Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs
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Say he did get the offer canceled. How would this employee feel about working for a CEO that does this?
LMAO. Yes. And a bad person.
Isaac Newton was one of the greatest mathematicians and physicists of history, inventor of the telescope, father of Newtonian mechanics, and a key figure of the Enlightenment. Yet he considered that scientific work of lesser importance, spending much of his effort studying the occult, biblical interpretation, and alchemy.
Stupid is the word I would use to posthumously describe the interests of Isaac Newton. I admit that it would have been difficult to recognise the stupidity of occult studies in 18th century England, but we can certainly apply that label with the benefit of a modern perspective.
It seemed to work for Jack Parsons. And many other very creative people.
But 44 billion wasn't an unreasonable price at the time the amount was offered, which was immediately prior to the stock market collapse of early 2022. And most of the TSLA stock he sold to acquire Twitter was sold at near to its market peak. Effectively he swapped some overpriced TSLA for some overpriced TWTR.
I mentioned this on an Elon thread and an SBF thread, and it fits here also. When people are so rich and powerful, it's often their own hubris that takes them down.
Average people tend to at least care about their own children. Jobs treated his own appallingly badly.
Not to mention how many parents think assault (smacking) is a "just punishment". It actually achieves the opposite of what it purports, i.e. more violence and disobedience as soon as the children grow large enough to hit back.
And then there is the peculiar acceptance in the USA of male genital mutilation for many non-Jewish children.
We are still in our infancy with parenting.
Dennis Ritchie as an example deserves way more respect than Jobs the buffoon.
But if you make "pop" devices to be sold to the layman, you are great in the public eye.
It turns out that's all it takes to be popular (and unfortunately, for all their wisdom in other areas, so many tech folks fail to grasp that nuance).
Ritchie did excellent work, but a world filled with nothing but computers that worked like C and UNIX do would be a harsh and inhuman place.
Bit difficult seeing how he died of cancer in 2011.
The last great Steve Jobs keynote was 2010, the iPad announcement. Any 25-30 year old founders nowadays would have been, what, 15 years old? Maybe there were a few enraptured tweens watching that stream, locking in a dream of being just like Steve Jobs that day, but at some point he's just another old dead guy to any new startup founders.
Bill Nguyen: The Boy In The Bubble
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3229299#3230401
https://www.fastcompany.com/1784823/bill-nguyen-the-boy-in-t...
>“I never use anyone else’s products but my own. I literally don’t think there’s anything to be learned from other people’s stuff,” says Nguyen.
>And then, that very night, everything came crashing down. Color execs started noticing that users were quick to rate the app a measly one or two stars out of five–nails in the coffin, given an oversaturated app market that was spawning more than 1,000 new apps a day. The problem was simple: In order for Color to work, many users had to be in a similar location, but since Color hadn’t widely seeded the app prelaunch, users arrived to a social network that resembled a ghost town. “I wanna see that pitch deck,” ranted influential tech blogger Robert Scoble. “It must have had some magic unicorn dust sprinkled on it.” A mock satirical pitch deck began circulating around tech circles, spoofing Color’s attempt to capitalize on every web 2.0 cliché: “People. Colors. Apps. Cats. Bacon. Organic. Bieber. Mobile. Social. Local. Pivot.”
https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-google-others-...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-google-lawsuit-idUS...
Even by then most of those same companies had already settle another case that included ending those agreements:
https://www.cnet.com/culture/doj-settles-no-recruit-claims-a...
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-requires-s...
In the rest of the world Steve Jobs / Apple would have been in a bigger trouble just from the start of the emails.
Here’s one recent comprehensive labor report, for example. https://files.mutualcdn.com/ituc/files/2022-ITUC-Rights-Inde...
That could wind up in a bidding war that could end up affecting many employees and salaries going up a lot. That's a lot of lost money for Apple, which makes Steve Jobs mad. Additionally, some employees would still be lost in the war, slowing down Apple development.
>Say he did get the offer canceled. How would this employee feel about working for a CEO that does this?
I think it's implied that the employee wouldn't find out. I think Steve Jobs would be more angry if Google revoked the offer and blamed it on Steve Jobs than if Google went forward with the offer.
I think this is just shrewd business.
They did poach a huge chunk of the safari team. They then did launch a competing browser and aggressively pushed that browser globally. They forked the mainline project of WebKit and created blink - for reasons relating to Chrome product roadmap. It was a big deal when they did it.
But Jobs predicting this is what they were up to and calling google and complaining they are poaching a whole team from Apple. Is bullying?
Which CEO wouldn’t be upset at an entire core team being targeted by a competitor? It’s not price fixing, it’s not illegal (to be upset or to call another ceo and complain).
How would you feel if you were actively looking for another job and the CEO of your company repeatedly called one the the companies that was going to give you an offer to yell at them and try to intimidate them with threats of "war" into not hiring you?
That sure sounds a lot like bullying, even if you don't think it is bullying, it is certainly an illegal business practice. This isn't just my opinion, but that of the DOJ and the court.
While that case was settled without a trial, I'll note that the judge took the rare step of rejecting the first settlement agreement because Apple and Google didn't pay enough.
This want “an individual looking for a job”. This was a google going after an entire team.
Honestly everyone has the bullying round the wrong way here. Steve jobs was an ass in this instance, but his actions are likely 99.9% of other CEOs actions
Some places have made those illegal or greatly restricted them, hopefully that will spread.
> This want “an individual looking for a job”. This was a google going after an entire team.
It was google trying to hire ~3 internal recommendations. From the emails it sounds like for the main hiring prospect was potentially more interested if all 3 got offers and was also already looking at offer from other companies. I don't specifically see anything about it being an "entire team", so I'm curious where you got that from.
> Steve jobs was an ass in this instance, but his actions are likely 99.9% of other CEOs actions
I think the 99.9% number is a bit too high (and certainly hard to source). I do think you are correct that this (and other) illegal business practices are extremely common among CEOs, especially in companies of this size. Though I think CEOs of companies of this size are usually quite a bit more circumspect in how they go about it.
Again, the legal way to approach this is to make the developers an offer of better projects (which is sounds like Apple tried), money or other perks to make the job attractive. A volatile CEO who did what Jobs did here would probably count against that (if the employees knew what he did.)
I think Steve Jobs is motivated by money here.
Don't not consider that Sergei and Larry are not just as motivated by money as Steve, and trying to tap into leverage potential developed elsewhere, because it's a way to 'do more stuff that also makes more money'.
