Steve Jobs's response after getting a Google employee fired. | Hacker News Reader

Steve Jobs's response after getting a Google employee fired.

pando.com

258 pointsomegant271 comments

This article is so sensationalist. They could have just reported the facts without the histrionics and it would have been so much better.

This, especially: "The language is brutal, and as you’ll see, there’s an almost sadistic, military glee on all sides with the way in which the Google recruiter is 'terminated'"

The email following that description was exactly what I would have expected. "Yes, this person screwed up. We have a clear policy that they failed to follow. We're checking to see if they did this more than once. We've fired that person. Please apologize on our behalf, it won't happen again."

Making the story about "brutal" this and "sadistic" that is senseless, naive, and detracts from the real story, which is that they had these (illegal!) policies in the first place. Stop buzzfeedifying the news.

If a contract is breached, you terminate it, as in "We terminated your employment contract". It's not sadistic, it's professional language.

Firing and sacking are very much colloquial; fairly rare for anyone to actually say "You're fired" notwithstanding how difficult it is to simply get rid of someone.

If a contract is breached, you terminate it,

Programmers accidentally introduce bugs, a recruiter can be mistaken about someone's current employer. Even if the no-poaching agreements were legal, this is completely unwarranted for. What about starting with a warning first?

Maybe it's not sadistic, but their behaviour was certainly emotionless and inhumane.

Well it is brutal and sadistic because such a policy is neither moral nor legal, as you pointed out, even though the email masks it with "professional" language. Here comes another example of Godwin's law.. the quick termination of Jews in WW2 was done very professionally by the day's standards. Sometime readers (especially the young ones) need to be spoon-fed for a while before they start understanding and interpreting facts on their own, qualifiers that you mention are most likely meant for them.

And, had we had a completely objective article we wouldn't have had little gems like this - "apologizing and grovelling to Steve Jobs is a recurring theme" - which I find very accurate.

Also - "Please make a public example of this termination within the group". I guess when you go work for Google you need to leave your moral compass at the entrance.

Don't be shrill. They "lost their moral compass" because they fired someone who violated a clear policy and wanted to make it clear to all employees that such behavior is unexpected? Give me a break.

You are right that professional execution of unconscionable policies is itself unconscionable. But this isn't that. It's just illegal. There are degrees. Whether current Google recruiters should be blacklisted from further jobs for enforcing a policy that they should-have-known-better about is an interesting question that I don't see anyone asking... because the tone of this article engenders polarized arguments, not reasoned debate.

Lastly, I couldn't disagree more with your assertion that "sometimes readers... need to be spoon-fed." That's not your job, nor the press' job. I do not not not want anyone's interpretation of the facts mixed with reporting of the facts. Save the paternalism for your kids.

Firing someone who didn't follow your edict to break the law (by action, or by inaction) is immoral, absolutely.

Let me be clear: I agree. What they (the mid-level HR people) did was immoral. Obviously.

My point is that there's no need to compare them to war criminals, or for the dramatics in an ostensibly "news" site- "sadistic," "brutal," et al.

When we do so, we displace a conversation about the real story: a tech cartel that colludes to depress salaries, and the secondary but still very interesting question of how their mid- and lower-level employees who enforced the policies should be treated.

Of that, I do agree. The issue at hand can stand on its own feet without unnecessary comparisons.

> What they (the mid-level HR people) did was immoral. Obviously.

"Geshuri’s decision to “terminate within the hour” the recruiter was enthusiastically seconded by Google’s VP for Human Resources, Shona Brown ..."

There's nothing mid-level about the VP of HR. She should have known this was illegal, certainly was responsible to know that it was illegal, and was responsible for either advising the company that it's illegal or leave the company.

You're conflating law and morality. To resurface Godwin again, if a soldier was fired for executing a jew you were trying to save by implementing a secret policy of breaking the law to save them, would that be immoral?

Whether you want it or not it's irrelevant, and regarding this topic it seems you live in a fantasy world that belongs to young people. Show me an objective independent newspaper on the planet; there's no such thing. The simple act of reporting news is (or at least can be interpreted) as partisan. Interpretation is mixed with the facts ALL THE TIME.

Edit - it's called editorial policy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Editorial_board

In this case you don't want the journalist to be overtly taking sides but nevertheless he is, so he might as well not pretend to be objective. If he had not thought this affair to be immoral he would not have written about it, just like media doesn't report on so many encounters with the law of big tech companies. In for a penny, in for a pound.

> regarding this topic it seems you live in a fantasy world that belongs to young people.

I honestly have no idea what you're talking about.

Obviously reporters have biases. I like mine to try to be as objective as possible. I don't understand how we're disagreeing on this.

The article's title ("Newly unsealed documents show Steve Jobs’ brutal response after getting a Google employee fired" - not the current HN title) is also misleading, as these emails have been available for years - they were widely discussed in 2012: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/27/us-apple-lawsuit-i...

October 7, 2009: Eric Schmidt, responding to a question about why Google would not go the same way as Microsoft now that it is so large and powerful.

“There are many, many reasons why we are not going to be like Microsoft. The first has to do with the culture of the founders, the culture of the company, the value systems. The second has to do with the majority of the users, and usage is one click away from moving to a competitor, which is not true of more embedded platforms in high tech. It is very difficult to move out your database system, it is very difficult to move out of Windows, for technological reasons whereas it is quite easy to move out of these online services.

“The third is that, having taken such a strong position as a company, if somehow we went into a room with the evil light, and somehow evil came all over us and we exited that room and we announced an evil strategy, we would be destroyed. We would be destroyed in reputation, we would be destroyed in consumer behaviour, consumers would mass against us, and so forth. There is a fundamental trust relationship between Google and its users.

“And the fourth is that none of us would ever want to go through the kind of legal proceedings that would then follow in enough countries to make it painful. So there are positive reasons and there are good negative reasons, plus I do not think any of us are going anywhere and we have not yet found the evil room on our campus.”

For those keeping score on the timeline, this quote is two years after the incident mentioned in the pando.com article.

Reference: http://blogs.ft.com/businessblog/2009/10/eric-schmidt-thinks...

I previously had a lot of respect for the Google founders, and figured they were decent human beings.

That behaviour from Steve Jobs I can kind of expect - he's fairly consistently shown that he's basically just a bad seed.

However, the behaviour from Brin also sounds like pretty a*sehole behaviour.

Curious is anybody can confirm if they're actually like this?

Or was this all taken out of context?

Surely he's actually nicer than this in person?

He knowingly participated in a scheme that suppressed the wages of every engineer in the Valley. That should tell you enough.

I'm bouncing back and forth between "ah shit, and I thought they were cool..." and... Well, engineers are finicky and will bounce back and forth between companies each time they're offered a few grand more... Why don't we just avoid that?

That's because wages are too low. Eventually an industry hits an equilibrium and people stop changing jobs unless it's too move up the ladder.

It seems easy to avoid to me. You either pay the wages required to keep important people in the building or you illegally collude with your competitors to keep them in the building. Bonus that the second option lowers your payroll costs as well.

Is a man not entitled to his own worth and value? I see nothing wrong with that, if your engineer can easily be sniped by a competing company willing to offer enough salary increase to convince somebody to move out of his job and jump to a new platform/environment/learning process, maybe you should be paying him more. You're not willing to? Well maybe that single engineer wasn't that vital to your company after all.

Well, engineers are finicky and will bounce back and forth between companies each time they're offered a few grand more... Why don't we just avoid that?

Not true in comparison to other job types. I think engineers enjoy on-boarding the least. If you have 5 jobs in 10 years, that's 5 periods (about 6-9 months) of being "the new guy" and (a) performing at a suboptimal level, because you're learning idiosyncratic details of a closed-source tech stack, and (b) being unlikely to get useful projects because, no matter how good you are, every organization's going to put new people through a dues-paying period. That ends up taking 3-4 years out of your career, time essentially wasted on learning parochial details of internal codebases rather than getting better at the craft in general. Not fun.

Engineers move around so much because they have to, not because they want to. Wages are too low relative to housing costs, and advancement is often political, and interesting projects are too thin on the ground because engineer-driven companies are a rarity.

That tells me he's doing the right thing for his company and his shareholders.

It's not like Google and friends are the only tech companies in the world. They simply cannot really screw over engineers. All they can do is bargain. Everyone bargains in trade and tries to get the best price.

> They simply cannot really screw over engineers. All they can do is bargain.

We say this now, because the industry is growing so rapidly that it's hard to feel shafted given the sea of opportunity.

