Steve Jobs emails Eric Schmidt (2007)
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Or you will end up in all kinds of 'action paralysis' situations, and you would also end up dragging your emotions into these things which will have unintended consequences. The worse that could happen is the whole organisation could reduce to doing things for the self preservation of top individual(s) and not the organisation or people/interests they serve.
That's it. Seems so small. That is like a week's worth of pay. It goes to show how class action suits only enrich lawyers, in the end.
For me it was the personal abuse of trust that really stuck with me. Folks I worked with and respected colluded to keep my wages and the wages of my colleagues low. Illegally. I don't think they ever apologized for it either.
The main thing I got was the satisfaction of writing a letter to the judge pointing out that the attorneys who were representing my class ignored my attempts to communicate with them. I dug up the letter:
To the Court for the High-Tech Employee Antitrust Lawsuit,
I am writing to explain my decision to opt-out of the proposed settlement for the lawsuit against my former employer, Google, and their collusion with other employers. I was a software engineer at Google 2001–2006.
Google, Apple, Adobe and Intel are some of the leading employers in my industry. The harm they did to software engineers, particularly junior ones, is enormous. It’s not simply the lost wages in the settlement period; the market distortion set back the careers of my friends. Artificially lower wages compound for years as new jobs’ salaries often depend on previous ones. Brilliant young engineers lost opportunities to advance their careers because they were unaware of opportunities at other companies. The harm done was significant and I do not feel the settlement is sufficient.
I’m also opting out because I am unimpressed with my nominated attorneys. The fact that Judge Koh ruled the original settlement was “below the range of reasonableness” suggests my attorneys are poor negotiators and have not represented the plaintiffs effectively. I do not see wish to participate in a settlement where they receive $80M+ dollars. Also personally, I’m irritated that they cannot even do class members the courtesy of answering email sent to the published contact address of **@****.com. My emails of April 29 and May 10 both went unacknowledged.
Thank you for reading my letter. I do not wish to speak at the Fairness Hearing.
DOJ helped software engineer salaries tremendously
No, Facebook did, by just refusing to take part in the cartel. You only need one company to start bidding up salaries for the category of employee they want to move the market if they have a big enough budget. The DOJ didn't even push for a reasonable fine, one measured in years of revenue, or reasonable punishment, like jailtime for executives and HR staff who were in on the conspiracy.
Your response: ":)"
Man, Steve Jobs sure had a lot of admirable qualities, but sometimes he was just a fcking asshole.
Why qualify it with "sometimes"? I think it's safe to assume that the way a person behaves in private, among their peers, shows more about their essential character than how they behave when doing public relations.
The Schmidt and Jobs on display in the email are the essential Schmidt and Jobs. The admirable qualities are the stage show.
Is someone closer to their true self when they are drunk? Tired? On a power trip?
I suspect we try to characterize people because we're attempting to build a Bayesian Model that can help us predict someone's next move. And all that is going to depend on our 'prior' and 'base rate'. In this perspective, there is no "true self" that will be observed by everyone on the planet.
Legality of wage fixing aside for the moment, I don't think this should have been a fireable offense at all (reprimanding the recruiter to ensure it does not happen again would have been all that's needed to satisfy their little gentlemen's agreement).
Even setting aside how Steve fired more than one person on the spot — I’m personally aware of him firing half a room in MobileMe, for example — and everything we know about him, and how the firing of that recruiter was probably the outcome he was telegraphing via the email, there’s absolutely nothing to gain in this situation challenging or objecting to Google’s move as an executive at another company, particularly on moral grounds. He’d have looked like an (exploitable) idiot, to be quite frank, given how business works at this level.
How do you think that conversation would have gone? “Oh, you’re right, we shouldn’t have done that, our bad?”
But I also wouldn't also have left the building without that NeXT station under my arm.
I know that in Europe you can let people go if the company is experiencing financial difficulties and all that, but there's no question that the commitment to any new European employee you hire is higher than in the case of their US counterpart. And it would be foolish to assume that by increasing the decisioning barrier there wouldn't be some kind of an action-reaction happening in the market. As an employer, you never have 100% certainty that a new initiative will pay off - there's always this doubt in the back of your mind. Well, if the cost of failure is higher in one case than another, you are simply going to initiate fewer bets and will also give fewer people an opportunity to benefit from them (and those bets that you do initiate, you will approach more carefully and with fewer people).
