had to lose.

hemantv 13y ago

The one person I admire the most is Mark for being a rebel in the valley.

xcntktn 13y ago
Don't worry, he's got his own strategy to keep programmers' salaries down: http://gawker.com/mark-zuckerbergs-self-serving-immigration-crusade-484912430 http://gawker.com/mark-zuckerbergs-self-serving-immigration-...
- philwelch 13y ago
  If all he wanted to do was keep programmers' salaries down, he could just as easily open offices in India and China and employ people over there and pay them even less than he would have to pay them if they immigrated to the US. And as a large company that's an advantage Facebook has and their prospective competitors lack. I'm sorry you feel insecure that more immigration might threaten your ability to single-handedly earn three times as much as the median American family, but literally every other human being other than native-born American programmers is better off with this kind of immigration reform.
  - esturk 13y ago
    That would mean Facebook would get the same quality of engineers in India vs. grad students from India that are studying in US. Frankly, this is far from the case. In fact, most grad students from India studying in the US are by far of a higher quality than just a regular engineer in India. From what you've written, you're equating engineers as commodities (as in they are no different from each other), which is quite insulting to the actual engineers here from India and China. They are just better and Facebook knows this. They want the better quality and they are willing to pay more (than those in India) for it, but they won't go so far as to greatly inflate the salary of the entire software engineering occupation in America.
    - philwelch 13y ago
      My point is that, for Facebook's interests alone, they would rather hire the same engineer in India than in the US because after they move to the US you have to pay them more than if they stayed in India. The effect of immigration reform is that more engineers will move to the US, which is against Facebook's interests.

ryguytilidie 13y ago

To be fair, Sandberg saying "we didn't do this" about an illegal thing doesn't necessarily mean that they didn't do this. Also, why would a company much smaller than the others agree to this?

avdempsey 13y ago
Losing a talented employee can hurt regardless of the size of the company that snaps them up. A larger company will often have more resources with which to compete in the job market. A smaller company might (illegally) join such an agreement for the same reason that a weaker nation might sign a defensive pact with a stronger one.
- ryguytilidie 13y ago
  Right, but as a Googler who went to FB, movement was much more common one way than the other. Also, I can say for a fact that Facebook recruiters were using Google org charts to reach out to people, so that's probably why they didn't agree to this, not because they're super awesome nice people.
chippy 13y ago
Actually she said "I haven't done this" She didn't use the word "we". She was talking only about herself - not for other people in her company. She was not talking about her knowledge of other people's actions either.

kchoudhu 13y ago

Does anyone know how much money we're talking about here? How much do, say, Google SRE people make after a few years on the job?

jcdavis 13y ago
Can't say salaries, but any engineer who joined facebook in 2008 is now safely a multi-millionaire.
elwell 13y ago
Avg $126,375 according to GlassDoor for Google SRE
- jcdavis 13y ago
  Most Glassdoor numbers are out of date.
  - kchoudhu 13y ago
    Man, Glassdoor is making me jealous. Kids with 1-3 years experience making 204K in NYC? BRB, applying to Google SRE.
    - jrockway 13y ago
      Half is taxes and the other half of that is rent for a 1 room apartment. NYC ain't cheap. I have no idea why there are software engineering offices in this city.
      - kchoudhu 13y ago
        Tell me about it. Front office technology at one of the larger banks here in NYC -- the only reason we still have jobs is because the desk needs someone in technology to yell at when things go wrong. Your taxes and living observation gels pretty well with my ongoing experience in the city :(
- 13y ago

diskerror 13y ago

This is a great precedent set by Facebook against a not so great one.I feel that this current trend is quite scary to think about. Taking away someone's opportunity to be employed elsewhere oversteps the line between the employer and the employee's personal life.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

PythonicAlpha 13y ago

>The pervasive attempt by large tech companies to suppress wages by diminishing their employees’ rights to choose where they work is not merely selfish in the extreme, but is counter to the very market principles that made these companies so successful to begin with. The "free market" system is just an illusion. When you are on the side of those with the lowest power (e.g. the workforce), the system does not work. So much about the notion, that the "free market" system will correct itself.

