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).
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.
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.
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?
"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 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.