It's 'small scale hardball' between CEO's and that's mostly it.
Drama. The 'Young and Restless of the Valley', Tuesday afternoons @ 2pm.
If he called up a competitor and complained about them undercutting prices on competing products, and threatened "This means war", would you be explaining how tolerating competitive bidding is bad for the company? Everyone knows that, and knows, I thought, that the only legitimate response is "Tough shit."
He spent his whole professional career bullying people and repurposing their ideas into pretty amazing products.
This is very much in the interest of employees, but not in the interest of companies. So companies have a motivation to implicitly (legal) or explicitly (illegal, slap on the wrist punishment) cooperate to keep wages somewhat fixed. One way to do this is to not proactively "poach" each other's employees. If you hire a Bob, I won't actively try to recruit Bob - though I will extend him an offer if he, himself, proactively approaches me.
2 years after this email exchange, you had this [1]. A Google recruiter tries to poach an Apple employee. Steve contacts Google, Google responds that the recruiter will be "terminated within the hour", and Steve responds with a smiley face. They were sued over this [2] and "punished" with a fine that can't even be called a slap on the wrist. Now they do the same, but more cleverly. But having recruiters just spam everybody with endless recruitment offers, they can claim to be competing yet those recruitment offers become meaningless.
[1] - https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1443263744906305543
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
P.S. if it was a race to the bottom, consider that only 1.5% of the labor force works at minimum wage.
To avoid this, companies use various tricks to fix wages such that they don't have to pay even the highest valued employees more than a fraction of the value they actually bring to the company, and thus can get away with huge profits.
To illustrate this with an extreme scenario, assume that all of Apple's work relied on a single engineer's designs. If Google and Apple were to compete on who can hire that engineer, Apple would be willing to pay almost all the way up to their entire revenue to that single engineer, as in this contrived scenario, if they lose him, they lose all of their revenue. So, Google and Apple would be racing to the bottom, offering ever more extravagant salaries to this magical engineer until they couldn't pay him and make a profit at all anymore.
So you pay them $3m a year? Now there's zero profit, so nothing to invest in expanding the team, improving your services services, hiring more developers, growing the businesses, funding new projects for that developer and all the other employees to work on. Oh, by the way you owe $20m to your investors that put down the capital to get the business off the ground in the first place. How are you going to pay them back? Also, maybe you could have hired another developer and they might have done just as good a job, which is also true of everyone else in the business.
Finally, if you do up the pay of the developer say $1m a year, what happens if the product gets eclipsed in the market or the developer moves on to another product nowhere near as profitable. Now they're working on something bringing in a lot less, but they're still costing you a million a year.
Even Facebook has had to lay people off when the market demand for $500k genius coders cooled a little recently
FAANG salaries and RSUs are pretty much the perfect compromise between labor and capital IMO. The only way I'd change things would be to move toward fewer hours per week, possibly with widespread fixed-bid consulting and health benefits not tied to employment
Obviously, software engineering teams aren't as dramatically interdependent as a bridge where the departure of any one member causes the entire structure to collapse, but they also don't live in the perfect balance where the value of the whole exactly equals the sum of the marginal value/cost of each member. As a result, there's no one number for the "value" of an individual engineer that both represents their negotiated wage and is viable for the company to pay without going bankrupt.
From everything I've read in the last twenty years, there was not one single facet of Steve Jobs' life in which he was not a bully.
I prefer not to mythologize (very good) products of billion dollar companies too much, even if they could stand on their own.
In the cartoon, a gun was pointed at Daffy's head - and he managed to lay a golden egg.
Can a miracle be justified?
The ethical question is: if it's a genuine miracle (say, a discovery or invention that breaks new ground or was previously thought to be impossible), can the duress be justified?
I don't think it makes any sense for 1 single person to decide if the price paid was small, simply because they don't know what actual price was paid (in terms of suffering).
Also, it sounds to me that's you're assuming that's a necessitated price to pay, which I don't believe is true (but I don't have any examples either).
Fresh graduates may not realise they are being treated badly, lacking a frame of reference. Immigrants may be on a visa where they have no choice but to put up with it or leave the country.
Locals who've been around a bit, who know their discipline, the proven (local) best of the best? They don't stay on teams led by bullies.
aren't credible because they became so successful that they're now millionaire executives
Yes that's what I'm saying. The statement of two men who stood at the top of the ladder about the man who put them there immediately after that man has died is absolutely not credible in regards to judging how that man treated regular workers. At all.
Jobs could be a bully, it's well documented. Pixar wasn't somehow immune to this behavior.
You've painted a utilitarian, partisan viewpoint: that the cultural and technological significance of Pixar outweighs any negative experiences of staff. The two are not easily comparable. How do you quantify them, what's the denominator? Jobs didn't have a crystal ball, he couldn't know Pixar would succeed. What was his calculus? How did he determine the trade-offs between success and bullying? Finally, cultural/tech significance is most certainly possible without putting staff through negative experiences.
They make that choice everyday they chose to keep working for it.
I see what you're saying, I just don't understand how it promotes a healthy discussion here.
Jobs wasn't out there hurting civilians on the streets. You want to see a real bully, go to Ukraine and see what Putin is doing to civilians.
Being slightly earlier to market and with a little more style is what made him a business juggernaut. But I don't think being first really means all that much when it comes to an ends justifying the means conversation.
Given the choice, I'll take the product not made under duress, even if I have to wait a bit longer.
I think this is a reasonable perspective, and you could be right, but you could be wrong too. We don't get to run an experiment on this one. There are obviously huge things Jobs did that I take issue with (I hate the copyright and DRM crap in Apple Music, for example, and the whole patent war with Samsung was terrible), but at the same time, he grew up decades before me and I got the privilege of living in a world he helped created. Who knows where the world would be without him pushing it.
> Given the choice, I'll take the product not made under duress, even if I have to wait a bit longer.
I think we may be able to get to a world where we can have that, but not in today's world, IMO. There's still far too much evil and not enough infra for truth, that if the good people don't push much harder than the bad and indifferent, we may never get there. Of course, not something we can test, just have to discuss and place our bets.
Unless you are the one of course.
How do you mean by "behaved like a feudal lord"?
Admittedly not read up on Jobs (sacrilege in this venue, I know), so I'm struggling to understand why he who pays the piper calls the tune is somehow objectionable.