CoolGuySteve 13y ago

The worst thing about this oligopoly/cartel is that during the period they were refusing to poach, they accrued billions cash reserves while spending only a little on R&D (which I assume is mostly engineering salaries). Even after the class action lawsuit is settled, it's likely the penalty won't be anywhere near the amount of profit that was illegally captured. Furthermore, think about what these companies would have chosen to work on had engineers been more expensive. Would we have seen more useful products coming out of the valley if staff allocations had worked out differently? When people are cheap, throwing them into doomed ventures like Google Buzz or Apple's awful Samba clone isn't nearly so devastating to whatever middle manager chain dreamed them up.

cromwellian 13y ago
Presumably the shortage of labor was still real, and if they needed to hire people, but couldn't poach, then they hired them from the rest of the talent pool. If that's the case, then removing the "cold calls" from the talent search might have had the effect of actually driving up salaries for those not working at these companies, since potentially reduced the supply. If that's the case, then it would not have saved money, rather, it would have had the effect of simply shifting the money from going to existing Google/Apple/etc employees to applicants from smaller firms. That is, it changed the distribution of spending, and probably in a more egalitarian way, distributing the spending over a larger pool, instead of simply fighting over, and raising the wages, of the small group of superstars at the big companies. These companies are spending on R&D and increasing the percentage year over year, they are also spending huge sums of acqui-hires, and hiring faster than the local communities, or their own office space, can handle. You could argue that excessive salaries are actually bad for allocation. Wall Street has infamously brained drained tons of the best and brightest to figure out how to gain small efficiencies in stock trading. What discoveries might have occurred had string theorists not left to go optimize portfolios? One thing I wouldn't call engineers is cheap. You're talking about people making upwards of $150-200k in salary, and probably up to half-million when total compensation is considered. I paid more in taxes last year than my mother earned in several years of working as a cashier. And that's pretty sad. I grew up poor so I have a different perspective on this, but I see a lot of #zeroethWorldProblems whining going on in the valley while the world around them is falling apart. It's useful to have some perspective, and honestly, if these companies are to be fined and sanctioned, I'd rather the money go to poor people, instead of lawyers and techies who need to increase the bid on their studio apartment.

adventured 13y ago

"You can’t just free market part of the time. Good on Facebook for not being party to the shenanigans." I'm always fascinated by what people don't understand about free markets. The author appears to think "free market" means lots of government enforced market controls (which would be an obvious contradiction in terms). In an actual free market, it's not illegal to collude to suppress wages, just like it's not illegal for employees to form unions, leave for other better jobs, or start their own companies to compete and pay superior wages to steal talent. In intentionally overly simplified terms, "free market" means a lack of, or severe limitation of, government controls. How is it possible the author doesn't know that?

tedks 13y ago
Good luck starting a union if all the union organizers are fired as soon as management finds out they're unionizing. Good luck starting new companies without any access to capital. Good luck finding a new job in a labor market like today's. (If you want to see how easy it is to "start a union," there are plenty of active campaigns by unions to unionize various companies: Starbucks and Jimmy Johns are the ones that come most quickly to mind. The people running those campaigns would appreciate your help, and you'd learn a valuable lesson about labor politics.)
- adventured 13y ago
  Good luck starting new companies? Why yes indeed in fact. I'm very well versed on the history of the free market in America for example, circa 19th and early 20th century. There was no problem in starting companies - in fact it was a boom time for entrepreneurialism - despite the extremely low level of regulation. If there was a market opportunity to make money, capital was available. For every juggernaut there were numerous others that wanted to chop that juggernaut down to size. JP Morgan, Rockefeller, Carnegie, they all had countless large enemies willing to finance competitors. Why should it be easy in a free market to start a union inside of a company? Free markets don't guarantee you have a right to a job or a right to start a union at a company. In a case where the employees don't own the company, assuming they're strictly labor, they agree to work there and get paid for it, or they can quit. That's a free market for labor. You also don't have to work at a company to attempt to organize its labor in a free market. (also I should note, my intentions aren't to have a debate on the pros and cons of free market economics, but rather to describe what a free market for labor actually is)

