7 ms·

How are cold-calling ceasefires illegal?

35 points by Navarr 13y ago

epc 13y ago
Collusion with competitors to fix or restrict a price of a good in a market is one of the easier antitrust cases to pursue, especially if it's nicely documented in email. Engineering salaries were likely depressed due to this non–compete cartel. OPEC can do this with oil since it's not under US jurisdiction. US airlines, for example, cannot phone each other up and say "Let's agree to price JFK-SFO at $500 each way." They can observe what each other charges for a given ticket and make a decision to price their own fare accordingly, but they cannot act in concert.
- kkowalczyk 13y ago
  Pointing out the obvious: engineers are not "goods" that Google or Apple produces. Even if consider employees salary to fall under that dubious categorization, good luck proving the salaries were "likely depressed" when during that period the salaries went up. A lot. It seems that it only affected lazy and apathetic engineers i.e. those who couldn't be bother to send out a resume.
  - ryanobjc 13y ago
    Uh, goods are not just things companies produce, but also things they consume. Therefore it could also include employees. Also, if you have a look at the class action filing, the mechanism of action is quite clear. To lay it out, the way that salaries are set is for any given title (eg: Software Engineer I), there is a pay range. Hiring managers do not have the general permission to go outside the pay band. Under the interests of fairness, these pay bands are adhered to fairly strictly. So depressing the wages of even a sub-section of the employee pool helps keep the pay band down. While you may deem this a mere 'theory', there is evidence of it's affects. Specifically that Google was forced to give 10% raises to their entire employee when Facebook would not accede to a cold-call prohibition. Your final sentence is not very complementary to your fellow engineers - often times engineers are focused on the problem and unaware of their place in the market. To call them lazy and apathetic is pretty mean spirited.
  - vidarh 13y ago
    > only affected lazy and apathetic engineers Or loyal and happy ones, which believed the company was paying them market rates. In any case, if the companies formed a price fixing cartel, they're just as wrong if they failed to have an effect as if they did have an effect - the damage is just smaller if they didn't have an effect.
  - zorpner 13y ago
    Do you seriously mean 'good luck proving the salaries were "likely depressed" when during that period the salaries went up' when there were non-recruiting agreements between the top payers? How do you think salaries increase? It would be shockingly unlikely if salaries were not depressed, and that is what's actually obvious.
  - epc 13y ago
    The "obvious" is irrelevant. Under US antitrust law, if you conspire with others in the marketplace to fix prices, you can be prosecuted. Doesn't matter whether you're fixing prices for labor, pizza, cats, photos of cats.
inerte 13y ago
Read the Department of Justice press release about the case: http://www.justice.gov/atr/public/press_releases/2010/262648.htm http://www.justice.gov/atr/public/press_releases/2010/262648... > The department said that the agreements eliminated a significant form of competition to attract highly skilled employees, and overall diminished competition to the detriment of affected employees who were likely deprived of competitively important information and access to better job opportunities. Now, you may not _agree_ that it should be illegal, but the explanation is right there in the document.
- kinofcain 13y ago
  If that's the actual legal precedent set by these cases, then that's rather a big deal, no? California's limitations on noncompete clauses are quite strict, to the point of making noncompetes mostly worthless, but this is extending that to nonsolicits, and extending it to all 50 states. Regardless of what you feel about the case I think that's a huge change to the current ecosystem.
  - mbreese 13y ago
    Non-competes are between an employee/employer. Non-solicits would be between companies, in this case competitors. At least they are competing over the same pool of employees. As such, it's likely viewed as collusion. This isn't a big of a change to the legal precedents. This type of behavior has been illegal for a long time. This is just the first time that I know of where it's been this public involving media-friendly companies.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    > California's limitations on noncompete clauses are quite strict, to the point of making noncompetes mostly worthless, but this is extending that to nonsolicits, and extending it to all 50 states. No, its not. The idea that nonsolicits are combinations in restraint of trade as prohibited by the Sherman Antitrust Act has nothing at all to do with the California legal rule against noncompetes -- its certainly not a generalization of that rule. > Regardless of what you feel about the case I think that's a huge change to the current ecosystem. Its fairly well established that agreements not to compete between firms are generally illegal under the Sherman Act; finding a new exception to that rule would be a bigger change to the current legal climate.
Maxious 13y ago
>“if your employees reach out to us or vice-versa they’re fair game.” Not quite.... > "Not to pursue manager level and above candidates for Product, Sales, or G&A roles — even if they have applied to Google;" 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-...
- zacharypinter 13y ago
