But it’s not like the small-town social bubble of West Coast software development is a stranger to collusion. What was that thing again? Apple and some other giant tech companies colluding on wages? Well, it was on HN a few times at least. I don’t remember the details.
However, in a small town, business owners may warn each other, and in a small bubble of companies, they may talk to each other.
And if you need a reference, better pick a fellow employee. Other than that, ignore the boogeyman!
For my part, the fired workers that were added to the list had been escorted out by police or wheeled out by EMTs after causing property damage and physical harm to other employees. I didn't think much about it at the time. I was young and foolish and happy to have been promoted off the call center floor into management.
I think the list had started a decade earlier for sharing across sister companies. My local company had been acquired by a larger foreign company which had several US subsidiaries in similar businesses, one of which was just the other side of the river from us. I think they first shared the list amongst themselves which despite them being different companies, is almost "internal", but eventually they started sharing it with another Austin business with a large call center over on Mopac that shared a bunch of workers across different shifts. They'd work for us during the day calling businesses and work theirs at night calling residential. Then a third company joined and I wouldn't be surprised if they shared it even more broadly after I left, but by then I suspect most of the phone workers in Austin were covered at that point.
There were two other companies we regularly swapped low-skill call center workers with and the management teams of all three, I was on one, shared a list of disruptive and dangerous workers we'd had to fire and discouraged any of the three firms to hire. On our end, the list was in Lotus Notes and it was someone's job to make sure it integrated updates from the other call centers.
That was the late 90s and the list sharing started in the late 80s before I got there but it was one of the thing you learned about when you got promoted to management, check the list before the interview!
I started out on the phones and had many friends still on the floor when I got promoted, so learning about the list was a little bit disturbing, but the names I recognized on it from my time in our call center, had been escorted out by the police or carried out by EMTs.
That firm was wild. We literally took on 20 guys from the child sexual abuse convict halfway house to work the phones. Only half made the cut after the trial period and only three of them stayed on more than a few months, and those three were quite good, one making the "CEO" team which was the highly capable group that could hold a CEO on the phone for a 45 minute interview about, for example, printers and multi-function devices conducted on behalf of Dell Computers to see if they were making any headway eating into HP printer sales or whatever.
My point is that back in the '90s lists you say don't exist absolutely did. I not only knew of one, I used it, added to it, and I have every confidence that two other companies employing the same kind of people were using it as well.
At worst, you won't get a positive recommendation from an employer like this if somebody calls and asks. The idea that employers are busy maintaining "no-hire lists" and collecting names from all of their industry peers doesn't hold up, at least not outside of maybe weird small-town social bubbles.