Just because you can get away with it doesn't mean it's ok.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20050427012806/http://alvyray.co...
Frankly, it's ex post facto justification by false entailment. I don't buy it.
Quit making excuses for "brilliant assholes" and start demanding better.
What does this even mean in the context of the story from TFA? The "impediment" was one of his employees getting a competing job offer, and the "irreparable damage" was...having to actually pay someone as much as they'd be valued elsewhere? That's not a reasonable way to behave, and masking it in impersonal language doesn't somehow make it more reasonable.
> [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20050427012806/http://alvyray.co...
So if someone spent for example 44*10^9 dollars on some venture, would it still be ok to be jerk, or would it be counterproductive to viability of such investment?
I forget the author, but someone famous once noted, "The reasonable man adapts himself to his environment. The unreasonable man adapts his environment to him. Therefore, all progress is made by unreasonable men."
Like any quote, there's a hint of truth to it and also not applicable in ALL situations.
By "total control", do you mean well beyond the boundaries of labor law? In my mind, I'm admittedly inclined to interpret this color as a consequence of the music stopping at an unprofitable creative house with an internal culture of unabashed freedom on someone else's dime.
Maybe I just need to read the books mentioned by the parent sometime.
You have a boss and you have a meeting with your boss to make a decision about including a new feature you've coded up a prototype for, into a product that is going to be released in a year. You demo it, and it goes mostly OK but there are some hitches.
You boss has several ways of responding. One way could be to call you an idiot, a stupid idiot who's wasting everybody's time. The other way would be to provide a more polite way of saying that the feature might not be ready yet and could use some refinement.
Multiple employees of Jobs reported this sort of behavior (screaming, belitting, etc):
"""Jobs stormed into a meeting and started shouting that they were “fucking dickless assholes."""
""" He shouted, "You guys don't know what you're doing. I'm going to get someone else to do the ads because this is fucked up."""
"""A few weeks later he called Bob Belleville, one of the hardware designers on the Xerox Star team. "Everything you've ever done in your life is shit," Jobs said, "so why don't you come work for me?"""
"""When Steve had to make cutbacks at Pixar, he fired people and didn't give any severance pay."""
"""“How old were you when you lost your virginity?" he asked. The candidate looked baffled. “What did you say?” “Are you a virgin?” Jobs asked. The candidate sat there flustered, so Jobs changed the subject. “How many times have you taken LSD?” Hertzfeld recalled, “The poor guy was turning varying shades of red, so I tried to change the subject and asked a straightforward technical question.”""
"""To address the problem, Jobs gathered the MobileMe team in Apple's auditorium and asked: "Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?" When the team gave their answers, Jobs replied, "Then why the fuck doesn't it do that?"
Jobs then fired the MobileMe boss on the spot and replaced him with Eddie Cue."""
I think Jony Ive pinpointed it: """I once asked him why he gets so mad about stuff. He said, "But I don't stay mad." He has this very childish ability to get really worked up about something, and it doesn't stay with him at all. But, there are other times, I think honestly, when he's very frustrated, and his way to achieve catharsis is to hurt somebody. And I think he feels he has a liberty and license to do that. The normal rules of social engagement, he feels, don't apply to him. Because of how very sensitive he is, he knows exactly how to efficiently and effectively hurt someone. And he does do that."""
The only question is: if Jobs hadn't been an asshole, would the computing world have come so far so fast, and does that justify his behavior?
How can we be objective about subjective things when we can't even be objective by objective things?
That job tends to be virtually impossible as companies launch a transformation then reject each individual change as "this is fine" or as a sacred cow.
If, to survive, you must change many things quickly, some decisions will be wrong, but that's why you iterate.
Let's not get carried away here.
"According to the American Cancer Society, for all stages of pancreatic cancer combined, the one-year relative survival rate is 20%, and the five-year rate is 9%."
And don't forget, Steve Jobs died in 2011, which means treatment was being received for years prior. That's 12+ years ago.
Did his choices hasten his death? At least one oncologist thinks that "the end result would probably have been the same"[1]:
"Had he been operated on then, would most likely would have happened is that Jobs’ apparent survival would have been nine months longer but the end result would probably have been the same. None of this absolves the alternative medicine that Jobs tried or suggests that waiting to undergo surgery wasn’t harmful, only that in hindsight we can conclude that it probably didn’t make a difference. At the time of his diagnosis and during the nine months afterward during which he tried woo instead of medicine, it was entirely reasonable to be concerned that the delay was endangering his life, because it might have been. It was impossible to know until later—and, quite frankly, not even then—whether Jobs’ delaying surgery contributed to his death. Even though what I have learned suggests that this delay probably didn’t contribute to Jobs’ death, it might have. Even though I’m more sure than I was before, I can never be 100% sure. Trust me when I say yet again that I really, really wish I could join with the skeptics and doctors proclaiming that “alternative medicine killed Steve Jobs,” but I can’t, at least not based on the facts as I have been able to learn them."
From that point on the game theory is fairly obvious and the rest is a question of style. May as well get angry; sometimes it works. It isn't optimum behaviour but at that level it'll be quite common. There aren't a lot of strategies to choose from. Call it bullying if you like, but realistically once this sort of money is involved something different is happening to what goes on in playgrounds. These people are well insulated from any emotional consequences or threats to their comfort. For a label like 'bully' what matters is how Jobs treated people he had actual power over.
He was just a capitalist. That's how capitalism works, by definition, i.e. extracting the most surplus-value from the workers (in this case the Apple employees). Increased their salaries (i.e. making a "better offer") would have decreased the surplus-value extracted by Jobs, hence why he was angry.
Capitalism is[0] "huh, even greedy people can be useful, because their greed is best served by supplying other people's needs".
[0] or, I should say, some forms of it are, because Laissez-faire died with the New Deal as hard and for the same reasons as USSR-style Communism (the economic system not the dictatorship)
As long as the stock keeps going up, hagiographies
My father once worked at an electronics contracting firm. One of his co-workers who was in charge of purchasing parts was masterful while on the phone with suppliers. He drove a very hard bargain and often shouted and swore at suppliers to extract the best prices. Bullying or business?
Both.
Being an arse, and becoming resistant to arseholes on the other side, can become an arms race in some sectors. It tends to break down after a while, when people on the supply end start “sacking” customers because they get enough business from the others that they can be choosy, then the cycle begins afresh.
Bullying. Full Stop.
