Steve Jobs emails Eric Schmidt (2007)

This is a criminal matter. It should not be too hard to prove criminal intent :

> A few months later, Schmidt instructed a fellow exec not to discuss the no-call list other than “verbally,” he wrote in an email, “since I don’t want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later?”

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/02/google-apple-cl...

To conceptualize it, Google/Apple/Pixar/etc were paying (hypothetically) 100k each for SEngs. The rest of the industry was paying 80k. The aforementioned companies would only poach from the lower paying companies, with an offer to bring the employees up to 100k, thereby ensuring that all of the best talent was funnelling in to the big companies.

To ensure that talent stayed cheap, they (under the table) agreed not to poach from each other, since the only companies that could compete (generally) with their current salary would be the other big names.

So, they got the best of all worlds. The best talent. At deflated rates. And the talent would naturally gravitate to their preferred employers/optimal workspaces via proactive applications.

The no-hire list is not at the center of companies refusing to hire from competitors. There is often an understanding between executives that competing in the job market hurts all companies, and they wish to cool talent mobility. Otherwise, there would be salary races, more intellectual property would leak, the culture would get diluted, and more money would need to be spent on poaching people back.

Let me share a relevant experience. Two years ago, I was employed at a large tech company, but not FANGMAN. It had no-hire lists with its competitors. When I applied to one of them, a close friend in management of my former employer let me know the executives got wind of this, and they were upset. Consequently, my application was ignored. And my friend let me know that it will probably always be ignored. It felt very gauche, but there is not much one can do about these situations - knowing and being able to prove it are separate things.

I do not believe no-hire lists exist as an isolated ceremony in large companies. They stem from efforts to cool competition. Executives are often friends and it would be impractical for them to not form cartel agreements. What is a regulator going to do about an unwritten agreement between friends? Many good (but ingenuous) people think that just because "it's the law", so it shall be.

Note - throwaway account, will not respond.

It's an example of why systems people should be paid like pro athletes and have agents, given their extreme value to the organizations they support, both garage and conglomerate alike. [But the industry went the other way, reaching into grade schools with efforts like Code.org and, I Kid You Not, homeless shelters like https://youtu.be/l6p0VYIP5M8 in a failed attempt to flood the market with Supply so they could continue to prey upon their fellow human beings. Even the whole paradigm of Object Oriented Programming going mainstream was FIRST AND FOREMOST (but not exclusively) an attempt to reign in labor costs, as per Mitch Kapor's numerous lectures on the topic back in the day. A generation before that, They were pushing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_One_(software) and, well, you know what those "deep pockets" are up to these days with AI coders.