  > While the later is certainly much more questionable on the legality standpoint The author of this post seems to have acknowledged that part was suspect.
- Navarr 13y ago
  Honestly, the article takes it to the extreme. There is provided to evidence of wage theft or even attempt. Other commenters have pointed out, however, that restricted trade contracts are illegal which is what forms most of the basis of why this is illegal. I still haven't been convinced it's unethical, but I can see now why it's illegal.
codezero 13y ago
Because those employees deserve to earn more money from a company that is willing to offer it to them.
- alecbenzer 13y ago
  But they weren't willing to offer it to them. They might have been, if it didn't mean competitors might start poaching, but it did mean that.
  - ArtDev 13y ago
    If you don't work there anymore its not poaching. It applied to former employees as well.
    - alecbenzer 13y ago
      s/poaching/poaching or hiring former employees, if that's the case
jbapple 13y ago
> And I can’t even figure out how it’s illegal? Are you a lawyer? If not, have you asked one? What research have you done to try to figure out how it might be illegal? Have you read any laws or legal articles about the subject matter?
sudhirj 13y ago
Salaries, perks, and descriptions of interesting projects you might work on are rarely public information. Quite often the only way I'd find out that I could get a better deal and more interesting work at Company X is if they reach out to me and tell me so. If my current company is blocking this, then I'm being deprived of a very important source of information and opportunities.
michaelochurch 13y ago
First of all, even if it weren't illegal, it would still be extremely sleazy. Second, many people who do objectively illegal things (a) are subtle enough about it to leave doubt and (b) rarely will be caught on the totality of evidence that would convict them. If they leave enough of a trail to prove them guilty on the small things they don't care much about, what are they up to that's hidden from view? Let's take extortion. Real-world extortionists don't say, "give me money or I'll shoot up your storefront." Making it that obvious will put them in jail. Accidents and annoyances occur, with escalation over time. Rumors are spread, often by the extortionist, that the extortionist is taking interest in the business and will demand payment. Someone goes in, hits his head on the side of the door and demands recompense. Or the extorted party is asked to purchase "protection" services. White-collar extortion tends to focus on reputation rather than physical violence, and the services are dressed as some kind of consulting, but it's a similar game. It's hard to convict because most criminals can stay just on the right side of the line, at least in terms of where they leave a record. Is this a price-fixing cartel? No, not quite (at least, not from what we know). However, if people are being instructed to follow no-poach agreements and terminated when they break them, it's quite likely that these networks of collusion are being used for worse things, like blacklisting. A no-poach agreement denies career opportunities to people who would otherwise have them. without their knowing why the opportunities are not there or even that it is occurring. That's a big deal. It makes it not unlikely that these companies are also blacklisting, say, people who might support collective bargaining for engineers or who otherwise fight for themselves. Shit, I might be on a PITA list somewhere. Those sorts of probably illegal collusive arrangements exist all over the Valley, especially among venture capitalists who compare notes on prospects instead of competing on a fair market. Indeed, most of what VCs do would be highly illegal (insider trading, market manipulation, pump-and-dump, use of negative rumor to punish and intimidate) if it pertained to publicly traded stock rather than private equity. This is a major issue. Even if not illegal, it's still sleazy and shameful.
outside1234 13y ago
It doesn't have to be illegal to be unethical.
- alecbenzer 13y ago
  It also doesn't need to be unethical to be illegal.
EGreg 13y ago
Wait so it's illegal to agree not to cold call each other's employees and let them apply for a job if they want? If that's all they did, what would be illegal? How is that price fixing? That's like saying stores agreeing not to advertise inside each other's premises are a cartel. Those companies can still advertise their openings just not actively poaching each other's employees.
- alecbenzer 13y ago
  Well, inside the store is a bit different, but an analogous situation might be two stores agreeing not to buy out ad space in front of each other. And I agree, to me that seems rather innocuous, as does agreeing to not poach from each other.
- trekky1700 13y ago
  Essentially, think of the reason for Google to want this. They essentially want to keep their engineers with them for a lower price while preventing other companies from offering more attractive positions/salaries which would mean either Google would have to match the salary, or they'd lose the engineer. A lot of hires and promotions are made through these sorts of offers. Steve Jobs famously courted John Sculley from Pepsi. Do you think Marissa Mayer applied for her role at Yahoo? These sort of agreements restrict the market and are unfair to engineers.
  - EGreg 13y ago
    Ok I guess if the market gets out of control with everyone poaching each other's customers blatantly, then any agreement to scale back is considered an illegal cartel? So if for example stores advertise massive discounts in front of each other's premises specifically for the customers about to make a purchase at the competing store, then two stores agreeing to stop and go back to simply letting shoppers DO THEIR OWN RESEARCH is a cartel?
    - nknighthb 13y ago
      Are you seriously advocating for companies to collude to suppress salaries if they can't handle the heat of market forces? How much, exactly, do you think engineers deserve to get before it becomes "too much", how did you arrive at that number, and do you have a similar number for how much companies should be allowed to make before we just start confiscating it all with a 100% tax rate?
spiritplumber 13y ago
As in "You stop cold-calling me, I cease firing on you"? Not sure why that would be illegal.
zedshaw 13y ago
It's pretty simple. It's illegal for corporations to get together and decide the price of things. This destroys the free market's ability to choose the best product at the best price since all the products, despite their quality, have the same price. This is the part of economics that says a free market only works as long as everyone involved has equal information. And remember, a free market means the consumer has a right to choose, not the corporation has a right to trick consumers into buying at fixed prices. In addition to price fixing products, companies also can't wage fix. If corporations were allowed to get together and decide the max they'll all pay certain employees then they can do...well exactly this. Also remember that these companies also refused to hire people who came to them, and also ratted out those employees to their original employer. That goes beyond basic wage fixing and into the realm of heinous employee rights violations. The main reason all of this is illegal though is because the consumers and the employees are not given all the information they need to decide. The key to this important detail is in how all these sleazy assholes went around telling each other to be quiet. If this action were something that was morally correct they wouldn't need to hide it. However they knew that if the employees knew they'd leave the company and it'd cost more to keep them. That's why the companies kept the information from the employees. More importantly though, if the consumers know about price fixing, they revolt and entire industries collapse in huge meltdowns and the consumers stop trusting the market. Politicians then react and pass laws against it so that there isn't a huge economic revolt, or worse, a political bloody one. Then again, programmers seem to worship corporations these days so I got no idea how this will play out. Personally I hope we all boycott the shit out of every company on this list, but that'll never happen as long as coders have their heads firmly planted up Ayn Rand's ass. The one thing that I'm enjoying coming out is how this is proving to programmers that they are valuable. I think before this coders just kind of thought of their value as just a typical cube farming wage slave. Now they see that they're so valuable that corporations will go to very great lengths to keep them from leaving and from paying them what they're worth. That is definitely going to be interesting to watch play out.
- brisance 13y ago
  >>It's pretty simple. It's illegal for corporations to get together and decide the price of things. << Is this not how LIBOR or the Fed rate is determined?
zacharypinter 13y ago
I think there's two aspects to this discussion that keep getting muddled together. 1. Were the individuals at the companies in question knowingly acting outside their own ethics or the ethics they portray themselves as having? Was there something "sinister" about this? 2. What harm did these actions cause and do we need to do something to prevent such kinds of harm in the future? A lot of #1 sounds like execs trying to manage the relationships with the companies they worked with. It doesn't sound like there was a big taboo around these types of do-not-solicit agreements at that time, and with all the players aggressively trying to hire and hold onto experienced employees I can see how finding out that a partner company was targeting the employees you were trying to keep around could be interpreted as a hostile/unfriendly business move. The most damning thing I've come across regarding #1 was the email about taking the conversation offline to avoid a paper trail. Would love to read more about the context of that. I wasn't sure about #2 at first, but after all the discussion I've been strongly persuaded that this is a net negative for the software industry. The lawsuits and public outcry will hopefully create a strong taboo against this sort of behavior in the future, in addition to clarifying the legal ramifications. Is there anything more that needs to be done here?
qq66 13y ago
It's illegal if a court says it's illegal. Whether a particular person can think of a good reason for something to be illegal doesn't factor into the picture.
beedogs 13y ago
Misrepresenting what happened in order to strawman it, and then self-posting it to HN. Fantastic way to get hits, I guess.
- ArtDev 13y ago
  Is it me, or has HN quality really dropped in the last couple months?
- Navarr 13y ago
  No need for hits. It's a tiny blog. Relevant xkcd though: https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
ArtDev 13y ago
Wrong. 1) It also applies to former employees. 2) Like monopolies, corruption and price-fixing its bad for the free market. Steve Jobs knew it was illegal and wrong.
ASneakyFox 13y ago
This marks the decline of hn. Experiment over I guess. Now where do I go for news?