This behavior gets people thrown out of restaurants and bars. If I ever catch someone treating one of my employees like that, and the employee is caught like a deer in the headlights because it is a big deal, I have absolutely no qualms stepping in and firing the client representative on the spot (clients can get back into our good graces by swapping representatives with apologies). I don't care how big the client is (I also perform receivables management to ensure no client is ever put into a position where they can threaten my book of business).
I've been told once by a purchasing manager after speaking with a client's company counsel that I drive a hard but fair bargain. Happy repeat clients to this day. We respected each other without anyone resorting to toddler-teenager tantrums during the negotiations.
When dealing with wait staff, hotel staff, valets, pool cleaners, all the way to CIO's and boards of directors, bullying is never acceptable. That you attempt to put a patina of respectability upon it by making it "just business" is also unacceptable. It's extremely disrespectful and rude, not to say the lowest, crudest, ugliest, low-cognitive effort form of negotiating. Negotiating to me is another communications channel conveying valuable information about how your culture reacts when the stakes are high, time is short, and actionable information sparse. Just like in a critical production down outage.
When bullying in business is your SOP, the network effects of positive collaboration powered by increasingly pervasive technology advancing upon us will deliver far more attenuated benefits to you than your competitors.
Business
> often shouted and swore at suppliers to extract the best prices
Bully
I worked for a guy who had built a business from his kitchen table to 90,000 sq ft building employing 100 people.
He was on vacation and met up with a long-time supplier of a material he used in his products, and after dinner one night the supplier told him he'd be increasing his prices by some large amount. They had a huge argument, and as soon as he came home he started a new plan. He'd make the material himself.
He found a person with a Phd in that field, bought the necessary equipment, and started producing his own polyurethane foams. After another 10 years, he found his own customers and was making more money reselling the foam than he was using it in his own products, and ended up selling the company to a chemical conglomerate for tens of millions of dollars.
Another fun fact: this guy would do all of his drawings in Microsoft Paint. Architectural drawings, product designs, everything. Blew my mind. He would fly tutors in for the week as he tried to learn AutoCAD, Solidworks, etc, but he hated them all.
Suppose I go up to some person I know and say "Give me $100!". They politely decline. I become aggressive and shout and swear at them. Eventually they give in, as a result of which I am $100 richer and they are $100 poorer. I take it we can all agree that this is not reasonable behaviour. (Perhaps it's even criminal; I guess it depends on the exact nature of my shouting and swearing.)
I don't see how such behaviour becomes any better when it's done in pursuit of corporate gain rather than individual gain.
You might say: ah, but it's understood that this sort of thing is part of the game: it's just what happens when people negotiate with one another. Maybe that's true, but I don't think that's any justification. In some cultures it's been "part of the game" that if two men both fancy the same woman then they fight one another and maybe one of them dies. In some cultures it's been "part of the game" that if a man dies his living wife is burned to death on his funeral pyre. Something can be customary but also harmful.
Sometimes you hear people talking about what an awful thing "capitalism" is. That's not a popular sort of opinion around these parts, but I think this is the sort of thing that fosters such opinions: the idea that nothing can be really bad if it is motivated by the search for profit. To hell with that. Yes, some things motivated by profit are bad. And yes, from what you say your father's co-worker's behaviour was one of those things.
Please don't think that people let $ Billions go one direction or another because of the genteel rules of white collar world.
Steve is doing his job and leaning in to protect his talent.
Just imagine conversations between coaches in sports.
It's probably just 'tough talk', but it's also firing up a warning flare as if to say 'don't do this' etc.
Depending on what he did after that, it could get ugly practically or legally ... but this is mostly just a CEO doing his job.
I mean, yes, and I say this without any intention of minimizing or justifiying, but: Which of the leaders/founders of firms at that scale and success do you imagine do NOT have a history of bullying?
A certain amount of what we might call "force of personality" is required to get something off the ground.
Once it succeeds, these people live their lives in a place where there is an enormous power and wealth differential between them and everyone around them.
Those two factors will absolutely put you at risk for shitty behavior, I suspect.
You may or may not agree that that is reasonable, but it certainly is not exceptional and does not make Steve Jobs look like a bully.
The document came to light in a lawsuit which Apple, Google and others eventually settled. https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-google-others-...
Ever work on a project for the C-suite that had a lot of urgency, some strange amount of substance and a huge amount of bs that resulted in some huge action/deal but when you sit back and think about it nothing really of value was made?
Yeah you just worked on the coverup for the country club deal that got made weeks ago.
No, this is likely not the reason in this particular case. If email were a replacement for face to fact negotiation, sales people would have stopped taking flights 25 years. Instead, sales at the b2b level is still filled with travel and relationship building.
Humans like humans showing up in person and to blow smoke up their ass. They don’t say that but it’s what they really like and they respond to it in the form of being less ruthless when it comes to cutting ties, etc.
Humans also like that in person meeting to be a swanky ski village for them and their WaGs. Or some resort at an exotic beach location. Or some high end club. Or some other type of payola type of arrangement. Those are kind of hard to do over email
you're mythologizing and neglecting the market-wide knock-on effects of rampant illegal wage theft collusion like this.
Which, of course, they eventually did.
If anything, I take this email to be indicative of how companies can lose sight of the effect on their actual employees of market strategization. Jobs isn't worried about having to pay his team more here; he's worried that he's about to see the world's largest online advertiser launch a browser that could cut Apple's control of their users' online experience out from under them. If anything, I don't think they're really thinking about how much people need to get paid (which is, indeed, a problem).
fighting poaching through collusion is functionally equivalent to wage suppression. you're mythologizing. these are billionaire businessmen, they fully grasp the intent and result of their actions. wage suppression is the whole game whether legal or illegally played. that's their profit.
What apple is seeing here is a company they believe to be a partner pulling key staff away from an extremely important project to them (Jobs took the success of Safari very personally), which they didn't anticipate because that's a partner harming them on what they believe to be a shared goal. It's like "dudes... You want Safari to succeed too. Why are you pulling away the staff that would make it succeed?" Which is why I suspect he jumps to the conclusion that Google is working on a competing browser, not the Google is simply following recommendation chains and executing their standard strategy of hiring the smartest people in the room.
Google was also trying very hard to build and maintain a coalition of smaller browsers (at the time) that can compete with IE's complete stranglehold on the technical web ecosystem by virtue of its sheer mass. Apple is a notoriously fickle partner in any kind of technical coalition (note how they got bored with other companies dragging their heels on the usb-c standard and released their own standard several years earlier). They had the leverage of both their own browser and their mobile phone platform to position against Google or towards Microsoft if they chose to.
