DoJ: Apple, Google Now Free to Steal Each Other's Staff; This Is Better How?
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but I don't think the deal was at all about maintaining good partner relations. I think it was more about trying to hold wages down in the valley. I realize that it was only a handful of companies, but those are the companies that literally everyone else looks to (for wage levels) and competes with for employees. It's quite possible that that agreement had very real effects on average salaries.
The article states that the company agreed not to use the most aggressive recruitment techniques (cold calling) on each other, which sounds like a gentlemen agreement more than collusion.
Google states that they recruited from Adobe, Intel, Apple, etc., that's pretty easy to verify.
In my simplistic (possibly wrong) view; If you look at employment as a market place, and individual employees as different commodities, it keeps the market price of employees (specifically the extremely talented ones) artificially low. In the extreme it would be similar to price fixing. This is good for Larry and Sergei and Steve, but not good for the rest of us.
They shouldn't be making any agreements about hiring practices. (Gentlemen's or not).
The article mentions that employees should know their worth, but doesn't mention how? The only way to know is to either actively seek a new job and get offers or be approached through cold calling. This ruling clearly helps the employee.
Here's much better analysis:
excerpt:
It's not just that their actions are shameful.
It's not just that these actions violate everything Silicon Valley represents.
These agreements reveal a profound insecurity about their ability to compete on free and fair terms with one another.
[1]Prefer working at Google to Oracle? Fair enough. Rather work at Apple than Microsoft? Ha, have fun with that.
Why would these companies choose to do that?
The particular companies involved make me think this really is about good partnership relations - until Android, Apple and Google had a really good relationship, Apple and Pixer share a head honcho, they all buy from Intel, Intuit's not really a competitor to any of them, etc. The effect, of course, is to drive down wages for the employees who would otherwise have been poached, and that's why the DoJ got involved. But I doubt that execs at each of those companies were telling themselves "We're going to drive down wages for our key employees" when they made the policy.
I also believe that collusion was made much easier by the existing good relationships you refer to.
Where we may part ways is on what the execs were saying to themselves. I don't think it was just about maintaining good relations. I believe it was about reducing the cost of having to replace key institutional knowledge. It is worth skipping out on raw talent (that will need training) if it results in keeping key people.
Which brings us back to my point. Microsoft, Oracle and Yahoo do not have good reputations among tech people. So they are not major threats to losing institutional knowledge. And they are a great source of candidates. So it isn't in the interests of Apple, Google, etc to extend the agreement to those companies.
Kind of the same problem that kept it from happening with Facebook, but with the roles reversed.
uh.... everyone. Trying to sue someone so you can force your employees to stay is lose/lose.
Poach, entice, lure, certainly, but steal?
Agreed. I'm a huge fan of glassdoor and would encourage everyone (including managers/founders) to participate.
They seem to encourage balance and only criticism that is constructive.
I was at one of the companies mentioned, and was contacted by a recruiter from another one of the companies menteioned, but they contacted me through linked-in, not through a cold-call.
Did the agreement really matter anymore with all the alternative ways of communicating?
(I ended up leaving where I was, but didn't go to the place that was recruiting me.)
I know, its just cold calls, and smaller companies make these agreements (or just don't do it out of respect). But these are not small companies. They must behave differently.
And so they don't. All these companies decided was that THEY don't aggressively try to recruit employees from certain other companies. They are not "controlling" anything. Their employees are free to apply wherever they want, including other companies that were part of the informal agreement, and those companies are free to hire them if they want.
I agree that recruiting employees from other companies isn't "stealing", and the argument that this agreement could artificially lower wages isn't unreasonable either. However, some people seem to be jumping to conclusions here. The agreement does NOT mean that someone cannot move from e.g. Google to Apple (etc), nor that Google would sue Apple if they did, nor that any of these companies "control" where their employees are going.