35 points by Navarr 13y ago

epc 13y ago

Collusion with competitors to fix or restrict a price of a good in a market is one of the easier antitrust cases to pursue, especially if it's nicely documented in email. Engineering salaries were likely depressed due to this non–compete cartel. OPEC can do this with oil since it's not under US jurisdiction. US airlines, for example, cannot phone each other up and say "Let's agree to price JFK-SFO at $500 each way." They can observe what each other charges for a given ticket and make a decision to price their own fare accordingly, but they cannot act in concert.

kkowalczyk 13y ago
Pointing out the obvious: engineers are not "goods" that Google or Apple produces. Even if consider employees salary to fall under that dubious categorization, good luck proving the salaries were "likely depressed" when during that period the salaries went up. A lot. It seems that it only affected lazy and apathetic engineers i.e. those who couldn't be bother to send out a resume.
- ryanobjc 13y ago
  Uh, goods are not just things companies produce, but also things they consume. Therefore it could also include employees. Also, if you have a look at the class action filing, the mechanism of action is quite clear. To lay it out, the way that salaries are set is for any given title (eg: Software Engineer I), there is a pay range. Hiring managers do not have the general permission to go outside the pay band. Under the interests of fairness, these pay bands are adhered to fairly strictly. So depressing the wages of even a sub-section of the employee pool helps keep the pay band down. While you may deem this a mere 'theory', there is evidence of it's affects. Specifically that Google was forced to give 10% raises to their entire employee when Facebook would not accede to a cold-call prohibition. Your final sentence is not very complementary to your fellow engineers - often times engineers are focused on the problem and unaware of their place in the market. To call them lazy and apathetic is pretty mean spirited.
- vidarh 13y ago
  > only affected lazy and apathetic engineers Or loyal and happy ones, which believed the company was paying them market rates. In any case, if the companies formed a price fixing cartel, they're just as wrong if they failed to have an effect as if they did have an effect - the damage is just smaller if they didn't have an effect.
- zorpner 13y ago
  Do you seriously mean 'good luck proving the salaries were "likely depressed" when during that period the salaries went up' when there were non-recruiting agreements between the top payers? How do you think salaries increase? It would be shockingly unlikely if salaries were not depressed, and that is what's actually obvious.
- epc 13y ago
  The "obvious" is irrelevant. Under US antitrust law, if you conspire with others in the marketplace to fix prices, you can be prosecuted. Doesn't matter whether you're fixing prices for labor, pizza, cats, photos of cats.

inerte 13y ago

Read the Department of Justice press release about the case: http://www.justice.gov/atr/public/press_releases/2010/262648.htm http://www.justice.gov/atr/public/press_releases/2010/262648... > The department said that the agreements eliminated a significant form of competition to attract highly skilled employees, and overall diminished competition to the detriment of affected employees who were likely deprived of competitively important information and access to better job opportunities. Now, you may not _agree_ that it should be illegal, but the explanation is right there in the document.

kinofcain 13y ago
If that's the actual legal precedent set by these cases, then that's rather a big deal, no? California's limitations on noncompete clauses are quite strict, to the point of making noncompetes mostly worthless, but this is extending that to nonsolicits, and extending it to all 50 states. Regardless of what you feel about the case I think that's a huge change to the current ecosystem.
- mbreese 13y ago
  Non-competes are between an employee/employer. Non-solicits would be between companies, in this case competitors. At least they are competing over the same pool of employees. As such, it's likely viewed as collusion. This isn't a big of a change to the legal precedents. This type of behavior has been illegal for a long time. This is just the first time that I know of where it's been this public involving media-friendly companies.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > California's limitations on noncompete clauses are quite strict, to the point of making noncompetes mostly worthless, but this is extending that to nonsolicits, and extending it to all 50 states. No, its not. The idea that nonsolicits are combinations in restraint of trade as prohibited by the Sherman Antitrust Act has nothing at all to do with the California legal rule against noncompetes -- its certainly not a generalization of that rule. > Regardless of what you feel about the case I think that's a huge change to the current ecosystem. Its fairly well established that agreements not to compete between firms are generally illegal under the Sherman Act; finding a new exception to that rule would be a bigger change to the current legal climate.