History might have played out very differently if most search traffic from the Apple platform was going through MSN instead of Google.
Interesting that this pivots from an antitrust problem related to employers to an antitrust problem related to the browser market. Artificially binding negotiations of one market to another to prevent competition is bad too.
Anyway, most of the above have little to do directly with wages and a lot to do with pride, bullying, control and/or things that smell a lot like narcissistic injuries (see also former presidents and current tech CEOs prone to meltdowns). I'm not a psychologist or play one, though, so take that with a grain of salt.
Eric and co. simply appeased him way too often. They did push back and occasionally even troll him (like the night before the Nexus One launch), but nowhere enough. If only they had penned a reply like Palm's.
For engineer, compensation is not everything, regardless of money, going to google to build a browser would easily look like a good idea at the time.
Sounds like a traitor to me ...
> So a compromise would be to continue with the offer we have made (to [REDACTED]) but not to make offers to any of the others unless they get permission from Apple.
This right here should be illegal. Where one chose to work should be 100% on your own accord. That a employer I want to work for/wants me to work for them would collude with my current employer to not hire me based on the whims of the CEO seems like a bad outcome for everyone, including the employer which would "retain" me.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33292364
[2] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/04/24/306592297...
Maybe to the specific candidates affected, but this would also have had a stifling effect on compensation across the industry too (and the resulting growth would have lasted for years). This kind of subtle wage fixing pays off in spades.
The perverse incentive with the anti poaching collusion is to move from FAANG to a startup. Where you are confronted by problems involving 50 servers instead of a million. Normal problems.
> On May 23, 2014, Apple, Google, Intel, Adobe agreed to settle for $324.5 million.
> ..
> In June 2014, Judge Lucy Koh expressed concern that the settlement may not be a good one for the plaintiffs. Michael Devine, one of the plaintiffs, said the settlement is unjust. In a letter he wrote to the judge he said the settlement represents only one-tenth of the $3 billion in compensation the 64,000 workers could have made if the defendants had not colluded.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
...and none of that is realistic. The correct estimate would be the INCREMENTAL comp for the portion of employees that ACTUALLY looked for work with the competitors.
Never blindly trust one-side of the story in a damages lawsuit.
"Sergey Brin and Steve Jobs got into a yelling match over me."
Obviously that's stretching the truth a bit but that would get a lot of attention pretty quickly. Maybe enough to skip the leetcode challenges.
Whoever he is, he's a stand up guy in my book
I don't have any inside info here, but I'd be willing to bet Darin Adler was one of those other REDACTEDs. He was an early Safari guy, as well as tech lead for Mac OS 7 and worked at General Magic, so Google would probably have been pretty happy to get their hands on him.
I also think parakey was the startup referenced as his other option (Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt)
Steve Jobs was obsessed with loyalty, so I figured that anyone applying for a job at Google would be dead to Apple as long as Jobs was there. Hyatt was one of these guys who even Jobs would probably have hesitated to blacklist, though, so maybe it really is him they're referring to here, and he ultimately remained with Apple.
People underestimate the sense of control that Jobs derived, not from being prophetic or smart, but from making things extremely personal and psychologically stifling for other people. (Musk works in the same way when he gets flustered or fearful.)
Jobs talked a lot about seeing the future, but his high-use "like/dislike switch" was really in control most of the time. It's a very emotional way of being.
Notice that Brin immediately metabolizes that type of communication as A-OK, and understandable:
> he made various veiled threats too though i am not inclined to hold them against him too much
> as he seemed beside himself (as eric would say).
This particular response shows off a strength which, while impressive in patience, openness to relationship dynamics, etc. is also in some respects similar to the type of person who stays in cults while all of their friends call it quits.
Brin likely sees his own strength in nuanced understanding rather than in control-focused decisiveness. It's a logical yin to Steve's yang. I wouldn't be surprised if he saw Steve as a promising or up-and-coming feelings-relater. I.e. "if he could just move past the explosions, which maybe I can help with by talking to him, he could be so expressive and creative" or something like that.
Brin is also a bit lower in conscientiousness and a lowered-boundaries person compared to a lot of techies in leadership, but he's also high-creative, high-expressive personality. This is more of a "therapeutic" type of person in general.
With an angry Steve Jobs in the room, this kind of person will get steamrolled 99% of the time, no matter the tech in question or the negotiation setup.
I believe Brin saw a lot to aspire to in Jobs' _upside_, but shared Jobs' blind spot for diplomacy and truly creative work at a higher level, and was unable to perceive a need to work in that way.
On Jobs' part, he was extremely lucky to grow up in a capitalistic society which sees $$$ as something it's happy to exchange for control of a given domain, along with a legend to go in the books of the great man theory. In terms of group values like leadership, what you'll find is a constant communication of vision backed by a huge amount of emotional control technique which is not quite so dynamic as it is whiny.
Thanks for posting this op!
No. No he wasn't. Not in the literal or figurative sense. But I get what you're doing in saying that.
Really the Steve Jobs worship is something I'm thankful to see going away day by day.
I’ve heard stories that Google set up development office in Denmark because one of their V8 developers wanted to move home and he was “that good” that it was worth setting up an office just to keep him on staff.
And as sibling comment suggest, it can’t be the person discussed in the emails.
These February 2005 emails make for an interesting timeframe since that was the year of the Apple/Google default search engine deal. I can’t find a more exact date for the search deal than “2005”, so it’s possible both were under negotiation simultaneously with no cause/effect relationship, but it sure is an interesting coincidence https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/25/technology/apple-google-s...
I suppose perhaps that was true at that moment. When did they start making Chrome?
> on another note, it seems silly to have both firefox and safari. perhaps there is some unificaiton strategy that we can get these two to pursue. combined, they certainly have enough marketshare to drive webmasters.
Would be absolutely hilarious if these series of calls and emails led to the development of Chrome
Although Chrome eventually diverged years later with the development of Blink, Chrome was the result of a multi-company, industry-wide unification strategy on WebKit, the core of Safari.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit
>WebKit started as a fork of the KHTML and KJS libraries from KDE, and has since been further developed by KDE contributors, Apple, Google, Nokia, Bitstream, BlackBerry, Sony, Igalia, and others. WebKit supports macOS, Windows, Linux, and various other Unix-like operating systems. On April 3, 2013, Google announced that it had forked WebCore, a component of WebKit, to be used in future versions of Google Chrome and the Opera web browser, under the name Blink.