iamshariq 13y ago

How did people come to the conclusion that these companies had the agreement to reduce wages? It seems like they had this agreement - only because they hated their employees being poached on. It's not price fixing. It's self preservation. Sure it had a side effect of keeping wages low - but that was not their goal. None of them are short on money. I'm not saying what they did was right - but lets not frame it in a context that makes it look like they did this to not let employees have more money. When in reality - they did it to stop others from stealing their employees.

batiudrami 13y ago
You say 'reducing wages' as though it's a side effect, but in reality it and preventing poaching are one and the same. If companies wanted to keep their emploeyees from being poached, they could pay them more and offer them better conditions. They could have conversations with employees about what it would take to keep them with the company. By having anti-poaching agreements, they avoid having to do that.
pvarangot 13y ago
> It's not price fixing. > It's self preservation. It's both. One of them is illegal.
djur 13y ago
You can't "steal" employees. They're people, not property. They have agency. These agreements exist solely to limit the opportunities of the people who work for these companies. At the bare minimum they should have been public, so people who decided to take a job at one of the companies knew they'd be restricted in their ability to find work elsewhere.
asdfologist 13y ago
Email from Schmidt asking his people at Google to stop poaching: "Google is the talk of the valley because we are driving up salaries across the board."

ryandrake 13y ago

I think we should stop using the word "poach" when describing these job changes. Use of this word suggests that we (technology workers) are the property of our employer, and that other employers are "stealing" that property away. I don't consider myself akin to a cow owned by my previous employer, stolen by my current one. I hope you don't either. My relationship with my employer is one of equals, freely and mutually entered into, and does not imply any ownership of my person. Hate to be the PC police, but I personally feel offended by the use of this word, and I'm surprised that more people aren't. I'd like to propose using a more neutral phrase, like "hire away" to describe this practice, instead of "poach". I hope, upon reflection about their own role in the employer-employee relationship, others might come to this conclusion and stop using this word as well.

Eliezer 13y ago
"Seduce"
asdfologist 13y ago
The word has evolved to mean much more than that narrow definition. Language is a living thing.
- jrockway 13y ago
  The word has not evolved past the negative connotations. Poach implies that someone is being wronged, but you being offered a higher salary for your skills is not wrong.
  - asdfologist 13y ago
    Everything you said is true and yet does not imply the parent's conclusion. You're making the point that poaching someone is not unethical despite the word's tone, while the parent is claiming that using the word "poach" makes someone sound like property. You're conflating those two claims.
pjbrunet 13y ago
That bothered me too.

bane 13y ago

Here's what's saddest to me about this. There isn't really a labor shortage. These companies colluded for years on salary and poaching to make it possible to selectively hire from choice schools and people with a certain "pedigree" -- which artificially limited the pool of people they felt were "acceptable"...which drove up the salary of people from this pool which of course caused them to want to collude to keep wages down. This is why discriminatory hiring practices are bad for everybody. Now years later Google, using the power of massive data, has figured out that it didn't really matter all that much that they were hiring from this artificially limited pool. Which means it didn't matter all that much to start with for any of these companies. If they hadn't colluded on pay and poaching, but stayed selective, they would have been eventually forced to either reach outside this selective pool and end the "shortage" or suck up the higher wages. Basically the market would have resolved the issue of higher wages for them.

mik3y 13y ago

In late 2008, Facebook seemed to ramping up hiring (and recruiting aggressively, with good reason, from Google). Any "truce" would have been severely one-sided for Facebook. I'm sure they weren't worried about bleeding employees to Google if they said no, especially when you remember $GOOG was near a 3-year low and FB growth was exploding..

kagali 13y ago

Proof positive that there is no shortage of people - just companies paying a living wage.

drawkbox 13y ago

Platforms are getting a little bit like mini kingdoms these days, feudal in nature, from the castles of the Altos. 5-10 years before we have a moat around a campus, a technological one though that blocks all non-essential communication while you are Under the Dome, then, apartments, pretty soon "bring out your dead" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grbSQ6O6kbs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grbSQ6O6kbs).