But being shafted is independent of whether or not you could've found another job elsewhere; the agreement they made prevented engineers from being able to bargain to their fullest extent.

>> That tells me he's doing the right thing for his company and his shareholders.

Except when he does something illegal that leaves his company vulernable to a massive class-action lawsuit from his own employees. That doesn't seem like the right thing for his company and his shareholders.

Plus, in order to get this conspiracy off the ground and keep it running, he had to produce documentation of the conspiracy that would be embarrassing and possibly incriminating when it was made public. I'm not sure that he did the right thing for his company there.

It's now clear to current and future employees that he has conspired against them with other companies. That doesn't seem so good for his company either.

You mean, you didn't like Steve Jobs but you do like Brin. That's okay. But no need to rationalize, they're the same guy.

No, he means there has been loads of reports of such episodes with Steve Jobs, not not with Brin.

Some say money changes you. Others say money just reveals who you really are.

Either way, the founders back in the day had different motivations and influences than the founders today. From my very limited and decidedly not rich point of view, the CEOs of seriously large corporations seem destined or doomed to turn into absolute shit spears when they receive their billions and see more down the road.

Never trust a billionaire. It's unfair, but probably mostly safe.

Although I get that these sorts of agreements may well have been illegal and unethical, all this outrage over the attitudes of the executives seems overblown to me.

Try putting yourself in Eric Schmidt's shoes: from his perspective, the greed of an individual employee to generate recruiting commissions by violating a strict policy endangered a key strategic relationship. This could obviously not be tolerated and the lack of a strong response would make enforcing the whole landscape of mission critical policies harder. These guys HAVE TO think of the system before the individual or the system will not work.

And in general, in any industry and any role, if you start a fire that the senior management team 10 levels up has to put out... you will expect harsh treatment.

The behavior is not acceptable. This is a cartel to "fix" the wages of workers - esp. when these tech companies claim their workers are the most important resource.

Now, I am not surprised the book price fixing Apple did with the publishers.

But both Apple and Google get a pass - think if it is done by Oracle or MSFT, well we would be talking about Evil Empire and Death-star

Yup. "It was St.Steve of Cupertino, and the Do-No-Evil Company Inc., so that makes it quite all right."

What do you mean "get a pass"? This story has been on and off HN's front page for months and the companies involved, including Apple and Google, have received nothing but strong criticism every time.

> What do you mean "get a pass"?

This is what he's referring to:

> all this outrage over the attitudes of the executives seems overblown to me

I'm no "occupy wall street" fan, but I think taking millions of dollars from the pockets of a lot of workers is very much something to be outraged about.

It really comes down to this:

If you are working, you don't want to jeopardize your job with a lawsuit against your employer. Lest you do, you get blackballed.

If you aren't working, you cannot afford a lawyer. End of discussion.

Perhaps the Justice department can do something... But then again, I'm sure it will be smoothed out with greased palms to both parties.

He's specifically talking about outrage over the attitudes, as in how the execs handled this one incident. His entire point is that the attitudes displayed in this e-mail chain are unrelated to the larger wage-fixing scheme.

Of all the discussion forums on the internet, I'd expect HN to be one where it's possible to discuss things rationally and discuss individual aspects of an issue separate from the whole in a reasonable manner, without being called out for failing to express the proper quantity of outrage at every step. Of course, this is completely naive of me as it ends up being proven wrong over and over.

I get where you are coming from and appreciate the desire to keep things rational. But sometimes there is a time and place to get angry about things that are wrong. Everyone has their own issues, and I can see that this particular one wouldn't get everyone fired up, but it certainly flips my bits: they summarily fired and "made a public example" of a person for not following an illegal policy.

I can understand getting upset about this. I personally see it as a sort of "double dipping" on outrage in this case, but that's just a difference of opinion.

My main point here is simply that not getting outraged at the attitudes displayed here is far from giving these companies a pass on what they've done.

I agree with Mike here. Bear in mind that we're talking about the attitude of the execs, not the substantive issue at hand. Imagine if the issue at hand had been a Google employee deliberately breaking Google Maps for iPhone (back in the day when Google and Apple got on fine). Would anyone be surprised / outraged by Google firing the employee, and Steve Jobs forwarding the email informing him to Scott Forestall with a smiley face? I would think not.

Now, just to be extra clear, I agree with most people on HN that the substantive issue of non-poaching agreements is not acceptable. I expect all companies that were involved to be justifiably raked over the coals for it. But Steve Jobs responding with a smiley when he receives confirmation that the agreed-upon policy has been enforced? Total non-issue.

Even the attitude irks me. You need to fire someone, you fire them, you don't "make a public example" of them as a sign of obeisance to the head of a competing company. I want to know my boss has got my back, rather than thinking they're willing to throw me under the bus without so much as asking me about it if they get a harshly worded email from someone else.

Thank you. That's 100% correct. You don't make them a public example. I think Sharon is finding out what it's like to be a public example right now.

Just for your information, I've been on three separate management courses which say the contrary - when you're trying to set a cultural norm in your company, making a public example of infringers is practically considered the textbook response. The example given usually concerns sexual harassment. You make the punishment of the harasser public as a way of reinforcing that you're serious about the issue.

That said, most management courses will also tell you to privilege process over people - if something goes wrong it's because the process failed, not the person, and as such most of the time a public correction of someone making a mistake is not appropriate, unless it is felt that the person acted knowingly and deliberately against the rules... So unless the recruiter in question had already been corrected on this error, not only should they not have been fired, but they should not even have been reprimanded in public.

I've been on three separate management courses which say the contrary - when you're trying to set a cultural norm in your company, making a public example of infringers is practically considered the textbook response.

Then the textbook is wrong and should be thrown out. These are people we're talking about, real, actual, flesh-and-blood people... with feelings, family, friends, lives, hopes, dreams, etc. Not fucking "resources" or some fungible asset that can be treated as nothing more than a cell in a spreadsheet, and certainly not something that is a valid target for public shaming.

What do those same courses and textbooks say about illegal collusion about companies, managerial ethics and the like?

I'm glad my boss is a person, not a textbook.

"Meet the new boss same as the old boss."

Agreements between companies to not recruit each others' workers are not actually immoral.

There are many immoral laws, and whatever law is being thrown at them in this case is one such.

I also think it was immoral to stop MSFT from selling their product as they saw fit---with Windows and IE bundled. So you can't accuse me of being partial to one set of companies over another.

Collusion is, if not immoral, at least inconsistent with free markets.

Not, really. In a free market, everything is allowed, no? There is no arbiter to enforce any rules.

You cannot have efficient free markets without rules, because of the presence of externalities and monopolies. That's Econ 101. Beyond that, I'd argue you can't have markets at all without rules. Markets do not generally develop in situations where killing your counter-party and taking his stuff is allowed.

>You cannot have efficient free markets without rules

Wouldn't that be the most efficient free market? One in which only the most brutal and powerful ideas and companies prevail (with money)?

An efficient free market maximizes production. Markets in which companies can externalize costs or engage in monopoly behavior produce less than markets in which these behaviors are prevented.

"Free market" is not synonymous with "anything goes." It's a specific economic (rather than ideological) concept. Most economists believe that certain rules and restrictions are necessary to have any functioning market at all.

> An efficient free market maximizes production.

The usual economic definition of efficiency would be maximizing utility experienced by market participants, not maximizing production.

Currency-denominated "product" measurements are a common proxy measure for utility, but that's a compromise to the inability to measure utility directly.

You cannot have free markets period; a free market is an simple economic ideal that is unachievable in the real world, something like a "frictionless surface" or a "perfectly thermoconducting sphere".

What the best approximation you can acheive to a free market is depends on exactly what the features of the concrete set of products you are concerned with is, what features of the free market you prioritize approximating, and what technology (both technical and social) is available in the environment you are working in.

I've been thinking about this 'wage suppression cartel' as being the same basic idea as labor unions, only with the monopoly being on the side of business rather than labor.

But in a free market, contractual agreements would be upheld and enforced by an agreed upon arbiter.

Yup - it's the same basic idea as labor unions, but with participants taken from the group that controls 40% of the economy assets instead of those that have a near-minimum wage. That surely makes a difference in the amount of power that they can exert?

The basic idea of leveraging what you have a monopoly over is the same. But it is a good question you bring up of whether a group that controls 50% of economic assets in a particular industry is more powerful than a group that controls 50% of labor in the same industry.

A group where money is concentrated in a few hands, vs a group with thousands of members that controls a labor force that can be easily replaced by robots or outsourced? There is no color to that struggle, it's finished before it started.