Does this explain the entire gap in unemployment? Of course not. But I really do think it is a factor. So what's better - a bulletproof job that fewer people have, or a more risky proposition that more people can get access to? I don't think I have an answer to this, but I certainly don't think that the answer is always in increasing the decisioning barriers.
Unemployment in northern Europe is lower than in comparable places in the US with the same labour rights.
I can imagine unemployment in Southern Europe to be higher, but I am curious what you think you are comparing.
Here is something else to think about: it's safer to hire Americans because they will work 60 hours a week, never take a sick day, won't get pregnant and even if you give them vacation days they won't use them. So they are about 3/5 of the price of your typical European employee. A much better value proposition.
In return some of this will burn them out and put them on edge. This will likely have cultural, political and social consequences. If only we could give our American friends the sleep, reflection and family time they so much deserve.
You should also cosider wages and disposable income. The US worker will have a substantially higher wage, and because of lower taxes and living costs, a higher disposable income.
>You should also cosider wages and disposable income.
As one would consider purcasing power, healthcare costs, student debts, good public infrastructure, public spaces, physical safety, quality of water, quality of air, amount of people owining firearms, amount of conspiracy nuts, reliability of things like heat and electricity, the level of institutational racism, human rights, freedom of speech, etc. Lets not even dive in the fact that healthy high quality food is so much more expensive in the US.
In the end, the list of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_livable_cities does not contain many US cities at all.
This notion that you are rewarded better for the same work in the US is just not true. You have to work more, you have to put up with more abuse, you have to spend more time travelling to work, your roads are shit, your public transit is none existing. If you get into a small car crash, you have to worry for a bit if the other person will drive on (stucking you with a bill), or bring a gun (because they might just be angry and armed!). Your kids live in a cage in suburbia and after working all those hours, you will have to drive them around for them to go anywhere except their own house.
In addition you have to ensure you look at comparable statistics on who is counted as unemployed. This is toften tied to receiving unemployment benefits or being able to work etc. so different statistics might count based on different criteria.
It seems a different story for public orgs like schools and government positions. But private companies have a lot more freedom than some in here have been suggesting.
It’s likely a different story elsewhere in Europe though. There’s a lot of countries with their own laws in Europe
(I agree that the concept of server wage is pretty awful and should be eliminated as a matter of policy.)
This is an interesting take: with the idea that maybe the actual customers can contribute to the worker's salary
The customer always contributes to worker's salary
It's also worth noting that there's plenty of innovation happening in Europe too.
edit: I'll add a little more detail as to why I don't agree with your theory: in Europe you can still make employees redundant relatively easily. So if a company hires 100 employees then realises it's not cost effective, it can easily make 80 of them redundant. The catch is you cannot rehire for the same roles (basically you cannot make someone redundant to get around firing them), but given the purpose of your thought experiment was to cull staff after initial growth, redundancy works perfectly fine here.
Europe also has such as thing as short term contracts. Not contractors, though we obviously have that too, but FTEs that are hired for 6 months / 1 year rather than indefinitely. I'm sure America has this too.
So there isn't really any need to hire people with the intention of firing them shortly after. In fact any company that does this would get a pretty bad reputation pretty quickly. That's true for America too.
I've also seen people fired at short notice in the UK too so it's not like it can't happen in Europe even with greater worker rights. Heck, I was unfairly fired from one job -- but I hated the job anyway so it wasn't worth my time taking the company to court. Instead I used that energy to find a job I did like.
you respond definitively claiming that you know the answer, not causation.
I will say calling your own hypothetical link as "sensical" is a little presumptuous though. The very fact I disagreed in the first place should be evidence that it's sensical to everyone. :)
† Or never fired, like Eric Schmidt!
"A job" is really a fictional abstraction. Every day one works is additional services-for-money. Either party should rightfully be able to say "no thanks, that's enough, tomorrow is a new day" at any time.
If a person can get another job immediately, you aren't harming them by declining to continue to be a customer. In fact, you employing them is no power over them at all (unless you were overpaying them relative to their market value).
This does not happen in reality. There are transactional costs involved in job searching plus additional costs that come from onboarding.
It becomes more common the lower skill the job becomes, as the fungibility of the worker increases.
Social mobility in the US is still pretty good last time I checked. Most European countries have have lower income income inequality, but less mobility. Eg, the difference between the bottom and top 25‰ is smaller, but your birth class is more predictive of your future income.