StefanKarpinski 13y ago

I recall wondering at the time why, if there was such a shortage of talented developers, newly minted lawyers were still making several times as much as good programmers. Now we know part of the reason why: Apple, Goole, Adobe and all the other big names in tech – except, apparently Facebook – were illegally colluding to pay talented devs less money. Since this was discovered, industry pay scales have gone up, while law salaries have dropped – now it's much closer. The thing that bothers me the most is that this illegal collusion suppressed wages for the entire software industry, robbing us all of money that lined the pockets of these companies. The plaintiffs in this case are by far not the only ones who were affected – Apple, Google, et al. stole tens of thousands of dollars per year from each person who was working in the software industry for the better part of a decade and the vast majority of us aren't going to get any of that back.

judk 13y ago
Huh? College hires at Google got paid same or more ($100+K plus equity) than new JD lawyers ($150k).
- StefanKarpinski 13y ago
  In 2005? And Google hires aren't really the right point of comparison – that's the very top of the tech market, which you're comparing to typical starting lawyers. New hires at top law firms did and still do make significantly more than that. A better point of comparison is the middle of each market, which is where lawyers were getting paid multiple x developers. By suppressing the top of the market, these companies were pushing the pay scale down across the entire industry, not just at the top. That's precisely what I think it's so shitty.
  - logical42 13y ago
    This is incorrect actually. Pay for lawyers forms a bimodal distribution, where graduates from the top ten law schools tend to occupy most of the high end of the distribution while everyone else tends to fall in the lower end.

mantrax3 13y ago

Programming is not like being a cash register attendant at the supermarket (no offense to these workers intended). For programmers, getting into the workflow of a company, their existing codebase, becoming efficient, it may take months. Shipping a product may (and typically does) take over a year. The lifetime of a product may be over a decade. And if a developer quits mid-way through a project, they may derail the entire project, while someone else has to spend the time, step into their shoes and continue their work. I honestly can't imagine the morality of someone who would just abandon their project, their baby, so to speak, and go work somewhere else at the first call from another company offering more money. Did they take the first job out of desperation? We're talking top-of-the-top companies here. I doubt so. Poaching employees like this is also very unfair to every company spending a lot of resources to find the right employees, to build the right teams from other channels, only to have the competition cold call them and take them away after the former company has done the hard work. There's also the problem of trade secrets. An employee who has spent some time at, say, Apple, learns a lot about their product plans, processes, methods, and so on. Getting those employees means that one way or another you get access to these carefully kept trade secrets implicitly, if not explicitly. Keeping wages down is bad, but employees who keep shifting jobs, leaving a trail of destruction behind them is also bad. How do we resolve both sides of the issue so everyone is happy?

