Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs • Hacker News Board

Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#121

Post by rlt » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 5:52 AM UTC

Thorrez wrote: post #103

pm90 wrote: post #57

I don’t understand Jobs’ logic here. Is he just a bully? If Google makes such a great offer that his employee will leave him, shouldn’t he try to make a better offer, or meet with the employee instead of calling Sergey? Say he did get the offer canceled. How would this employee feel about working for a CEO that does this?

>I don’t understand Jobs’ logic here. Is he just a bully? If Google makes such a great offer that his employee will leave him, shouldn’t he try to make a better offer, or meet with the employee instead of calling Sergey? That could wind up in a bidding war that could end up affecting many employees and salaries going up a lot. That's a lot of lost money for Apple, which makes Steve Jobs mad. Additionally, some employ…

That's a long way of saying: yes, he's a bully.

Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#122

Post by wanderingmind » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 5:55 AM UTC

All this stopped not because of any class action, but one company Meta will not play along with the cabal. Zuck raised the salary so much he started poaching left and right from other tech giants. Google and Apple had no choice but to match the salaries to retain and hire top talent. For all the fault of Meta, they knew the worth of employees and have always tried to give them a good bargain.

Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#123

Post by krick » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 5:55 AM UTC

> on another note, it seems silly to have both firefox and safari. perhaps there is some unificaiton strategy that we can get these two to pursue. combined, they certainly have enough marketshare to drive webmasters.

Now that was funny. (Google Chrome was release in 2008 BTW. 3 years later.)

Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#124

Post by wyclif » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 5:55 AM UTC

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #16

bluehorseray wrote: post #5

It would be pretty cool to have Steve Jobs and Sergey Brin fighting over you as an employee, wonder who it was.

No kidding. That employee's resume could be reduced to one sentence: "Sergey Brin and Steve Jobs got into a yelling match over me." Obviously that's stretching the truth a bit but that would get a lot of attention pretty quickly. Maybe enough to skip the leetcode challenges.

The line from Sergey about Eric Schmidt made me smile. It's his "OK boomer" moment.

Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#125

Post by saagarjha » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 5:59 AM UTC

UIUC_06 wrote: post #102

Rather than think of REDACTED as "labor" it might be more helpful to think of him as a star NBA player. The term "labor" applies more to the players in the D-league. If you're Steve Ballmer and you want Giannis Antetokounmpo on your team, you can't just call him and offer more money. They have regulations around that. So it shouldn't be surprising that Jobs & Brin have conversations about REDACTED. If it was an engin…

There are regulations around not having these conversations.

Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#126

Post by selcuka » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 6:03 AM UTC

ineedasername wrote: post #112

leetrout wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always felt like it was but apparently there is a real chance of me seeing several hundred dollars over buying the horrible 2018 mac air. Nothing close to the 1800 I shelled out for it which I could never recoup.

I just got an $80 check in the mail over a class action regarding the dishwasher (appliance) I had a few years back that broke long before what should have been it’s usable life. Roughly $1000 to replace it. $80 class action settlement. Class actions are a crappy way of extracting the actual cost or damages done by a corporation and then getting those damages into tha hands of people that were on the shit side of the…

If $80 is enough to purchase, say, 2-3 years of extra warranty, then it's a fair amount.

Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#127

Post by gghffguhvc » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 6:03 AM UTC

bluehorseray wrote: post #5

It would be pretty cool to have Steve Jobs and Sergey Brin fighting over you as an employee, wonder who it was.

Probably Dave Hyatt.

Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#128

Post by hota_mazi » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 6:04 AM UTC

It's pretty amazing to me that one of the richest people on the planet (at the time anyway) and arguably one of the most successful tech people ever (Sergey Brin) not only did not see anything wrong with putting all of this illegal stuff down in writing, but he's actually unable to use proper capitalization.

Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#129

Post by hinkley » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 6:04 AM UTC

thayne wrote: post #89

gzer0 wrote: post #78

The tech giants ultimately reached a settlement in the amount of $400 million in a lawsuit involving allegations of these dishonest backdoor dealings. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33292364 [2] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/04/24/306592297...

And financially, it was probably worth it to them.

I suspect the fines exceed the salaries the employees were 'owed' but are much less than the profits earned from those employees, yes.

Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#130

Post by the-rc » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 6:04 AM UTC

wahnfrieden wrote: post #63

JKCalhoun wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't make that bet. Jobs played favorites and I believe he was known to amply reward his favorites.

this email's aim is to suppress market wages. you're mythologizing and neglecting the market-wide knock-on effects of rampant illegal wage theft collusion like this.

Aim? Eventual consequence, yes, most likely, but only as a secondary effect. Eric and co., down to the Maps leadership, were on the receiving end of similar outbursts pretty regularly. It wasn't just about hiring. Sometimes it was about patents, like the pinch to zoom one, which actually existed only in Jobs' fantastic tales. Sometimes it was about YouTube. Sometimes it was about Maps features that he wanted Google to implement (and then attempt to patent for himself). Or it was about Android, which eventually became the straw that broke the camel's back: he threatened war in these 2005 mails and did follow through with the iPhone patent battles. Pretty much everything was a zero sum game, in his book. As someone (RIP) said, dealing with him was like dealing with Khrushchev, minus the shoes.

Anyway, most of the above have little to do directly with wages and a lot to do with pride, bullying, control and/or things that smell a lot like narcissistic injuries (see also former presidents and current tech CEOs prone to meltdowns). I'm not a psychologist or play one, though, so take that with a grain of salt.

Eric and co. simply appeased him way too often. They did push back and occasionally even troll him (like the night before the Nexus One launch), but nowhere enough. If only they had penned a reply like Palm's.