Maxious 13y ago

>“if your employees reach out to us or vice-versa they’re fair game.” Not quite.... > "Not to pursue manager level and above candidates for Product, Sales, or G&A roles — even if they have applied to Google;" 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-...

zacharypinter 13y ago
> While the later is certainly much more questionable on the legality standpoint The author of this post seems to have acknowledged that part was suspect.
Navarr 13y ago
Honestly, the article takes it to the extreme. There is provided to evidence of wage theft or even attempt. Other commenters have pointed out, however, that restricted trade contracts are illegal which is what forms most of the basis of why this is illegal. I still haven't been convinced it's unethical, but I can see now why it's illegal.

codezero 13y ago

Because those employees deserve to earn more money from a company that is willing to offer it to them.

alecbenzer 13y ago
But they weren't willing to offer it to them. They might have been, if it didn't mean competitors might start poaching, but it did mean that.
- ArtDev 13y ago
  If you don't work there anymore its not poaching. It applied to former employees as well.
  - alecbenzer 13y ago
    s/poaching/poaching or hiring former employees, if that's the case

jbapple 13y ago

> And I can’t even figure out how it’s illegal? Are you a lawyer? If not, have you asked one? What research have you done to try to figure out how it might be illegal? Have you read any laws or legal articles about the subject matter?

sudhirj 13y ago

Salaries, perks, and descriptions of interesting projects you might work on are rarely public information. Quite often the only way I'd find out that I could get a better deal and more interesting work at Company X is if they reach out to me and tell me so. If my current company is blocking this, then I'm being deprived of a very important source of information and opportunities.

michaelochurch 13y ago

First of all, even if it weren't illegal, it would still be extremely sleazy. Second, many people who do objectively illegal things (a) are subtle enough about it to leave doubt and (b) rarely will be caught on the totality of evidence that would convict them. If they leave enough of a trail to prove them guilty on the small things they don't care much about, what are they up to that's hidden from view? Let's take extortion. Real-world extortionists don't say, "give me money or I'll shoot up your storefront." Making it that obvious will put them in jail. Accidents and annoyances occur, with escalation over time. Rumors are spread, often by the extortionist, that the extortionist is taking interest in the business and will demand payment. Someone goes in, hits his head on the side of the door and demands recompense. Or the extorted party is asked to purchase "protection" services. White-collar extortion tends to focus on reputation rather than physical violence, and the services are dressed as some kind of consulting, but it's a similar game. It's hard to convict because most criminals can stay just on the right side of the line, at least in terms of where they leave a record. Is this a price-fixing cartel? No, not quite (at least, not from what we know). However, if people are being instructed to follow no-poach agreements and terminated when they break them, it's quite likely that these networks of collusion are being used for worse things, like blacklisting. A no-poach agreement denies career opportunities to people who would otherwise have them. without their knowing why the opportunities are not there or even that it is occurring. That's a big deal. It makes it not unlikely that these companies are also blacklisting, say, people who might support collective bargaining for engineers or who otherwise fight for themselves. Shit, I might be on a PITA list somewhere. Those sorts of probably illegal collusive arrangements exist all over the Valley, especially among venture capitalists who compare notes on prospects instead of competing on a fair market. Indeed, most of what VCs do would be highly illegal (insider trading, market manipulation, pump-and-dump, use of negative rumor to punish and intimidate) if it pertained to publicly traded stock rather than private equity. This is a major issue. Even if not illegal, it's still sleazy and shameful.

outside1234 13y ago

It doesn't have to be illegal to be unethical.

alecbenzer 13y ago
It also doesn't need to be unethical to be illegal.

EGreg 13y ago

Wait so it's illegal to agree not to cold call each other's employees and let them apply for a job if they want? If that's all they did, what would be illegal? How is that price fixing? That's like saying stores agreeing not to advertise inside each other's premises are a cartel. Those companies can still advertise their openings just not actively poaching each other's employees.

alecbenzer 13y ago
Well, inside the store is a bit different, but an analogous situation might be two stores agreeing not to buy out ad space in front of each other. And I agree, to me that seems rather innocuous, as does agreeing to not poach from each other.
trekky1700 13y ago
Essentially, think of the reason for Google to want this. They essentially want to keep their engineers with them for a lower price while preventing other companies from offering more attractive positions/salaries which would mean either Google would have to match the salary, or they'd lose the engineer. A lot of hires and promotions are made through these sorts of offers. Steve Jobs famously courted John Sculley from Pepsi. Do you think Marissa Mayer applied for her role at Yahoo? These sort of agreements restrict the market and are unfair to engineers.
- EGreg 13y ago
  Ok I guess if the market gets out of control with everyone poaching each other's customers blatantly, then any agreement to scale back is considered an illegal cartel? So if for example stores advertise massive discounts in front of each other's premises specifically for the customers about to make a purchase at the competing store, then two stores agreeing to stop and go back to simply letting shoppers DO THEIR OWN RESEARCH is a cartel?
  - nknighthb 13y ago
    Are you seriously advocating for companies to collude to suppress salaries if they can't handle the heat of market forces? How much, exactly, do you think engineers deserve to get before it becomes "too much", how did you arrive at that number, and do you have a similar number for how much companies should be allowed to make before we just start confiscating it all with a 100% tax rate?