> In a free market, everything is allowed, no? There is no arbiter to enforce any rules.

That's not really how you keep a market free. A free market requires regulation. Without it, you get a market dominated by monopolies and cartels, rather than open competition.

According to most supporters of the free market, at least among libertarian types, a free market will prevent monopolies and cartels from forming without regulation

I don't know how much I agree with that, but your opinion certainly isn't universal.

Yeah, but there's little evidence to support that. Corporations will form cartels and monopolies if they get the chance. Unless they consider enabling corporations also a form of regulation (which is kinda true). I do agree that we'd have a more free market without corporations.

Of course, with sufficient lack of regulation, it also becomes possible to just shoot people who monopolize stuff.

> at least among libertarian types

Libertarians are not a single group of people - and most libertarians agree that government is necessary to ensure the Law is respected - only a fraction of libertarians actually think no government is necessary at all. What most libertarians agree on is that Big Government is a Bad thing, not that it should be completely removed.

In economics, "free market" is a term of art referring to an efficient market, which requires specific operating conditions.

In libertarianism, "free market" means, "I'll shoot you if you try to make me pay taxes!".

The difference is glaring.

That's a straw man so obvious, it almost self-labels as a strawman. "When libertarians say they want a free market, they aren't actually saying they want a free market..." Come on, if you have to stoop that far, when you're deliberately and openly rewriting the terms that somebody else is using, why not just admit you don't actually have an argument?

What rewriting? "Night-watchman state" and "necessary axioms for the Efficient Market Hypothesis to hold" are completely different things. The libertarians are making an argument from (broadly, there are several branches of libertarianism, after all) Nozickian ethics and conflating it with mainstream economics.

No. Not at all. I really wish people understood what "free market" means. Just like "free software" is used by people to mean open source, free as in libre not gratis, "free market" does not mean anarchy.

A free market is one which is free from government price intervention - subsidies, price floors, price ceilings but also free of monopolies and cartels. In practice, a government may need to step in to break up a monopoly or stop an anti-competitive cartel to maintain a free market.

That is false. A free market is properly defined as a market where the use of force is barred by the government.

So when the government itself initiates force in the market, it is not a free market.

There is no such thing as a monopoly without the use of force. You can temporarily have companies that have a very large share of their respective markets, but monopoly is not properly defined as "a very large company."

A cartel is just an opportunity for other people to make money by undercutting the cartel. For instance, if the cartel is maintaining artificially low wages, the competitor can take advantage by paying "normal" wages and getting the best employees. Hence, a cartel is not stable. (Unless it has government force backing it---as all modern successful cartels do.)

This bizarre fixation with the "use of force" as a critical dividing line is to my mind incomprehensible. "A free market is free except for the arbitrary restrictions I think are fundamental."

collusion is absolutely consistent with free markets. Companies make deals ALL the time. Getting lower rates for supplies, fencing off markets, agreeing to not litigate, etc.

Looking at it another way...these companies are trying to keep their costs down (labor being #1). This in turn allows them to charge lower prices for their products while maintaining a profit margin that keeps investors happy. They are serving their consumers. We should be thanking them for being prudent and not engaging in labor bidding wars that would push their costs skyward. This is capitalism 101.

Companies make deals, but making deals across an industry to fix prices inputs undermines the market. If everyone that used bananas colluded to set artificially low prices, that might result in cheaper banana products, but would result in a deadweight loss. I.e. the loss sustained by the banana producers would outweigh the savings to the consumer.

This wasnt across an industry...this was between two companies...apple and google.

Even still your analogy is still wrong...you are talking about banana consumers (which inherently will always go for the cheapest banana products that satisfy their needs) vs. a business who is trying to keep their costs down to remain competitive.

There is an saying that everything in business should be viewed from the eyes of the consumer. If the consumer is getting the same product for cheaper and the business model is still viable (aka the business can sustain that price) then it's a net win.

Again in your example, banana producers will lower their prices until they cannot be viable and thus they will stop supplying bananas. You cannot collude enough to keep failing business models in business.

> you are talking about banana consumers (which inherently will always go for the cheapest banana products that satisfy their needs) vs. a business who is trying to keep their costs down to remain competitive.

I'm talking about companies that buy bananas, not consumers. The supply chain looks like Farmers -> Dole/Chiquita -> You. If Dole and Chiquita colluded to keep the cost of bananas from farmers low, that is collusion that creates economic inefficiency.

> There is an saying that everything in business should be viewed from the eyes of the consumer. If the consumer is getting the same product for cheaper and the business model is still viable (aka the business can sustain that price) then it's a net win.

This "saying" is blathering that has no basis in economics.

> But both Apple and Google get a pass

Seems like the opposite. Apple and Google are being called out for their behavior on a regular basis in the tech press, while the other companies named in the suit (Adobe, Intuit, etc.) are barely mentioned.

The other companies don't get the online press their well deserved pageranks and clicks in news aggregators that Apple and Google do when used in headlines.

First, Apple and Google haven't been getting "a pass" they've been called out as the primary perpetrators every single time this story has come up. Which has been many times, for several months now.

Second, you don't need your hypothetical: Oracle and MSFT were both involved. And, if anything, they're getting "a pass" because their involvement has always been a secondary data point under the headlines about Apple and Google.

In any case, if the board or geeks in general had any special reserve of outrage for those two companies, that should have surfaced by now, right?

So where is it?

The system works just fine without using peoples' livelihoods as a mechanism to "make a public example." At the companies I have worked, firings happen, of course, but it's something people talk about in hushed tones because frankly people are embarrassed to have to do it. This shame is virtuous.

There is a bigger system than Google/Facebook here: all the engineers that work for these and other companies. It's not just this one person who is affected. There are all these engineers whose wages and opportunities are lower that they could be.

Exactly, you could call it the trickle-down effect.

If you apply for a job at a start-up they can say "Hey, an engineer at Google makes this much, you're not as good, so you're going to make 25% less, and since this is a start-up we're going to take another 25% off.".

Look at AngelList and the salaries being offered. Isn't is strange that the majority of salaries top out at the same amount, and the amount of equity on offer seems to be the same too.

Smells like something fishy going at the VCs to price fix wages of start-up worker bees...

Say what? "The greed of an individual employee". Said employee is a recruiter, her job is to source people. Can hardly be called a case of greed especially when considering the whole context and greed on the part of the participating companies.

The outrage over the attitude of the execs in question is not so much because we don't understand business. Yes, we get it. This endangered a strategic relationship and deserves a strong response. The outrage is due to the nonchalance and utter arrogance shown by these execs, which were in previous times considered as inspirational leaders and models to aspire to.

I personally think it is important to show our outrage and reaction over the attitude of the execs because many folks would like to work for Google, Apple, etc... This gets them thinking about whether they'd really like to work for such companies and under such leaders.

Agreed. I understand the concept of wage-fixing that's happening here, but I also see the vemon that's laced in all the articles written about it to make Google/Apple execs seem as evil as possible. I get it, they've been doing stuff under the table and people are losing their jobs needlessly... but it doesn't need to be stated in this manner.

And it hasn't left my mind that even with all these wage-fixing complaints, those of us in the soft-engineering field are still enjoying the current good times and we still have SF-gentrification issues, and all the outside-of-tech people, who have real problems.

This whole thing is beginning to lose perspective. Because seriously, we're doing...pretty...freakin'...well these days on our average 6 figure salaries. The real victims are people like the HR-lady who lost her job.

Engineers are doing well, for sure. But compared to the profits of Google and Apple and their executives, engineer salaries are a joke. And yet, these cartels did not help to support the HR lady who lost her job, but instead served to further enrich the obscene wealth of the executives in charge of these companies.

So the person that was fired was the greedy one and Eric Schmidt was the victim?

Just wow.

I can see why you feel the outrage over this is overblown. I personally think there isn't enough outrage.

> I can see why you feel the outrage over this is overblown. I personally think there isn't enough outrage.

Agreed. Apple and Google were actively colluding against their workers.

The point of the comment to which you're replying is to be outraged at the right thing. Be outraged at the no-compete policy (it's illegal)! Don't be outraged at the efficient enforcement of the policy.

Would it be better if the recruiter had just been given a PIP instead of being terminated? And Eric Schmidt had e-mailed to Steve Jobs, "Sorry, won't happen again, the employee is on probation and I personally lectured them." No, because the policy would still be in effect.

The swift response from the top of both companies does tell us something, though. It tells us, for one thing, how much this had to do with a person-to-person deal between Schmidt and Jobs. It also shows how Google was anxious to demonstrate its faith to the agreement. The trust must have been pretty fragile if Google was so anxious to demonstrate it was not misplaced.