Derander 13y ago
The standard argument is that people shift jobs so much because it's the most reliable way to get a large pay raise. If companies stopped making it necessary to hop jobs in order to make closer to what you're worth, then it might help retention.
sgustard 13y ago
Give me a contract with a guaranteed salary and no risk of being fired, for one thing. At-risk employment cuts both ways.
Curmudgel 13y ago
> I honestly can't imagine the morality of someone who would just abandon their project, their baby, so to speak, and go work somewhere else at the first call from another company offering more money. Employees (most of the time) don't own the work that they produce for the company, and they themselves are not property of the company. Unless they are contractually obligated to stay at a company for a certain amount of time, there is no reason for them to work for less than they are worth and reject an offer that would make them happier. Employees have good reasons for switching jobs. If they feel dedicated to their current job then they always have the option to stay. >Poaching employees like this is also very unfair to every company... Employees are human beings, not chattel. You started off by doubting the morality of people who switch jobs, but now you make it seem as the are powerless to choose where they work and must always leave for a company that offers more money. >spending a lot of resources to find the right employees, to build the right teams from other channels, only to have the competition cold call them and take them away after the former company has done the hard work. Not every employee will switch jobs because he or she received a better offer. And if finding another employee is so costly, then matching the new offer would probably save them money. >There's also the problem of trade secrets. An employee who has spent some time at, say, Apple, learns a lot about their product plans, processes, methods, and so on. Getting those employees means that one way or another you get access to these carefully kept trade secrets implicitly, if not explicitly. That's what the legal system is for. > Keeping wages down is bad, but employees who keep shifting jobs, leaving a trail of destruction behind them is also bad.How do we resolve both sides of the issue so everyone is happy? Pay the employees what they're worth.

jjallen 13y ago

Of course Facebook refused! They were hiring many more employees than Google was as a percentage of the starting employee base because of the insane growth they were undergoing. They were building a business, they had to keep poaching. I don't think Facebook should get much credit for not participating, when they couldn't have. Also, from a more game theoretical approach, they were a free rider on the collusion - they could have outed the collusion if they were that benevolent, since they clearly knew what was happening. Why didn't they publicize the blatantly wrong agreements at the time?

rwallace 13y ago
The fact that it was in Facebook's interest to do the right thing doesn't change the fact that when it came to it, they did the right thing and Google, for all their "don't be evil" talk, did the wrong thing. That's what really matters in the end. And I don't particularly like having to say this, because I've been a Google fan ever since I switched to their search engine from AltaVista, whereas I think the world would be a better place if Facebook shut down their servers and deleted their database tomorrow. But yes, damn it, Facebook does deserve credit here.
- lsaferite 13y ago
  Well, by not exposing the situation, they were complicit and therefore just as 'evil' as the rest. I'm sure some lawyer somewhere could argue conspiracy if they felt the urge.
- jjallen 13y ago
  They would deserve credit if they acted against their best interests by making it known what was going on at the time, but they knew they were benefiting from lower than otherwise salaries due to the collusion.

outside1234 13y ago

i mean, come of, of course they did. it was going to be like 99:1 in Facebook's direction. this isn't any shining beacon of ethics.

outside1234 13y ago

Ten things we know to be true... ...make that nine things we know to be true...

weixiyen 13y ago

so basically every company did the most logical thing for their own best interests.

AaronFriel 13y ago

There's a flip side to this no poaching agreement, evidenced by Facebook's position: Is there a benefit to this agreement depressing wages in that, for startups, obtaining competent developers was cheaper than it would have been otherwise?

jasonwocky 13y ago
Well, sure, there was a benefit to the startups' founders and funders.

ojbyrne 13y ago

The most offensive thing about these stories is that those same people who conspire to drive down employee salaries then go to their executive compensation committees where they conspire to drive up executive salaries.

higherpurpose 13y ago

Is this a surprise? Facebook has been hiring Google employees for a while...

xiaoma 13y ago

Even without facebook, there would likely have been another mega-successful startup springing up and ruining the hiring collusion. As long as incumbents can't create a regulatory or legal moat (e.g. patents), I don't think these kinds of salary depressing tactics will work for more than a few years at a time.

eyeareque 13y ago

I remember my friend At Google telling me that he just got a big raise and that the raises were happening across the company. I wondered what cause googled to do this, but quickly assumed it was because Facebook was sucking talent away from google. At the time googlers were paid less than other companies too. Facebook might look good in this instance but remember they were growing really fast at this time so it would have seriously hurt them to agree to any hiring pacts.

