Emails From Schmidt And Sergey Brin Show Agreements Not To Hire Apple Workers

Re:Emails From Schmidt And Sergey Brin Show Agreements Not T... by vacri on Sunday March 23, 2014 @07:47PM (#7455789)

This is an interesting fight to watch from here on the sidelines, given that many employees were colluding to drive up wages - here on HN, we had people boasting about having a stable job, then hearing about a job at another BigNameCo, and applying for it just to drive up their own wage. No intention of leaving their own company, and that it was turning into a routine process rather than the odd here-and-there.

I'm sure there will be apologetics, but it's not like one side was behaving ethically.

They conspire illegally to drive down wages, then whine that not enough people want to work in this field where wages have been artificially and illegally deflated.

This field where wages are still significantly above mean values? Where are these engineers going to go en masse for better wages? Into medicine? Hello for another 10 years training. Law? Already overstaffed, and wages are similar for most anyway. Finance gets some, but isn't going to hold them all. If the engineers are in the career for the dollar, restarting in another career that will pay more is going to be difficult as a group.

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Re:Emails From Schmidt And Sergey Brin Show Agreements Not T... by jkldotio on Sunday March 23, 2014 @08:32PM (#7455943)

You are comparing a legal practice that demonstrates real market value to an employer - i.e. here is a document that shows another participant in this market is willing to pay me $X for what I can do - in a salary negotiation to an illegal practice which distorts the market by decreasing competition.

A legal practice which increases competition and increases the allocation of resources to productive individuals can't be compared to an illegal practice which decreases competition.

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Re:Emails From Schmidt And Sergey Brin Show Agreements Not T... by mike_hearn on Monday March 24, 2014 @06:14AM (#7457469)

Are you suggesting US law requires companies to aggressively try and poach each others staff? That would be remarkable and amazing if so. What if you aren't particularly interested in staffing a large recruiting division, and don't cold-call anyone? What if you think cold-calling is like spam and just feel it's not something your company should do? Do you get in trouble for holding down wages?

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Re:Emails From Schmidt And Sergey Brin Show Agreements Not T... by vidarh on Monday March 24, 2014 @08:53AM (#7457895)

No, he is suggesting that making a mutual agreement not to do so is illegal, just like a whole range of other actions that have price setting effects are legal when a company does it in isolation but illegal when multiple companies collude to affect the pricing.

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Re:Emails From Schmidt And Sergey Brin Show Agreements Not T... by vacri on Sunday March 23, 2014 @11:21PM (#7456501)

Ah, counter ethics with legality? It's legal in some jurisdictions to confiscate the property of a person and sell it before that person has seen the inside of a court. There was an article recently on HN about that, but Jello Biafra spoke of the problem as far back as the 1980s. Using your litmus test, this activity must be ethical because it's legal.

I do not think it's ethical to scare the other party by threatening actions that you have zero intention of carrying out.

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Re:Emails From Schmidt And Sergey Brin Show Agreements Not T... by nova22033 on Sunday March 23, 2014 @08:59PM (#7456051)

The agreement explicitly excludes engineers.

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Re:Emails From Schmidt And Sergey Brin Show Agreements Not T... by n09n on Sunday March 23, 2014 @08:01PM (#7455835)

>we had people boasting about having a stable job, then hearing about a job at another BigNameCo, and applying for it just to drive up their own wage. No intention of leaving their own company, and that it was turning into a routine process rather than the odd here-and-there.

Regardless of your opinions about the morality of this practice, there's no basis for calling it collusion.

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Re:Emails From Schmidt And Sergey Brin Show Agreements Not T... by vacri on Sunday March 23, 2014 @11:25PM (#7456515)

Sure there is - people here on HN were openly talking about colluding with their friends in other companies to do it.

It's not to say that all engineers were doing it (which I think is a salient point), but in all these arguments, the engineers are painted as naifs who had done nothing as a group to merit this. To be clear, I don't agree with the ethics the companies displayed, I just think it's unfair that the collusion between some engineers gets glossed over amongst all the outrage.

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