The problem with the OP is that it focuses anger on the efficient enforcement aspect. That's a side issue.

''Be outraged at the no-compete policy (it's illegal)! Don't be outraged at the efficient enforcement of the policy.''

It's reasonable to think that both things are not at all unrelated. In a mindset that considers "terminating an employee's career within the hour with no recourse" an efficient enforcement of policy, "colluding to ensure low wages" can be seen as achieving the same kind of efficiency for the company.

I think I'm fine with feeling outrage at the efficient enforcement of policy. Doing something bad efficiently doesn't suddenly make it good.

You say you understand that these agreements are illegal and unethical and at the same time admonish us to put ourselves in the shoes of those people who engaged in this illegal and unethical behaviour.

Okay. Let's do that shall we?

I am Eric Schmidt. I have made a conscious decision to collude illegally in order to suppress the wages of my own employees because I frankly don't think us folks at the top are getting enough of the pie. So we're going to take more - not through our talent, but through our power. Because fuck everyone below us. They're clearly greedy (your word) so they'll get what we give them.

I'm not entirely certain that's the motive... I mean, as a CEO it is your responsibility to do what is best for the _company_. If you can save the company a lot of money in wages and prevent top talent from leaving then it's your responsibility to do so.

Not that I think what they did is ethical or legal, but I'm not entirely sure that greed is the motive here.

You may be right. I apologise for any inaccuracies in my shoe-placing. It's as good as I can do when trying to empathize with psychopathic assholes.

Overkill to let him off. 'psychopathic' almost implies internally generated impulses beyond conscious control. I suspect 'asshole' sums it up nicely.

You seem to have missed the irony.

To paraphrase jobs:

And what if you can make the company a lot of money by selling crack to kids? Or embezzling money from your customers' bank accounts? Or by cheating on your tax?

As a CEO it is your responsiblity to do what is best for the company _within the law_.

CEOs and companies can establish their own priorities. That may be profit or revenue, but it could be any number of other things like deliberately choosing "green" options even though it increases their costs and reduces their profit margin. Or even paying talent what they deserve. That isn't (by most standards) "best for the company", but it's the choice of those running the company, and in the long run may prove out to be the better choice. Quarterly thinking kills companies, and they deserve it for their short-sightedness.

And cutting wages and forcing people to stay, that might save money, but it's hardly "best" for the company. I've left two jobs because management thought that was a good idea. I was poor (a low, 4-digit bank balance poor) the first time, and I have no regrets. I'd do it again if put in the same position. Screw incompetent management.

Employees are 'the company.' Screwing over your employees is not in the companies best, long term interests.

Conditional on having an illegal policy, enforcing said policy in an effective manner similar to your enforcement of other (legal) policies should not earn you extra condemnation.

> Conditional on having an illegal policy, enforcing said policy in an effective manner similar to your enforcement of other (legal) policies should not earn you extra condemnation.

Why not?

Expressing outrage at extraneous facts surrounding a widespread unethical conspiracy to screw workers, should not earn you a pretentious lecture about compartmentalising your emotions.

Speaking of conspiracy...

Anybody else looked at AngelList and the salaries being offered?

Isn't it strange that the majority of salaries, cash and equity, top out at the same amount?

Isn't it amazing that in a free market, hundreds of start-up founders value engineers the same?

Smells like something fishy going at the angel funds and VCs to price fix wages of start-up worker bees...

Free markets tend to balance out at an equilibrium price.

Sounds a bit like saying "Conditional on being a thief, behaving like a douche should not earn you extra condemnation".

Some of the executives seem professional and that's ok, but others seem to take things rather personally, with all the marks of an ego trip.

Conditional on having an illegal policy, enforcing said policy in an effective manner similar to your enforcement of other (legal) policies should not earn you extra condemnation.

Sure it should. You should not be enforcing the policy, you should be denouncing it.

The point is these actions aren't any different than if they were enforcing any other ethical and legal policy. These emails aren't really shocking at all. It just shows its business as usual.

Which is part of the point. Employees are considered as commodities, and a career-ending breach of a (illegal) policy is treated as a fixing a bug in your code - jokes and all.

Hardly career ending. People get let go. It happens. You didn't see a "He'll never work in this town again!" This just seems to detract from the actual issue which is the policy itself.

What most people fail to realize is that by colluding to repress wages, they essentially robbed the State of California of tax revenues, at a time when school teachers were being asked to do without teacher aides.

I have one word: Prison.

You should stay in prison for a few days before you suggest it so casually.

If you're going to start accusing folks of 'robbing' the State of California, you should carefully investigate the morality of compulsory taxation.

I think you'll find that the State does a damn site more robbery and extortion than any group of tech companies.

>"Although I get that these sorts of agreements may well have been illegal and unethical, all this outrage over the attitudes of the executives seems overblown to me."

I wouldn't quite say that...

I believe you're absolutely correct about the strategic concern, the act and the result is easy to understand.

What's really distasteful is the tone from all parties. The whole exchange is dripping with polite passive-aggressive nastiness, boot clicking and ass-covering.

It's possible to be pragmatic and decent about it.

Agree. If you assumed the non-solicitation policy were legal and ethical, then the rest of the actions make sense. (Of course they're neither.)

Also, I think the article takes a lot of liberties with descriptions. I didn't see military glee. And Steve's response struck me as that of a guy who sends thousands of emails a day and got something he wanted resolved, not schadenfreude.

Agree. Employees get summarily fired for violating policies every day, in every business sector. Try showing up late for work at McDonalds. The second or third time you do it, bye-bye.

Policies don't mean much if they are not enforced.

I'm not defending the policy in this case, but given that it existed, and was apparently very clearly communicated to employees that it was a "zero-tolerance" deal, Google could hardly have reacted in any other way.

> Try putting yourself in Eric Schmidt's shoes: from his perspective, the greed of an individual employee to generate recruiting commissions by violating a strict policy endangered a key strategic relationship.

If said employee were aware of the policy, then he would surely no that this candidate was non-hireable, right? Firing for that sounds like a mistake. If we take the article at face value, his firing certainly does not look justifiable.

On the other hand, the emails do not make it clear as to whether this was the recruiter's only policy violation.

>These guys HAVE TO think of the system before the individual or the system will not work.

"The system" being an illegal no-compete agreement, an unethical, immoral boot on the face of Schmidt's own people. It's a system in the sense that it was a systematic process of betrayal. That's what he was protecting. That's what couldn't work if he put individuals ahead of "the system."

This isn't just a betrayal of the employees of Google and Apple et al. This is a betrayal of the very free-market, capitalistic, "greed is good" Randroid principles these Master of the Universe types have touted and have in turn been celebrated for.

Speaking for myself, I'm not surprised. I don't think that ultra-free-market stuff works. This is what happens again and again; once someone gets ahead in a free market, they turn around and try to cement their position by making the market less free.

But I can see why so many others are so angry. These guys, Jobs and Schmidt and Brin, were heroes to a lot of people, especially here on HN. But it turns out they didn't actually believe in the principles we thought they embodied. It's one of those moments behind the adage "Never meet your heroes."

Shouldn't Google fire Eric Schmidt now using your logic?

The right way to think about the system would be to simply expand the acceptable hiring pool. The hyper selectivity that big SV companies use for hiring artificially limits the pool of possible applicants and drives up wages. Expanding the pool would solve this problem without going into illegal practices.

Ok, as I'm still not able to find anywhere where a legal ruling says a 'do not call' is illegal, could someone please direct me to said ruling?

I get that part of what they were doing has been deemed illegal, namely the 'do not hire' restrictions, but a 'do not call' list doesn't seem like it could possibly be illegal.

I'll refer to my previous comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7463419

There are many other things that disturb me about this.

- the HR professionals who participated in this illegal non-solicitation scheme. I mean really, nobody raised their hand and said, "FYI, this is illegal". I'm sure they say it all the time about other HR issues where companies try to eliminate expenses and maximize profit.

- what's the story on how Steve came to know about the solicitation? Did the Apple employee raise the flag to their boss (who should have also known that this was illegal) or where their emails being read? smells like fish.

- what's the word on the wrongful termination lawsuits that must be in the works?

Are people surprised when tech executives act like other power hungry execs?

The worst part of it was "make a public example of this termination". This doesn't make it any more or less illegal but it shows how drunk on power on he is.

"Make a public example of this termination" was written by by Google's VP of HR, not Jobs.