And as we all know, Android is as important to Google as iOS is to Apple.
So there was really no chance of either of them (or any other of the many companies interested in mobile and embedded devices, like TomTom for example) ever building on top of Mozilla/xulrunner.
Probably true at the time (anno 2007), but since ~2014, FirefoxOS which is an entire mobile OS based on Gecko (called boot2gecko) I think proves that at least the browser engine (not UI) could be used for more than just simple webpages, and on mobile devices.
The OS itself was relatively fast, but the public perception of the performance of the OS was very low, as most (if not all devices) running FirefoxOS was very low powered compared to the contemporary flagship models for Android and iPhone.
I remember a rigorous article where he dissected Mozilla vs Webkit and explained by why the latter was superior (= less abstractions and no XPCOM). I wouldn't be surprised if that article was the basis for the decision to not go with Mozilla at Apple.
Nothing to be held against him for sure, if you have been in this business for this long you are sure to have created stuff that you realize was not optimal. Particularly over-abstractions.
Also I would not be surprised if it is that person they are talking about in the mail conversation.
> I don't think we should let that determine our hiring strategy but thought I would let you know.
> Basically, he said "if you hire a single one of these people that means war".
I'm guessing the idea for Chrome started to crystallize right about here...
That out of the way the dinner was mainly an evening of Steve asking a lot about Apple as it became obvious he still was emotionally invested in the company.
None of us went to NeXT.
Class actions are a crappy way of extracting the actual cost or damages done by a corporation and then getting those damages into tha hands of people that were on the shit side of the stick in the transactions.
But no, I have no grand answer for how to do it any better either.
1) Assumption: Extended warranties are available for these appliances that would cover the expected usable lifetime of the dishwasher plus the extra purchase 2-3 year warranty.
This assumption is incorrect. Lifespan for something like this would, formally, fall under the category of durable goods. In this case, the expected lifespan of a durable goods such as a dishwasher is 10 years. The manufacture warranty falls well short of that, And a 2 to 3 extension will still not covered that time span. Of course life span of 10 years in this case would assume some potential paid maintenance by the consumer. But would not assume maintenance due to errors that would be significant enough to warrant a class action lawsuit. As such, an extended warranty would not be a sufficient substitution for problems arising from an issue that would warrant a class action lawsuit.
2) Implication: The implication of your comment is that consumers should bear the cost of errors that are sufficient enough to warrant a class action lawsuit, and pay for such errors in the form of an extended warranty.
I disagree with this. It does not seem to be a reasonable expectation as a cost the consumers should bear for systemic defects or negligence. If there’s an issue such that a class action is necessary to remedy for the issue, then a consumer should not be the one bearing the cost of that, even if it was an easy and simple matter of an extra purchase of a few dozen dollars, which as covered in the above assumption #1, would not be sufficient in any case.
All of that aside, as a matter of consumer purchasing and economic implications, I believe that consumers should have a very transparent understanding of the manufacturers warranty presented to them on point of purchase. Options for an extended warranty are nice but not necessarily required. Beyond that though, if there is an issue with a product that should reasonably have been remedied, or something that was deliberately or negligent ignored, the standard terms of the warrantee are moot. Because the manufacturer has not acted and produced a product in good faith, Either by accident or actual knowledge of the issue.
For example, a car may have a warranty that, as a standard from some manufacturers, last five years. That is the duration for which the manufacturer is obligated to correct things that went wrong during the manufacturing process. However, if there was a design flaw, and that design flaw perhaps for example rendered a car useless due to a bug in the software once the clock in the integrated circuit governing the electronic system hit a certain date, that would be a flaw that went into exceeded in terms of customer expectations and rates, boundaries of a standard warranty. We would hope such an issue would be easily rectified by some sort of software upgrade understand the age where those types of things are the norm. But if a manufacturer resisted that type of solution then I think something like a class action would be fully warranted to require the manufacturer to either render the product usable, or compensate the consumer for what might have been the remainder of the cars usable.
Within reason. Cars can be maintained to run for 100 years! But I would not expect the Ford corporation to make good on a design bug found in a model T car designed more than 100 years ago.
Exactly where the balance of time and liability may fall is probably not subject to a specific formula. It depends significantly on the type of good in the nature of the flaw that might be present in the knowledge of the manufacture in terms of how the flaw entered the product. These are not always, and probably almost always not, simple things to determine. This is where class action lawsuits enter the picture to support the collective rights of consumers, where individuals have significantly less power than the corporations producing the goods.
The problem, as I have pretty much stated, is that class action lawsuits are a very poor vehicle for remedying this sort of issue.
I am open to further discussion if you disagree with all or part of this, and may read any response, but I do have some thing of a short attention span and may not necessarily Replying to any response you were right, but I am probably likely to at least read it. Thank you for the discussion.
No. My assumption was the manufacturer warranty plus the extended warranty should be close to the expected lifespan. I believe 10 years is a stretch for a $500 dishwasher, so 2 years manufacturer warranty + 3 years of extended warranty sounds fair.
> 2) Implication: The implication of your comment is that consumers should bear the cost of errors that are sufficient enough to warrant a class action lawsuit, and pay for such errors in the form of an extended warranty.
Not really. I meant that if $80 buys you your expected lifespan (we disagree on the duration but bear with me) then a $80 refund is fair within the scope of current consumer laws in the US. I'm not saying that it's the best outcome for the consumer.
What happens where I live (Australia) is much better. The manufacturer warranty means zilch, and anything you buy should work for a reasonable lifespan (statutory warranty). If your dishwasher with a 2 year manufacturer warranty breaks after 25 months you simply call the shop and claim your statutory warranty. The "reasonable lifespan" is debatable, but it is longer than the manufacturer warranty in most cases.
In this case, it would have been hard to recover more overall as a class in a finite period of time - the values were calculated based on each individuals wages and expected earnings lost at various levels or something like that (it's been a while, sorry).
The judge initially rejected the first settlement (which was 320 million i believe), and considered the final one to be much more reasonable (450 million or something).
This was in front of Judge Koh, who is no slouch and has dealt with lots of complex tech litigation. She is also not viewed as "industry-friendly" in any way, shape, or form (look at the fight over her appointment to the 9th circuit for more details)
If they fought it out in front of a jury, taken it through appeals, etc it would have taken 7-10 years to finalize it, for a max expected improvement of probably 3-5x.