The authors picked several factors like which they assume lead to improved social mobility (like births/woman), score countries out of 100, then perform a simple numerical average them to form the mobility index. Look at page 205 of the report for the list. They don't validate that the factors are actually related in any way to mobility outcomes.
https://www3.weforum.org/docs/Global_Social_Mobility_Report....
In fact, mean income feeds 0% into the index ranking. Intergenerational change in income feeds 0% into the index. Income inequality (fixed in time), feeds in 10% to the index.
> They do consider income as well: "In Denmark or Finland, for example, if one’s parent earns 100% more than another, it is estimated that the impact on a child’s future income is around 15%, compared to about 50% in the United States...".
That is a reference to another study in the section explaining "why social mobility matters". It was NOT included in the Index ranking. That line data isn't sourced well, so it is hard to follow up on what exactly they are comparing and how.
Anything can be sold in America.
I feel in the US there is a lot of subconscious decision making that's essentially about buying more time with money, but in an actual monetary transaction as opposed to some implicit trade off. They seem to be chronically starved for time.
Maybe, maybe not. I'd argue there are far more who tried and failed than who succeeded, but I don't know if that ratio of success is better or worse than in other countries today (yes, today - not when the US economy was booming relative to other countries, or when immigration was easy, or in the early days of Silicon Valley, or back during the Gold Rush(es) etc).
In any case, though, I would argue this argument applies to a narrow slice of the population, namely those whose main goal is to get rich. Not everybody wants to "work hard and become rich". Not everybody wants life to be a competition to get ahead. Plenty of people are not deeply invested in a career and simply want to work 40h/week for a decent salary and still be able to afford a decent life.
Others feel a calling to a profession that will generally not make you rich, but is still valuable to society. Case in point: teachers. Extremely valuable to society and extremely badly compensated in the US. If I wanted to be a teacher, I'd much rather be in most European countries than in the US.
When you say per capita, are you referring to median or mean figures?
Hong Kong is richer per capita than Switzerland at the median and does not have nearly as robust of employee rights.
The US is richer at the median than Germany and does not have nearly the worker protections. The US also has vastly more low skill labor immigration (for 40+ years now), which persistently debases its median figures. Why are German workers so relatively poor, if the claims about worker rights is accurate? Surely the dynamo of Europe, the German economy, combined with such potent worker protections, should lead to enormous median wealth.
Luxembourg has 613,000 people. That's a pretty ridiculous comparison. You're comparing a giant country of 330 million to a modest size city like San Francisco.
Perhaps they made a different trade off, more leisure, less work?
I've only brought up the two most obvious examples (there many others) that negate entirely that silly notion that somehow human rights are incompatible with technological advancement, which borders on hate speech.
I mean, should we really go back to slavery to become space-faring species? Not the kind of future I want to live in.
Norway (lets ignore because oil, but really it's not oil), Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Iceland - also better? Longer vacations, better transit, definitely less hobos from what I remember, and no pervasive urine odour.
And bigger median annual incomes.
The weather is brutal in some parts of Nordics, I'll give you that. Not sure if I'd trade cold weather for urine vapours though. Very very difficult question, so I guess NYC isn't entirely hopeless just yet.
In 2018 the Swiss financial sector accounted for 9.1% of GDP. For comparison, in 2018 the US financial sector accounted for 7.4% of US GDP. To claim that it is _entirely_ banking is just plain wrong. To insinuate that there is no innovation elsewhere, (but there sure is in good ol' America), is just insulting.
>Financial markets in the United States ... In 2018, finance and insurance represented 7.4 percent (or $1.5 trillion) of U.S. gross domestic product[0]
>Switzerland’s financial sector ... as a share of gross domestic product (GDP). In 2018, it represented 9.1%[1]
[0]: https://www.selectusa.gov/financial-services-industry-united...
[1]: https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/gdp_switzerland-s-financial-sec...
> Luxembourg remains a financial powerhouse – the financial sector accounts for more than 35% of GDP - because of the exponential growth of the investment fund sector through the launch and development of cross-border funds (UCITS) in the 1990s. Luxembourg is the world’s second-largest investment fund asset domicile, after the US, with $4 trillion of assets in custody in financial institutions.
https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/luxembourg/... (2020)
Why is it that nice places to live have such horrible weather?
Sure, yeah. no innovation at all at Sandoz, Nestle, Novartis and Roche, and ~200 other companies in life sciences and another 300 in precision manufacturing.
Zero.
I'm not a loyal employee. I do most jobs just good enough to get by, and alway looking for a angle to extract more money out of an organization. (It was easier before being surveiled with cams). I always like a few coworkers, and we become friends, but despised the corporation, and everyone in charge.