VP of HR so the over-promoted clerical assistant who gets the coffee and biscuits at meetings then :-)

I imagine you don't mean this and ended up doing this by accident because you didn't bother to research the person at all, but this comment ends up being unbelievably sexist.

I would like to have an interesting and informed discussion, but that requires that the other participants do some basic reading before making snide remarks.

I don't believe he made any reference to the sex of the VP of HR, either explicitly or grammatically...

That's why I took so much trouble to give him the benefit of the doubt, because it probably was accidental.

Calling me "unbelievably sexist" is giving me the benefit of the doubt - so what do you say if you really dont like some one then

And you made assumptions about my gender - Check Your privilege mate.

I called your comment that, and I stand by it.

If you can't separate your individual self from a comment you've written, that's your own problem.

That must have been exhausting.

A CA is not a gendered grade I think it is you who are being sexist by assuming that I meant a female secretary here.

You are referring to a woman, as the person in question is female. I assumed you didn't know this and that's why I gave you the benefit of the doubt, but in that context the comment ends up being sexist.

You keep using that word... I don't think it means what you think it means.

Make a public example of this termination

WTF? When did this become feudal Japan?

There are two cases where the "obey me without question or else" atmosphere is particularly useful:

1. In the military, where debates and disagreements could create fatal communication problems and delays

2. When the people in power need to suppress a truth that would otherwise be outed in the normal course of discussion

Yeah, perhaps I was a bit vague, I didn't mean Jobs.

I should have said he/she because I don't know the gender of Shona Brown. Jobs was drunk on power too, but I don't think this incident is the best example of it.

Or you could have looked it up....

Not worth the cycles. Gender doesn't really matter when someone's being a douche does it?

"Public, but not tooooo public! We'd prefer the facts of the matter not to end up in any newspaper articles."

>it shows how drunk on power on he is.

Read the article properly.

I did. This isn't about Jobs, it's about the reaction to his demand.

The smiley at the end is rough. However, I'd like to point out that Google took the action of firing the employee so quickly and strongly. Job's simply asked that Google's recruitment department please stop.

Very good point. He didn't demand the termination, that was a power play by the heads of HR who seem to be the real bad guys here. But I'm sure there was a mirror image of activity going on at Apple.

To me that's almost as sickening as the dismissal - the obsequiousness of the HR department

He didn't demand the termination

He didn't have to. And learning of the consequence, he didn't seem to care.

a power play by the heads of HR who seem to be the real bad guys here

Really? Blame the minions? They offered someone's head to save their own.

Yes. The smiley seems like a response to the almost humorous over-reaction and display of subservience on Google's part.

Well, the article doesn't try to hide that it's trying to instigate an emotional response.

In the big scheme of the moral calamity that this whole thing is, this particular exchange feels oddly trivial to get its own article. But I think it's just the sort of thing that people can and will latch on to easily.

The reason for the firing was trivial the firing was not.

And people can latch onto being fired because almost everyone has experienced it at least once. That moment, of "what do I do now?", is probably one of the worst feelings in the world. And the glee these assholes have in actually doing it (remember no one is supposed to enjoy firing anyone, MBA101) is even more enraging since it confirms everything the 99%ers have been protesting about. These guys are fucking with other peoples' livelyhoods and making a joke of it.

Setting aside what the policy meant in the context of keeping salaries down, the company's policy on its own was not illegal.

The employee in question was presumably trained on the policy upon starting work and presumably informed of the costs of violating the policy.

The employee violated that policy, damaging company relations in the process, and was fired. That's a separate issue from the whole salary debacle. That Steve Jobs replied with a smiley face is immaterial to the broader problem at hand. Steve Jobs would in all likelihood reply to the end of the world with :-O. Who cares?

That Google terminated an employee in violation of what they indicate was a clear policy, is again, irrelevant to the discussion. It serves as nothing more than an attempt to get emotional response using something only tangentially related to the core issue.

If the said employee felt the policy was unethical and possibly illegal, violating it is not the answer. There is no indication that the employee was making a moral stand. More than likely, he couldn't follow directions. And he got fired.

> the company's policy on its own was not illegal.

This logic would not fly in any other industry. I don't see why SV thinks it is exempt. You never see a "policy" like this being defended in banking or whiteshoe law firms.

Also stop calling it a policy. Policies are written down, recorded, and published. One manager having an informal meeting about an unofficial policy doesn't make it policy. The reason this lawsuit is making waves now is because the policy was never put to ink. It was never put to ink because these companies wanted as little evidence as possible. Does that sound like a good policy?

As an aside, I really dislike the term 99%. By a lot of metrics, I'm in the 1%, as I imagine a lot of engineers are.

I think it's really the 99.9%.

Being in the 1% top income in the country kind of rings hollow if you still can't afford a house.

The real division is labor vs. capital, but for historical reasons its impossible to use that distinction in those terms in public discourse in the US, so you get 99% vs. 1%, Main Street vs. Wall Street, and all kinds of other terms that talk around the real issue.

Interesting. So you're saying that it boils down to being branded as a communist because of the history of the US.

I'm Canadian, so the irrational fear of communism/socialism is much lower here.

Not that I'm advocating for communism of course. Any system that honestly believes that a dictatorship[1] needs to be established first and that it will simply "whither away"[2] has been proven by history to be wrong.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship_of_the_proletariat [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Withering_away_of_the_state

Ok but if you demonize the entire concept of firing, you will place a huge drag on innovation and economic growth. See: France.

Yes, it sucks to get fired, but firing is a necessary part if running almost any company.

Job's simply asked that Google's recruitment department please stop.

By emailing the CEO of Google. Jobs knew exactly what he was doing, and what the outcome would be. And boy, what an absolutely embarrassing response by Google.

>"Job's simply asked that Google's recruitment department please stop."

Hardly.

When one executive contacts another directly the intent is implicit. If destroying this person was not the clear desire this communication would have taken place at another level.

What you said is just made-up nonsense. You can claim that when somebody says X they really mean Y, but without evidence for that, it is a bogus claim.

Sipmle logic states that Steve Jobs actually cared about maintaining the scheme he had with Google and couldn't care less about one particular Google employee.

Why would he? If he really were some kind of perverted power-luster he had plenty of his own employees to torture, but he just wasn't like that. He was always pursuing HIS GOALS ruthlessly, he wasn't out to get his rocks off by hurting people or exercising power.

(None of this is from direct experience, but it's evident from public information.)

But alas, we don't live in a world of simple logic.

It's important to remember that Schmidt was on Apple's Board of Directors at the time this occurred (he joined in the fall of 2006.) The Board was hand-picked in its entirety by Jobs.

These are power guys, and if Schmidt doesn't do something strongly, he will be perceived as weak. The implicitness in this email was a basic alpha-male locker-room challenge for Schmidt to show if he had any balls.

To me, this looks like a survivalist-move on the part of Schmidt to show Jobs he is "in charge" at Google. It's obvious Jobs knew how to push his buttons; otherwise, why would he (Schmidt) jump when the CEO of another company (Jobs) said "jump"?

> show Jobs he is "in charge" at Google

Such locker room / schoolyard pissing contests show lack of leadership, creativity, compassion and humility. Very Wall Street.

Without a source of what was in the policy manual it's really hard to armchair quarterback, but such 1 strike and you're toast really sends the wrong message to everyone.

The message back to Jobs should have been, It's taken care of. Won't happen again.

Internally, IF the policy said violate A,B or C and termination applies, I can't quibble.

Otherwise, people make mistakes and should be handled as such. That what makes companies "Great Places to Work" and not the next job to pull a paycheck before the next one.

Dude: think it through. Steve Job's unprecedented :) is overwhelming evidence of his intent.

When an animal trainer gives a dog a cookie for jumping through a hoop, it's beyond question that the trainer intended the dog to jump through the hoop. Even the dog understands that. That is exactly the situation here.

In your analogy, what dog got what cookie for jumping through what hoop? From context it would seem you're saying that Schmidt recieved the email with the smiley as a "reward". It wasn't sent to him though, but to some HR person at Apple (probably the one who escalated the issue to Jobs).

From your comment I get the sense that Steve might as well be speaking a language you don't understand.

I recommend reading this: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/11/11/the-gervais-principle-i...

Agreed. There's no question that the smiley face in response to the consequences makes the intent perfectly clear.

I have to disagree because there 16 bits isn't enough to encode ACK of the intent of the original email. To me, he's saying "Hey, look what I made Eric do!" which is undoubtably more satisfying than getting some line level employee fired.

To me the smiley implies: You bitches danced for me, I like that very much.

That is about how I took it too. I see much worse in what Google did here.