That probably would not be worth it to most people, so settlement seems reasonable.
A particularly injured person may have been able to make out better in arbitration or something, but as a class, no.
This kind of very large, complex case is also just incredibly expensive to litigate.
Instead of looking at the plaintiff side, i'll look at the defendant side (since you don't have to deal with arguing about what reasonable profit margins are). This is just the cost of litigation itself.
The average litigation cost for "major companies" - 50 of the fortune 200's, was 150 million a year each in 2010. It was doubling every 5 years or less before that (it was 60 million in 2005).
It's at least doubled since then. This isn't just tech companies.
On average, "major" (again, fortune X00) corporations in the US spend 0.3% of their revenue on litigation costs. So your 100 billion revenue a year tech company is probably spending 300+ million in litigation costs.
A suit like this is a very large portion of those costs.
The plaintiff lawyers in this particular case were also very good, well regarded complex antitrust lawsuit lawyers. Not the typical "file a thousand class action lawsuits against everything" type firms that you see.
what realistically could steve jobs have done here? its not like he had any legal power to prevent his guys going over, and if he wanted to poach from google just to spite google it’d just be a stupidly expensive affair
And worth it in war, depending on the objective.
So, don't know what Jobs could have done with Google specifically, but safe to assume that it would be something else equally out of line.
[0]: https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1422603572814962692
--sergey
This line of thought seems somewhat nefarious. I suppose you could say it was just to fight back against msie, but in retrospect it feels like a plan to dominate web development.
There were a lot of cool ideas in the pipeline (particularly from Mozilla) that were dead in the water if IE didn't buy in. The modern state of the web is partially due to the fact that this kind of backroom dealing finally snapped the market out of IE's hands.
At the time of these emails, getting Apple on board with supporting modern features instead of them deciding, like Microsoft, that the web wasn't important was key to that strategy. The kind of damage Apple could have done would have been to forge their own path or to combine forces with Microsoft in the decision-making bodies about web tech.
- Imagine a world where the value add people got together and horse traded our managers around.
- How realistic even is the “programmer celebrity” anymore? It seems like the “this is the guy” (e.g. one of the best browser guys) happens less anymore. Are there people out there now that are the crème de la crème of k8s configurators? Top class QUIC implementers? Number one ad-tech hackers? It just seems that the things we used to lionize our star developers for were a lot easier to get excited about. It was like we were making a better new world. Now I just feel like a paving stone in a surveillance economy.
When I met him, we were chatting about Stanford, and I mentioned that I really admired that huge radio telescope that you could see around 280 and Page Mill Road in the hills above Stanford.
He looked puzzled and confused, and asked "Which huge radio telescope?"
I was flustered and explained how you couldn't miss it, right by 280 and Page Mill Road, it's out there in a field, its huge, it's enormous, gigantic I tell you, there's no way you can miss it, bla bla bla...
He let me go on and on, describing it, and acted like he had absolutely no idea what I was talking about, like I was crazy for hallucinating a gigantic radio telescope that both of us must have passed zillions of times.
Finally he let on and said, "Oh, you mean that SMALL radio telescope???"
Wew.
This reminded me of the scene in "The Pirates of Silicon Valley" where Bill Gates reassured Steve that he was not building an operating system and Steve was soothed, only to be extremely enraged later when he found out it was all a lie.
Literally going out of your way to prevent your employees from having a career if you’re not involved. Such an abusive behaviour.
I’m not happy he’s dead, but I’m glad he’s gone.
Now that was funny. (Google Chrome was release in 2008 BTW. 3 years later.)
Any good call centre worker knows you don't deal with irate people directly as they cannot be reasoned with, and (imho) their aggressive behaviour should not be rewarded.
I feel all the Google bosses wanted was for Steve Jobs to stop yelling.
What would Zuckerberg have done?
What would Musk have done?
Heck, what if Jobs was on the other side of the equation here?
When you carry your own toilet paper you've got options.
At least not as unfair as I initially thought.
In this case, Jobs wills it that some people work for him until he's okay with them leaving and throws his toys out the cot when the people in question feel otherwise.
XD
Hiring non competes do exactly this regardless of whatever benefit of the doubt you wish to grant (not to mention it clearly establishes they’ve done this regularly prior to this so it wasn’t even a one off). More importantly, these were already clearly established case law as illegal in California. So these are California employers talking about non competes for Californian employees. I think “not thinking through the consequences” is secondary here. They’re putting in writing that they’re actively breaking the law regularly and not just in this once instance. Of course details matter here so maybe there’s nuance here or they’ve got good lawyers helping them achieve intent without actively crossing the line, but I’ve always been curious why this was a class action and not prosecuted by the state of California. There’s also this [1]:
> In fact, Colligan, who left the company in June, sounded a little indignant in his refusal.
> “Your proposal that we agree that neither company will hire the other’s employees, regardless of the individual’s desires, is not only wrong, it is likely illegal,” he said, according to the report.
So at least one other CEO said “no thanks and what you’re doing here is likely illegal”.
[1]: https://www.internetnews.com/it-management/palm-ceo-rebuffed...
It was recoverable and if I recall correctly we had no keyboard prototypes with larger displays floating around but we failed to prioritize that properly / probably limited volume to shift from the Pre design after one year because of the upfront investment we’d have had to have made for the lines. Palm Pixi sacrificed the sliding aspect of the keyboard (typically candy bar) but went with a smaller screen with fight the actual market direction.
The second big factor in the downfall I think was our ads. Verizon totally fucked up our advertising further (positioning the Palm phones as “for moms” in extremely sexist advertisements). I wish I could say this was Verizon’s fault since they actually had control of the co-branded advertisements if I recall correctly. Anyone remembering the travesty of those original Pre ads though will know it was a disaster. Worse - the Jon at an all hands was all gung ho about it. Wasn’t sure if there was just no steering the ship because of budget or something and he was just trying to salvage it, but regardless those ads went out. High concept is fine for an art class. Not for smartphones without any hype and the general public inundated with smartphone = iPhone, android was “that knockoff iPhone”, and Blackberry was “the phone they make me use at work”. No one knew palm and our ads did a poor job articulating that to the general public, especially since we didn’t have the hype machine that iOS did (not that they needed it - they had really top notch pr/marketing/advertising people in the wake of the desktop OS wars and then the iPod rocket ship). Btw, Android failed at countering Apple’s marketing until Sony cracked it many years later: copy Apple almost to the letter in design, create clear descriptive messaging that explains what’s better about your phone (or at least equal), and take away Apple’s “coolness” by commoditizing as much of the phone as possible. This was many years later though.