But I'm never fired.
I'm usually shocked over the person they fire.
Also, to be clear, the lawsuit was not defending any company's right to hire from anyone they want. The class action lawsuit represented the employees of the companies involved in the anti-competitive behavior.
Bad managers exist in every company, Google would not be an exception to this and rules go out the window when executive gets involved, as happened here.
It really is ludicrous when you read it.
Google fired someone they hired to find people, for trying to find people just because it would please the CEO at another company that Eric was on the board of directors of.
Conflict of interest.
Well you know.. this kind of collusion is called price fixing.
In all likelihood, they were contractors, liable to be let go at any second.
But yeah, it was illegal and that's why there was a class action.
"I would be very pleased if your recruiting department would stop doing this".
The phrase "very pleased" implies to me that there is no pressure whatsoever, but nonetheless it would be great if it happened.
This also isn't the only threatening email from Steve to Erik. There was a Google labs project that had been approved by apple legal that got an angry email from Steve too. The lawyers signed off, so Google was protected but it didn't prevent swift action. (The lab project was taken down but the dev was not in trouble.)
Theoretically. In practice, Steve Jobs wasn't taking orders from Apple's Board in 2007.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_tur...
Anyway, I'd guess he was downvoted because a lot of people here have an old justified hate of flash and thought his comment signaled tribal allegiance to the opposite camp.
"Connections to the French surname Rochambeau are a folk etymology"
The decision to prevent Flash from operating on iOS was never considered as cause for lawsuit by any of the agencies mentioned by GP.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20100510113916/http://articles.s...
If they didn't fire that recruiter, they risked off-setting the delicate employee cartel balance they had going.
It was a summary execution to show they were serious so they could keep Jobs from unleashing his recruiters all over Google's employees.
The settlement was less than half a billion.
Eric Schmidt enjoyed a long and prosperous career at Google for many years afterward.
There's a followup email in the same thread saying that Jobs was cool with other companies hiring anyone that approached them directly, but not cool with companies doing "systematic solicitation" - https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1402650278105583620/ph...
Even though the person is paraphrasing what he said, doesn't that make sense? It's scummy and illegal to block a move once a person has decided to switch companies - but it doesn't seem to be the case here. It may be ok to target a specific person that you think may be a great fit.
However, is it ok to systematically target entire teams(regardless of whether or not this actually happened)? The answer to that may still be yes, but I haven't made up my mind on that yet.
Yes, there was an illegal, unethical deal in place, but I wouldn't think this message alone would trigger such a conversation at the highest levels.
Re: See this: WAS: Fwd: Re: Original subject
> their was a (laughable) settlement for the employees whose wages were depressed because of this
There also used to be tens of millions in wages paid out to people employed by cigarette companies. The conduct of the industry, and the individual employees themselves, will generally impact how people see them and thus how employable they are over time.
as if they're property and not vendors
> on another note, it seems silly to have both firefox and safari. perhaps there is some unification stretegy that we can get these two to pursue.
Which of course brings to mind the ol' "Standards" xkcd:
I'm writing this from a Macbook Air. One of the reasons why I use MacOS is because it's based on the NeXT heritage. There was some amazing stuff there. But Steve was just not a nice person.
It doesn't redeem them. Nor does it redeem Jobs. But being an asshole doesn't, in any way, diminish one's outsized impact on society.
How do you know person was not very well aware of the policy, and while their colleagues did adhere to it, the person in question did not, and attempted to benefit themselves financially/whatnot by breaking the said policy?
Why do you think ":)" === CEO is happy about a person getting fired?
That's why I asked "Why are you disgusted?" (thanks for downvotes everyone while asking a simple question)
It might be fair to be "disgusted" that CEOs put a policy forbidding cold outreach to competitors employees (but I personally wouldn't use such an emotional word)
But I don't get why you feel disgusted about a different thing and why you expect a CEO of a multibillion company with thousands of employees care about a random person in another company breaking another company policies and getting fired for it?
Don't push your current ideology back on historic matter. Whether something is illegal is dynamic and dependent on the era. Smoking weed would get you in jail not too long ago. So is that right or wrong? Things are not always black or white. Stay open-minded
I don't think its unreasonable for two business owners to be upset about actively attacking each others business.
I think if Apple and Google had agreed to not interview or hire staff that worked at each others company then that would be crossing a line. IN this case they are harming their own business by not hiring the best candidate for the job.