spiritplumber 13y ago

As in "You stop cold-calling me, I cease firing on you"? Not sure why that would be illegal.

zedshaw 13y ago

It's pretty simple. It's illegal for corporations to get together and decide the price of things. This destroys the free market's ability to choose the best product at the best price since all the products, despite their quality, have the same price. This is the part of economics that says a free market only works as long as everyone involved has equal information. And remember, a free market means the consumer has a right to choose, not the corporation has a right to trick consumers into buying at fixed prices. In addition to price fixing products, companies also can't wage fix. If corporations were allowed to get together and decide the max they'll all pay certain employees then they can do...well exactly this. Also remember that these companies also refused to hire people who came to them, and also ratted out those employees to their original employer. That goes beyond basic wage fixing and into the realm of heinous employee rights violations. The main reason all of this is illegal though is because the consumers and the employees are not given all the information they need to decide. The key to this important detail is in how all these sleazy assholes went around telling each other to be quiet. If this action were something that was morally correct they wouldn't need to hide it. However they knew that if the employees knew they'd leave the company and it'd cost more to keep them. That's why the companies kept the information from the employees. More importantly though, if the consumers know about price fixing, they revolt and entire industries collapse in huge meltdowns and the consumers stop trusting the market. Politicians then react and pass laws against it so that there isn't a huge economic revolt, or worse, a political bloody one. Then again, programmers seem to worship corporations these days so I got no idea how this will play out. Personally I hope we all boycott the shit out of every company on this list, but that'll never happen as long as coders have their heads firmly planted up Ayn Rand's ass. The one thing that I'm enjoying coming out is how this is proving to programmers that they are valuable. I think before this coders just kind of thought of their value as just a typical cube farming wage slave. Now they see that they're so valuable that corporations will go to very great lengths to keep them from leaving and from paying them what they're worth. That is definitely going to be interesting to watch play out.

brisance 13y ago
>>It's pretty simple. It's illegal for corporations to get together and decide the price of things. << Is this not how LIBOR or the Fed rate is determined?

zacharypinter 13y ago

I think there's two aspects to this discussion that keep getting muddled together. 1. Were the individuals at the companies in question knowingly acting outside their own ethics or the ethics they portray themselves as having? Was there something "sinister" about this? 2. What harm did these actions cause and do we need to do something to prevent such kinds of harm in the future? A lot of #1 sounds like execs trying to manage the relationships with the companies they worked with. It doesn't sound like there was a big taboo around these types of do-not-solicit agreements at that time, and with all the players aggressively trying to hire and hold onto experienced employees I can see how finding out that a partner company was targeting the employees you were trying to keep around could be interpreted as a hostile/unfriendly business move. The most damning thing I've come across regarding #1 was the email about taking the conversation offline to avoid a paper trail. Would love to read more about the context of that. I wasn't sure about #2 at first, but after all the discussion I've been strongly persuaded that this is a net negative for the software industry. The lawsuits and public outcry will hopefully create a strong taboo against this sort of behavior in the future, in addition to clarifying the legal ramifications. Is there anything more that needs to be done here?

qq66 13y ago

It's illegal if a court says it's illegal. Whether a particular person can think of a good reason for something to be illegal doesn't factor into the picture.

beedogs 13y ago

Misrepresenting what happened in order to strawman it, and then self-posting it to HN. Fantastic way to get hits, I guess.

ArtDev 13y ago
Is it me, or has HN quality really dropped in the last couple months?
Navarr 13y ago
No need for hits. It's a tiny blog. Relevant xkcd though: https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/

ArtDev 13y ago

Wrong. 1) It also applies to former employees. 2) Like monopolies, corruption and price-fixing its bad for the free market. Steve Jobs knew it was illegal and wrong.

ASneakyFox 13y ago

This marks the decline of hn. Experiment over I guess. Now where do I go for news?