From the front cover of the May 5th edition of Bloomberg Business Week magazine....
It seems that Apple, Google, and the other titans of Silicon Valley had a gentlemen's agreement between them in which none of them would competitively hire each other's talented employees out from under them. Their goal was to keep wages suppressed and overall HR costs down. And it worked. It has also been asserted that it led to the stifling of creativity.
Some might say "The market will take care of itself. Let businessmen do whatever thy want." But in this instance, "the market" of marketable skills was being manipulated, and wage competition between talented programmers hamstrung. And if it's true that creativity itself was dampened, what does that say about the US's ability --both now and in the future-- to compete in the global marketplace?
http://www.businessweek.com/article...he-silicon-valley-antitrust-hiring-conspiracy
It seems that Apple, Google, and the other titans of Silicon Valley had a gentlemen's agreement between them in which none of them would competitively hire each other's talented employees out from under them. Their goal was to keep wages suppressed and overall HR costs down. And it worked. It has also been asserted that it led to the stifling of creativity.
Some might say "The market will take care of itself. Let businessmen do whatever thy want." But in this instance, "the market" of marketable skills was being manipulated, and wage competition between talented programmers hamstrung. And if it's true that creativity itself was dampened, what does that say about the US's ability --both now and in the future-- to compete in the global marketplace?
http://www.businessweek.com/article...he-silicon-valley-antitrust-hiring-conspiracy
And if you're wondering how much money was involved in this out of court settlement ... it was mere pennies, $324 million. Another slap-on-the-wrist judgment from the American justice system.Apple, Google, and the Hubris of Silicon Valley's Hiring Conspiracy
by Paul M. Barrett and Brad Stone -- May 01, 2014
... It was March 2007, and [Steve] Jobs had received an e-mail from Eric Schmidt, then Google’s chief executive officer and a board member at Apple. Schmidt wanted to let Jobs know that Google would terminate “within the hour” a recruiter who’d dared to contact an Apple employee in violation of a “do not call” policy between the companies. Schmidt abjectly apologized, adding: “Should this ever happen again please let me know immediately and we will handle. Thanks!! Eric.”
Jobs forwarded Schmidt’s groveling e-mail to an Apple subordinate. His cover note said, in its entirety, “”.
This telling material—and there’s oh, so much more of it—comes from the voluminous court record in the recently settled Silicon Valley hiring antitrust case. On April 24, Apple, Google, Intel, and Adobe Systems ran up the white flag in a class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of more than 64,000 programmers and engineers who accused the companies of conspiring not to raid one another’s workforces in the interest of stifling competition and suppressing wages.
The tech aristocrats, who from 2005 through 2009 secretly forged a series of no-recruit agreements, suspected what they were doing wasn’t quite kosher. Schmidt at one point instructed a junior executive to disseminate the pacts “verbally,” because, he explained, “I don’t want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later.” But why did they think they could get away with it? And now that they’ve been exposed, what does the episode tell us about the nature of a corporate culture built on the labor of a relatively well-paid but evidently exploited cohort of digitally talented serfs?...
Last edited: