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Steve Jobs personally asked Eric Schmidt to stop poaching employees

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Re: Steve Jobs personally asked Eric Schmidt to stop poaching employees

#2
"If a Pixar employee applies to Intel without being recruited by Intel, contact Pat Gelsinger and explain to him a Pixar employee (provide the candidates name) has applied to Intel without being recruited and he will contact the CEO of Pixar for approval to hire"

Scary.

Re: Steve Jobs personally asked Eric Schmidt to stop poaching employees

#3
Summary of http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/27/us-apple-lawsuit-i...

Kind of ironic that The AOL Way was supposed to be the reason The Verge guys left to start a new blog. It looks like the only thing they were tired of was Engadget's layout. The AOL Way doesn't deserve traffic.

Re: Steve Jobs personally asked Eric Schmidt to stop poaching employees

#5
This seems like a pretty poor strategy for the involved companies.

1) It makes other companies (not involved in the agreement) more attractive, as their salaries will be closer to the salaries offered by the companies involved in the cartel.

2) This means that the pool of potential employees is reduced due the agreement, which means that the companies involved in the cartel will have to bear higher recruiting costs.

3) These recruiting costs make a mistake in hiring more costly. It gets harder to "test" employees and let them go when they are a bad fit, because expenditures from your HR budget are shifted to the front (on the promise of savings down the line).

4) Further, when the cartel breaks (as it will, each company has an incentive to cheat on the other members) the payoff of this inflated recruiting "investment" disappears.

Re: Steve Jobs personally asked Eric Schmidt to stop poaching employees

#6
imagine how fast Congress would get involved if something like this were revealed to exist between basketball or football teams for free agents. If these companies don't want employees to leave they are free to sign long term contracts to lock them up. This is plainly illegal

Re: Steve Jobs personally asked Eric Schmidt to stop poaching employees

#7
post #5

This seems like a pretty poor strategy for the involved companies. 1) It makes other companies (not involved in the agreement) more attractive, as their salaries will be closer to the salaries offered by the companies involved in the cartel. 2) This means that the pool of potential employees is reduced due the agreement, which means that the companies involved in the cartel will have to bear higher recruiting costs.…

Yes the free market can work - if the employee knows to discount an offer from one of the cartel companies because they will not be able to move to another cartel member.

Re: Steve Jobs personally asked Eric Schmidt to stop poaching employees

#8
I can only imagine how hard it is to have fair negotiations when a prospective employee applies at a competing company only to be told "no thanks" simply because of a hush hush agreement between the executives of said companies.

This flies counter with Google's "do no evil" statement and certainly doesn't paint a positive posthumous picture of Jobs.

Re: Steve Jobs personally asked Eric Schmidt to stop poaching employees

#9
post #5

This seems like a pretty poor strategy for the involved companies. 1) It makes other companies (not involved in the agreement) more attractive, as their salaries will be closer to the salaries offered by the companies involved in the cartel. 2) This means that the pool of potential employees is reduced due the agreement, which means that the companies involved in the cartel will have to bear higher recruiting costs.…

Yes the free market can work - if the employee knows to discount an offer from one of the cartel companies because they will not be able to move to another cartel member.

A hiring cartel basically acts like super-duper large company doesn't it? So by that logic we would discount offers from large companies compared to ones from smaller companies. Oh wait, we do, as large company pay > startup pay. ;) But is it for this reason?!
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