Side note: a girl I went on a first date with mentioned she loved the Pixi because of the smaller design. Maybe this was just trying to connect with me about my work, but I maybe it was also a missed opportunity on a niche beachhead market segment: second phone for women to put in a clutch for the night out which you could also use as a “phone for your kids”. The second one is particularly valuable but if you want to learn more read about how the companies carefully track how chat and social media apps do with kids and will sacrifice adoption with older generations to protect that - today’s kids are tomorrows yuppies with disposable income.
Finally something went horribly wrong with the Verizon deal. I don’t know what actually happened but it turned out that Palm somehow ended up on the hook for all unsold phone inventory on our books while Verizon forced us to premanufacture a ton (our leadership got overly excited and made too much without thinking through the consequences? Not sure). This was also around the time that Apple had ended their AT&T exclusivity and started shipping on Verizon. Did Apple strongarm Verizon into screwing Palm over in retaliation to this non compete stuff? We certainly were poaching very hard from Apple. Still, even if they did put the nail in the coffin (which I doubt because it just wouldn’t be worth it for the minnow that we were), we were clearly making a lot of missteps on the business front.
WebOS itself was also a technical mistake in a way:
1. Web tech was too early. In particular, we were finding and fixing JIT bugs not only in v8 (dedicated team that if I recall correctly was second to Google at the time in size and far more familiar with V8 ARM), but also the CPU (because QCOM had shitty chips at the time and wasn’t bothering to test cache invalidation of dynamically generated code).
2. Performance of web tech was too immature / CPUs were too slow. We were perceived as being slower than Android which was saying something.
3. While no one bats an eye at react native and electron today, the software ecosystem wasn’t as mature which meant apps in our store weren’t very compelling because they just couldn’t do all that much (and then the native SDK basically capitulated to that for games).
However. I don’t see the technical pieces as fatal mistakes in and of themselves. Given time we would have fixed these, brought down memory usage, etc etc. the technical team was phenomenally strong and we recognized technology gaps early and fixed them by iterating (eg Luna bus 2 got replaced DBus with a proprietary implementation that was waaaay better). Still. When you’re competing with Android and iOS at the time, it wasn’t a great spot to be in. On the other hand we were showing off core OS UIs that only now have started catching up a decade later. And even then, it would be close. So all in all probably more of a correct long term bet at the sacrifice of certain near term performance, but one the company wouldn’t live to see validated.
I don’t think it requires Apple doing much if anything out of the ordinary course of normal competition. I’m sure they were more worried about the impact of Chrome and Android. But who knows. Jobs was known for his anger and I doubt anyone will care because ultimately we ended up being a small player dead by the side of the road along with all the others.
edit: WebOS ended up being good though ( between touchpad and now LG it is actually my preference ). Can you elaborate on how big a difference it is between now and then ( are they tied by name only )?
As I said, today it's fine and AFAIK it's also on car infotaintment systems (the ARM ecosystem is way more mature with respect to web / JIT + much better supporting ecosystem). It's less clear to me if they still use a normal Linux ARM kernel or if they've switched to Android. The biggest problem with us not using Android is that Android sucked up all the oxygen and device vendors built Android instead of Linux drivers / provided binary blobs that only worked on Android. This increased costs because those drivers needed to be ported to normal Linux.
However, most (all?) of the really talented designers that pioneered WebOS got snapped up by Google and Apple. So did a lot of senior engineering talent (probably moreso by Google since a lot of them were already ex-Apple and not keen to return).
There's no such thing as "poaching" in an honest employment market. Firms are supposed to keep their valued employees by competing.
https://twitter.com/techemails/status/1443263744906305543
https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1422603572814962692
Because he clearly is trying to suppress wages. There seems to have been a lawsuit on it as well
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
There was a Carrie Grimes, but she was a statistician, not an executive.
This was February 2005, and Chrome wasn't released until 2008. The more you know.
;)
Edit: Not sure why the downvotes? I am referring to Sergey Brin's email, he doesn't use any capitals in that email. It just looks very careless.
:-)
Over analysis if I’ve ever seen it. Not using capitalization was just a part of 90s Internet culture which both Musk and Brin grew up in.
I grew up in 1990s internet culture, but culture changes and it's now the 2020s. I also no longer ask people for their MSNs or consume much of my content in the medium of Macromedia Flash videos.
> intentionally breaking them starts being a sign of personal style
This sounds more likely for someone as self-absorbed as a tech billionaire.
A browser is strategic, hence Steve Jobs getting pissed.
Starting your own company also requires specialist and generalist skills that a browser engineer doesn't have, and exposes him to risk that won't be worth it to a rock star developer.
Anecdote: In 2008, I was working at Ericsson in San Jose, as a junior software engineer on edge routers. I was paid ~$140K (bonus + RSU). We heard that very senior engineers were paid around $180K. Cisco was sought after place in our industry (Networking). They would pay ~$225K for senior engineers.
(all numbers are unverified and rumors).
Then one of my peer at Ericsson, a junior engineer, had an offer from Netflix and told during lunch break, his total comp was $250K, all cash (no RSU). I can still remember the gasps that followed.
I have read the book "No Rules Rules. Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention" [0]. It's fascinating the number of times Netflix pivoted and rewrote many rules. They discuss their philosophy on compensation in the book. They played important role in raising the salary bar.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/No-Rules-Netflix-Culture-Reinvention-...
This is just so absolutely shitty behavior. It’s bamazing they were willing to talk about it so openly in email format. You get to be so great at your job only to risk being blackballed by hush hush non compete handshake agreements? Unions don’t go nearly far enough to balance out this power asymmetry. I don’t know what would. Honestly I don’t know what could without knock on effects with their own awful potentials to hamper competition and innovation. Hugely punitive repercussions when this sort of things comes to light might be a step in the right direction though.
If you're Steve Ballmer and you want Giannis Antetokounmpo on your team, you can't just call him and offer more money. They have regulations around that.
So it shouldn't be surprising that Jobs & Brin have conversations about REDACTED. If it was an engineer with one year experience working under REDACTED, it wouldn't escalate to that level, at least until Google hired five of them.