It's only "simply asking" if you ignore context and subtext. When Jobs said he would be "greatly pleased if google stopped", it carries the implication that jobs would be greatly displeased if google did not. The email is a thinly veiled threat sent by Jobs ceo-to-ceo to carry the implied whole weight of Apple's resources, and the smiley is acknowledgment that google, did in fact, "get the message".

http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/11/11/the-gervais-principle-i...

It's all power talk.

Stop ... with extreme prejudice.

In plenty of companies I've seen people get off with warnings for at least their first few offenses of sexual harassment, being drunk or stoned on the job, and abusive language towards others. Yet here is something the execs should have known is clearly illegal and they're firing employees on the first offense. Supposedly recruiters were given a briefing about it but you have to wonder how much it was emphasized or written down, especially if their supervisors realized it was illegal.

"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."

- Eric Schmidt, 2009 as CEO of Google, on concerns about privacy and Google's insatiable appetite for info

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/google-ceo-eric-schmid...

Yes, people bring up this quote all the time so it seems cliche to do so ... but I don't care. I say choke him on his own words for being so casual about it in the first place -- when it affected others, that is; he had a very public hissy-fit when someone publicized details about him, even blocked Cnet.com from Google for a time if I recall right.

We are in a new society where the Information Technology brings enormous increases of productivity. The gains go to a small group of people. The capitalistic way to share this new wealth is to increase the workers wages. The middle class societies of Europe and North America were created this way.

Google and Apple are extremely lucrative companies, seeing them conspiring to decrease salaries is really sad. A sure path to a worse world.

On the other side, to see the American judiciary system attacking this evil behavior shows us why the United became the greatest nation in the world.

None of the language in the emails seems that shocking or "brutal" (as the article says) to me. I guess the smiley face is a little strange, but I don't think it was particularly malicious.

Exactly

To me it means, "I am pleased with the response"

One thing I've learned from email communication is that you can't grok the emotional response from text alone (even with emoticons)

This could be either a thankful smile, a loathful grin or anything in between.

Yeah, a lot of editorializing going on in that article. Better if you just read the emails.

Yeah I agree. A smiley face just means "thanks" or "good", not "MUAHAHAHAAA". It doesn't mean this is all OK, but the article really goes over the top trying to drum up emotions (warning: the next email you're going to read will scar you for life and possibly kill you). It's almost cartoonish.

Steve Jobs's reply was almost cartoonish.

It's not shocking to me because I'm not surprised at the behavior.

I would imagine that the person who was fired might disagree with you on the brutal part since Google's reaction was overblown. They could have simply told the person not to do it again. But they went with the instant firing without any second thought in an effort to keep Jobs happy.

The smiley face at the end is indicative of how happy Jobs was over how much power he had over them in that someone was fired over something he simply asked them to stop doing.

Smiling in the face of someone else's pain due to a career-ending mistake is close enough to the definition of "sadistic" as to make no difference.

Does this employee now have recourse to sue for wrongful termination since she was fired due to failure to comply with an illegal policy?

She should contact a labor attorney and probably has a strong case.

Brin's reaction is hilarious... and scary at the same time. I never imagined that these people could have so much contempt toward their employees.

Employees who endanger relations between tech giants by trying to poach employees even though they've been specifically asked not to by their superiors.

I mean, I agree that the treatment is rough, but the employee really was at fault for going rogue.

Tech giants, are they above human people? Because your comment makes them look so.

'Was at fault' for going rogue... I wonder what she will think once the current investigation ends.

Sometimes the right thing to do is to go 'rogue' against tech giants who ask of you things they should not.

"the employee really was at fault for going rogue."

None of the details surrounding the contact are included. For all we know that person didn't know they were contacting an Apple employee until after the fact.

Are we sure she knew about it?

>violating the secret and illegal non-solicitation compact

It doesn't say anywhere whether she actually knew about this. That would change my reaction from completely horrified to just utterly disgusted.

And 'rogue' is a... unique way to put it. It's not like she disclosed it to the press so it's a pretty tame rogue.

> "In general, we have a very clear ‘do not call’ policy (attached) that is given to every staffing professional" ... "Unfortunately, every six months or so someone makes an error in judgment, and for this type of violation we terminate their relationship with Google."

The recruiter knew from the how the Google HR to Eric Schmidt email reads. The 'secret' part of this agreement is being over emphasized, if you're going to have a non-poaching agreement your staffing employees need to know or it's utterly pointless.

It's a stretch to assume the employee "went rogue" in the sense of crossing a well-defined boundary. I'd hazard a guess that the no-poach rule was phrased (or at least understood) more as a suggestion, since explaining the reasoning behind the policy would hand HR evidence of the illegal cartel. Perhaps they even gave the HR people a BS reason, like "poaching leads to salary asymmetries and conflict in teams," which the unknowing HR employee proved wrong under the assumption that she could successfully work around the stated issue. When the no-poach suggestion didn't work, they needed to resort to making an example of someone to get the subtext across using the time-honored strategy of creating a "obey me without question" atmosphere to avoid uncomfortable discussions.

This kind of thing is the reason I like working at smaller companies. People do stupid stuff at those too, but there seems to be less of this "just following orders" herd mentality.

I enjoy working at smaller companies because I actually feel like I make a difference. How little do you actually contribute to your company if you can be fired within the hour.

What is most remarkable is a lot of software developers love Google because they are so open and against patents and all of that, yet Google, Apple, and others are all working together to screw software developers out of getting paid more.

For as much flack as Microsoft took over the years for being evil, I can't say that Google or Apple have done much better, even for their own people.

Are non-solicitation agreements between companies illegal? I'm guessing blacklisting people is illegal, but is not actively soliciting employees illegal?

(I'm not commenting on morality here, just legality.)

My last employer had a non-solicitation agreement in place with partner companies they were working with. Is that illegal, I wonder?

Was the agreement between the employers or between the employees? In some jurisdictions it is completely fine to have non-compete agreements and they very often are used to prevent vendor/customer poaching.

It was between the employers, who were also working together on business projects. They asked us to help enforce it, by telling them if a recruiter reached out to us from one of our partners.

Felt questionable to me.

It probably varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but in many cases a non-compete agreement is between the employer and the employee. Meaning that you can't quit one company to go work for a competitor. Most of the time the reasoning is because you may know trade secrets that you then may share with the company's competitor, which may be why they hired you away. Sometimes these agreements hold up in court and sometimes not.

A non-compete agreement between your employer and another company without your consent or input will likely not hold up in court and could be illegal depending on local laws.

Conspiring to keep wages down is. Non-solicitation agreements are an action that, while not illegal in themselves, in some circumstances would constitute the larger offence.

I believe the illegality is centered around conspiring to lower wages, the guys suing are claiming that this was achieved through the non-solicitation agreement.

I can see how this could be the case, especially when it looks like the biggest tech employers in silicon valley were all in on it. A few companies or companies in different areas agreeing not to poach won't affect the average wage, but when the majority of positions aren't being contested the incentive to offer larger wages drops.

In the case of a contracting shop, the contracted employee is a party to such an agreement. They can choose not to be. It's like an agency agreement.

Don't be evil.

What hit me the most is how Google and Apple had this illegal, secret agreement in place (for some reason I've never heard of it 'til now; it ought to be publicized more, for all the good PR these companies enjoy it'd be nice for more people to see the full story) ... and how Jobs (Apple, a.k.a. "cool" incarnate) and especially Brin (Google, known for "don't be evil") are so arrogant about it.

There has been a recurring argument about whether Steve Jobs became successful because of his behavior or despite his behavior. Few days back, I came across a compilation of facts on imgur images[1] which will immediately make you hate Steve Jobs. I also read the tumblr post 'What I Learned Negotiating With Steve Jobs'[2] which is also on the same lines. And then I read NY Times article that Jobs family has been secretly donating money to charity for past 20 years anonymously[3].

One thing is clear. The world is fascinated by Steve Jobs.

[1] http://imgur.com/gallery/neGNG (couldn't verify accuracy of facts)

[2] http://heidiroizen.tumblr.com/post/80368150370/what-i-learne...

[3] http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/24/laurene-powell-jobs...

This has very little to do with Jobs. It sounds like the employee broke a known rule and Google reacted once they were informed (although I'd argue they acted too harshly).

A known "rule", that was illegal to follow in the first place.

Why was it illegal to /follow/?

I am not an expert; and could be way off base, but I would assume, that knowingly following a corporate policy that is against the law, would be illegal, even if you aren't the one who implemented it. I am also making the assumption from what I read that everyone knew what this policy really was, from the way the emails between the two companies framed things. Again, this could be off base as well.