friendzis 13y ago

You all keep trashing companies for no-poaching agreements because it lowers your wages. Let's look at this from perspective of employer. There are costs associated with obtaining well performing employee: * Hiring: people spend their hours filtering prospective employees. Usually HR does that, but bigger companies have separate hiring department. Expensive. * Idling: newly recruited employee rarely has intimate knowledge of all technologies, systems used inside a company and surely has no idea how they are tied together. This takes some months to grasp. Recruits often wreak havoc and as a result produce very little net worth. And you greedy recruits want your 6 figure salary for your havoc. * Training: employees are trained. Be it actual courses, conferences or just unsuccessful internal startup its still training. And having a team work on a doomed to be killed project for a year is again expensive. In order to compensate for these no-worth-generating expenses employers are left with 2 choices: lower the salary or invent a way to keep the employee. Lower salaries are usually not an option because, well, who you will hire then in the first place when rivals often much better packages? Companies are left with an option to try and keep the employees. In intimate atmosphere of Silicon Valey it is hard to keep employee salaries/benefits and skills a secret, therefore it is much easier and cheaper to contact employee of a rivaling company and offer a better mutually agreed package. You either agree not to poach and let prospective employees go through your normal hiring process or chain employees with timed contracts. So just think that no-poaching agreements might be the thing keeping your salaries that high.

mavdi 13y ago

Yet another reason for every semi-talented programmer to become a consultant. They rob you of less money that way. I'm certainly going to write to my MP about this. I think you should too. In fact I think every programmer out there should be involved in bringing a class action case against them.

nctalaviya 13y ago

someone ahead of Google

chippy 13y ago

Sheryl Sandberg only spoke for herself. She did not mention her knowledge of what other people in Facebook did. She only said that she, personally, didn't agree to the agreement on behalf of the company. She did not say that Facebook didn't have an agreement, only that she did not ever agree to one. This is an important fact when looking at the evidence. She is only going to say enough of what she needs to say in terms of the lawsuit. The burden of proof of the law suit has to prove that Facebook had one - she could only speak about her own involvement. There was nothing about the other people at the top of the company - and in Law - nothing equals nothing.

revelation 13y ago
Abstract away from the people. At the time, it was simply not in Facebooks best interest to enter into such an agreement - at their ridiculous growth, they got lots of money and needed to put it into top talent, which means they need to aggressively recruit. If you then enter into an agreement not to recruit from many top companies in the valley - that hurts your chances. It's not that Facebook is the only ethical company in this, it is just that at the time there was no upside for them in it.

0800899g 13y ago

Pay fixing and chomski

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

s3r3nity 13y ago

Where are the calls for boycotting Google for doing something blatantly "evil" and illegal? Kudos for Facebook for doing the right thing here. I'm just curious what ramifications this has, if any.

drivingmenuts 13y ago

"Don't be evil." More like "Don't get caught."

1010011010 13y ago

So Google refused to hire Apple employees, but presumably didn't refuse to hire Microsoft employees. What a bad move for their culture.

j_m_b 13y ago

Could this have more to do with the fact that PHP/Javascript is the primary language used at Facebook whereas it is pretty much language-spaghetti at Google? Perhaps Zuckerberg figured that his technical culture didn't leave much for Google to poach yet he wanted to soak up some talent from the likes of Google. I kid, I kid!

dclowd9901 13y ago

When I talk to other developers about this stuff and H1B exploitation, we all seem categorically not in favor of collusion. These companies were started by software developers. What the hell happens in the process of running a company where you justify this kind of morality shift?

jpasden 13y ago
Getting rich?
cgore 13y ago
Where did you get the idea that software developers are the very definition of moral paragons?

pyrrhotech 13y ago

Engineers are still paid way too low for the massive value they add to these companies.

the_watcher 13y ago

Looks like Facebook identified a market inefficiency, and chose to bet on their ability to attract/acquire/retain talent over taking the defensive stance that Google and Apple did. Bravo to Facebook.

diminoten 13y ago

I still don't get why this is news now, and not like 3 or 4 years ago. I knew about this back then, and I'm some random nobody. Is it because there's proof now?