It's roughly the same as if these companies colluded to drive down the price on components.

Little to do with Jobs?

"That evening, Steve Jobs forwarded her email to Eric Schmidt with this note:"

The whole thing would not have happened without him, and his illegal scheme to prevent companies from competing.

I see you left out his note. All it said was:

"I would be very pleased if your recruiting department would stop doing this."

All Google had to do was remind employees they aren't allowed to recruit Apple employees. Google took the drastic action of firing the employee.

A rule that apparently was seldom written down given that it was highly illegal.

> a known rule

That "rule" is an illegal collusion that's probably worth billions in salary, ISOs, bonuses, etc. That is, the totality of the crime here is that the participants in the collusion literally stole billions of dollars from salaried employees.

How obsequious the HR people are in this is a minor factor. This is a Bernie Madoff-sized crime. What Madoff did was a more visible crime, so he was punished like a common criminal. But if you shave a few tens of thousands of dollars per year off a few tens of thousands of engineers' salaries and your motto is "Don't be evil" (or if you do something really big, like diddle the LIBOR rate) people think different, for some reason.

> This is a Bernie Madoff-sized crime.

Really? Equivalent to a $50 billion ponzi scheme in which thousands of people lost their pensions and become destitute? That's the same as denying a few thousand dollars to already very highly compensated engineers? I'm not excusing what they're doing but the Madoff comparison seems off.

Is it a smaller crime if you take smaller amounts from more people? Had these been outright unpaid wages, the answer would be clear. The dollar value here is probably similar.

They're not poaching each other's workers, so let's say that Tom works for Apple and makes $90,000 per year. Google could attempt to recruit Tom and offer him $100,000 per year, but they don't. So Tom loses $10,000 per year. This is probably the worst-case scenario for an individual engineer. Of course, Tom is still earning a very nice salary over that time, and who knows, maybe he actually ends up making more, but let's envision a worst-case scenario in which an engineer loses $100 grand over ten years, because of this policy.

In order for the dollar value to be similar to what Madoff stole from people, that scenario, or a higher wage loss, would have had to happen to five hundred thousand engineers. All working at a handful of companies.

Does that still sound plausible to you?

Or to 100k employees for 5 years. Or if it's not just cash but ISOs and bonuses that are also depressed, maybe just 50k employees. Multiple large tech employers are involved, over a span of perhps longer than 5 years. It adds up quickly.

It may be illegal (I agree it is) but I don't think that changes anything. It's not like the employee was whistleblowing or protesting the illegality of the rule, they just broke it through negligence.

I can't help but wonder who the recruiter was. I was going through Google's interview process right around this time, knew the recruiter that I was working with had connections to folks at Apple, and one day she was mysteriously no longer with Google. It makes me wonder if it was the same person...

Apple layed off a bunch of HR people around 2009-2010 as well. I knew one of them.

Why would a company with so much cash layoff part of a single division? It's incredibly suspicious.

I was indifferent towards all the hate/worship Jobs got. But seeing that smiley in response to some one getting fired makes me think he was a douche. He could simply have said that Google handled it the way he wanted. No need to take such pleasure in this matter.

I just wonder how did Steve find out this email? Did the employee hand it in? Did Apple have a scanner on their email server?

Do all the HR people in this email thread still have jobs? The only people who should still be employed is the original recruiter from google. Everyone else is complicit in these illegal actions.

There is mounting evidence Steve Jobs was a sociopath. Corporations select for these traits in their CEOs and Google is no expection. Not surprising, not shocking, but sad.

Well who would be naive enough to think you can make it to the top and play with the big boys by being Mr NiceGuy? Being acquired by Facebook/google/Microsoft/apple is probably what saves a lot of "founders" from becoming the next "charismatic" sociopaths...

I think English dictionaries should redefine "don't recall" as an idiom meaning "find it convenient to pretend not to remember" :)

In Congressional hearings it's a common method to avoid invoking the fifth amendment which could be cause for further investigation. If they don't recall, maybe there's nothing to it; if they invoke the fifth, there's likely something there and you just have to find it elsewhere.

Could the fired employee seek damages for wrongful termination? I dont recall what brought about this whole non poaching case.

I think Google should make a public example of Sharon by making her do the perp walk between the building and the cop car.

Actually that's probably similar to what they'll eventually do, and the big three will fly off into the sunset.

Colluding to keep down wages, which would attract more people into programming, and then always complaining that there are not enough software developers while, also illegally, discriminating against expensive older programmers. Shows money is the main factor with respect to programmers ability.

The real complaint is that there are not enough programmers that they can pay cheaply. The idea that there are not enough programmers is just bs.

In the counterfactual world in which Eric Schmidt were aware that the no-poach agreements might be violating antitrust laws, I doubt that the outcome between Apple and Google would have been any different.

Google and Apple had a friendly business relationship at the time. Apple was using Google search as the default on Safari. They were collaborating to make Maps and YouTube apps on the iPhone. When a recruiter tried to poach the Safari team while the companies were collaborating, I think it was right for Jobs to be angry and tell Schmidt that it jeopardized the collaboration between them, and it was right for Schmidt to stop being rude to a partner.

"Don't be evil." Should have been read as "Don't be evil, unless it helps Google get ahead." This all brings up the age old question..... how much money is enough?

So, now you know why I like neither Google not Apple.

If these were foreign countries, we'd have invaded them and set up puppet democracies.

Morons. Like they couldn't figure out the public would find out eventually...

How that lawyer can suck that much? He let someone who wrote an email get away in questioning by saying he was CCed and don't recall it. He wrote emails on the thread dammit.

I don't think we should pile on these tech execs. It happens elsewhere. I'd speculate it's rather widespread.

I worked for a Fortune 500 market research / consumer data company and I know for a fact that the Senior VP of our office would call Fortune 500 clients and kindly request they not "poach" our employees.

Most of it is done casually and "innocently". I doubt most execs even thought they were breaking the law before this came to light.

> It happens elsewhere. I'd speculate it's rather widespread.

Does that make it ok?

Add up the cost to salaried employees. It's a multi-billion dollar crime.

I think people are overreacting in the sense that non-solicitation agreements are not illegal per se and exist almost everywhere - tons of corporate partnership/vendor/contractor/etc agreements include such language because sometimes it's difficult for companies to work together closely in good faith without such agreement in place.

The main reason that the agreement is deemed illegal here is that they were made with a specific intent to manipulate the market at large and because they are deemed to have kind of market power, being a cartel of large employers. Also, the nature of the agreement is far too broad and the companies involved is far too numerous for them to argue in good faith that their intent was much more narrow.

I completely agree that they overstepped and should be held liable, but some of the outrage seems misguided. The HR executive involved, for instance, may or may not be in position to know that the policy is part of an illegal scheme and the fired employee certainly was not. Also, unless you're one of the star programmers who were highly in demand, it's quite unlikely that your salary was all that depressed over this. If anything, the impact may have been slightly positive for average employees - at a lot of places, superstars aren't necessarily substitutes for average employees, but rather complements and lowering prices of superstars can boost rather than depress wages of average employees:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html

On the whole, this is kind of the replay of the Microsoft anti-trust trials. Bundling web browsers with operating systems is not illegal - the illegal part was the context in which such action occurred. It was seen as an abuse of market power. Sports leagues openly collude on this kind of stuff without most people caring at all or pointing fingers at those involved. Government can have strong interest in such matters in the interest of encouraging a healthier market - though political and career motivations of lawyers/prosecutors involved also play a large part - but to seeing this as a clear morality play is not wise.

Edit: actually this covers the legal issues better:

http://www.mondaq.com/unitedstates/x/258600/Antitrust+Compet...

Assuming the article is correct, having a general agreement without any specific, legitimate purpose is illegal, but on a limited basic it can be legal. Still it seems far-fetched to assume that the HR executive in question had to know that such an illegal agreement existed, because for all he knows, a much more limited, legal contract could have existed due to their partnership and Google may have had a broader policy to ensure easy compliance. We now know that that's not the case, but I don't know why we can assume that the HR executive necessarily was aware of all this.

Contractor agreements are like agency agreements. The contract employee is a party to the agreement.

This is like colluding to set the price of LCD displays or chips. That's illegal. Even an HR director should know that.

You're usually not party to a non-solicitation agreement in which others are not allowed to solicit you. If you as an individual contractor sign such an agreement with your client, your client's employees whom you're not allowed to solicit were not party to the agreement.

Even if you somehow forced everyone to be part of the agreement, it's irrelevant - whether Apple's and Google's employment contracts had language that forced the employees to agree to what's going on here is not exactly relevant consideration.

Edit: part of the irony of this whole "non-solicitation agreements are illegal" chorus is that I think most people complaining probably have signed such agreements in the past as they are quite routine. Granted, most of the time, it's just handed to us and we have to sign or gtfo.

This reads like a UK tabloid article. (the internet should never feel that way)

As in, you're told what to think in advance of all info.

As with the Snowden leaks, I have to wonder if the number of fully aware collaborators in this crime would be more easily counted in tens, hundreds, or thousands.

I previously thought in this specific case that it would be tens, but if entire departments were being lectured about the penalties for deviation - were hundreds of people aware?

This is something people would have thought happened at Wall Street company, just shows that tech is ruthless to.

Wall Street is, in general, much more employee-friendly than your typical F500. It's the result of most of the big investment banks having been partnerships rather than corporations until relatively recently.

If you're trying to make us feel sorry for a tech recruiter, you may have come to the wrong place.

I hear you, but do you know how many people would kill to have people stalking them with job offers.

These companies are run by cutthroat persons. I'm not too surprised this stuff happens. They all want to compete and dominate their market, and that requires working together at times (even though its still competition...so maybe oligopoly).

But Steve's response is great :)

Hmm... the cold and ruthless way Google deals with its own employees is more shocking than Jobs's "brutal" response to it.

"make a public example of this termination"

And they're calling Jobs's smiley brutal?

Steve Jobs was a sociopath. there is nothing surprising about this at all.

What an odd spin on this story. Job's response is just a detail, the policy is agreed upon between both companies which is clear from the correspondence and Google's actions here.

"Do no evil."

When will geeks learn there are no good or bad corporations?

When you learn the slogan.

Glad to see Paul Graham's pending comments machine is working so well here.

They didn't happen, although perhaps they are what is needed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7475834

Wildly successful people exposed as utterly ruthless shock

</sarcasm>

Regardless of the overarching policy, this brief exchange is being brought down to tabloid level discussion by pando, it's really nothing that terrible.

I'll avoid the legality of the suit, but I think the smiley face is being spun a bit by the article.

Jobs wasn't sending the smiley face as some sort of grave dancing gesture, he was sending it as a "here, I took care of this problem for you" gesture to the team member that more than likely brought the issue to his attention. HR had a problem with something Google's HR did, so to cross borders they needed the boss to make the comment.

It's still sort of callous, but I don't think the author's framing this the right way.

Can we ask Elon Musk to get rid of Arnnon for being involved in this? Or is Tesla too holy and doing too much good, so they get a pass?

The sociopathic CEO stereotype is affirmed once again.

I look forward to the coming Apple/Google/XXXX apologists vs. Lucid observer comment war.

I get all the hate. But seriously big companies are run by ruthless people. Benovalent dictators are very rare..

It's strange that Google was so worried about placating Steve on this issue, yet they went on to redesign Android to be more like the iPhone, after it was announced.

http://mashable.com/2013/12/20/android-iphone-start-over/

For an earlier example, does anyone remember Google expressing actual outward praise (better yet, free marketing posing as ass-kissing) to Apple? http://i54.tinypic.com/rw6np3.jpg

Thanks for that ... triggered some nostalgia to see a screenshot of Google.com circa 2005. I kinda miss those little icons letting you choose which "engine" you wanted to use (i.e. web / images / maps / video / etc)

Google was probably more worried about the potential consequences of breaking the non-solicitation agreement than about Jobs. Breaking it would have meant Apple starting to hire Google engineers as well. And even if they didn't care about this then why start a fight over such a trivial thing?

This kind of policing of UI bothers me for same reason patens on things like "One-Click Shopping" bother me. Many properties of the iPhone are things motivated design students would've independently arrived at. I know this because I was in design school a few years before the iPhone and we did come up with many of iPhone's interface choices during phone design exercises.

Samsung precisely copying the visual styling of the iPhone is a different matter. But policing supposed copying of basic UI design choices rubs me the wrong way.

We can determine from this story that Apple's corporate email system in 2007 was wholly insecure. If one user can view and forward another users email, the system is broken.

I admire and despise Jobs completely.

I despise Jobs completely. FIXED.

SJ was such a lowlife. Seriously...

I understand that this particular case happens to be considered illegal. However, I am not convinced that a law banning this practice will not make things worse for most people.

A cartel involves an arrangement where members REFUSE TO OFFER a better deal than the others - a pricefixing arrangement. On the other hand, this is very clearly about not going blatantly on each other's turf to solicit / poach.

Consider this ... how did Apple find out about this? Was the employee called during work hours?

How come recruiters - internal HR or external agencies - can be instructed to not advertise job openings in venues like porn sites, but - it seems from all this outrage - cannot be instructed to not advertise on their competitors' websites?

Why can't companies decide that the cost of reprisals for poaching key members is too high, independently and internally, before agreeing not to do it?

To sum up - I do not see this as a cartel AS LONG AS neither company turns away candidates who applied on their own, based on a mutual agreement. To be fair, Google did have such a policy and to the extent that this policy existed, that WAS a cartel. But NOT if the agreement is limited to not advertising offers to each other's key employees. Those employees can easily find out job openings and average salaries just like everyone else can.

If you are going to make the argument that recruiters calling certain key employees of the other company to lure them away will give the majority of employees a better sense of how much they are worth and everyone's salary if going to go up, you'll have to work pretty hard to show the connection. Poaching key members of a team (e.g. to sabotage a competitor's project) seems to mostly benefit those key members. It increases the cost for everyone else including the companies involved. And that cost is very likely to be passed on to the other employees. You would also have to show that the companies will always choose not to pass on the cost of poaching to their employees -- because otherwise, you will have to admit that LESS poaching might actually lead to LARGER salaries. And in fact, the data seems to show this. (Once again, by poaching I mean reaching out and specifically cold calling key people in rival companies to advertise positions that they could have found on their own.)

UPDATE: In fact, in many states the poaching itself of key members can be illegal. Please consider this before you participate in the overblown outrage:

http://knowledgebase.findlaw.com/kb/2009/Oct/64552.html

Here is a court case of the exact opposite of what you are outraged about:

http://blogs.findlaw.com/tarnished_twenty/2010/07/tennessee-...

Here is another example of tortious interference

http://corporate.findlaw.com/human-resources/interference-wi...

Getting fired from your cushy silicon valley recruiting job is far from the end of the world. He probably had another one in a week. Who gives a shit? :) was a fine response.

I assume this wouldn't be your reaction if you were at the receiving end of this reaction for an "illegal" deal in the first place.

Well, I'd say that if you violate company policy about who you can and cannot contact you should expect consequences.

The fact that the policy itself may be illegal is secondary.

The employee was female, as established in the first line of the article.

Does the gender pronoun really change the persons post at all?

I previously thought the Google heads were pretty cool guys.

However, if you can believe the tabloids, it seem Sergey Brin is engaged in some messy affair with another Google employee:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2579067/Google-CEO-L...

http://www.vanityfair.com/society/2014/04/sergey-brin-amanda...

If you combine that with his pretty callous behaviour in those emails, maybe he really is a bad character.

We're getting off-topic, but...

I suspect a decade living like the normal rules don't apply to you will make you think that the rules don't apply to you. Brin, like most executives, probably has an group of people around him invisibly smoothing out his problems and shuttling him past all sorts of obstacles.

I'm basing this on a couple conversations with a retired telecom CEO (Charles) I used to know. Here's what he had:

-If he mentions that someone is bothering him, that person is removed from his presence. (Charles wasn't even aware that this was happening for the first five years of his tenure as CEO--his wife pointed it out to him.)

-There are people who prepare him and make him look good in every conversation. If he doesn't know the answer to a question, he says, "I'll get back to you." Someone else writes the question down and a thoughtful, well-formulated answer appears on his desk the next morning.

-A medical plan that includes a 24/7 on-call doctor. The doctors in his plan specifically take very few patients so Charles and his family can get appointments almost immediately.

-If there's a line or waiting list, he is ushered around the line or someone waits in line on his behalf. Charles literally never waited in line for anything for 15 years.

Charles was thoughtful and empathetic and was lucky to have a wife who kept him grounded. (She would say some variation of, "Don't screw it all up today," as he left the house each morning.) I suspect that most people wouldn't be able to keep a healthy perspective.

Edit: removed an extra word

In this case, I wonder if Schmidt being responsible for handling the legal stuff didn't help here.

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