I find it interesting that had they framed the 'do not hire' rules under the concept of avoiding lawsuits due to trade secrets, then there would be zero 'evil' in the whole thing (Not that I think it was evil in any case).

On top of that, unless I missed something, the documents I've read excluded engineers, the ones getting their jimmies ruffled, from the 'do not hire' list and simply had them on a 'no cold call' list. It was management and sales that were under some 'do not hire' list, right?

In this whole thing, the only part that I find morally/legally suspect is the agreement to not hire certain categories of employees from certain companies. Everything else is just a bunch of hand waving from highly paid people that want to be paid even more. And even that, had it been worded slightly different, would be arguably legal.

And that's exactly what I'm getting at. Once you establish that there has been a breach of law, you _have_ to take the context/wording into account, which is highly "slimy" on its own merit, as the grandparent post puts it, and turns what might otherwise be a "don't word your hiring practices in such a way or collude them between companies" reprimand into a "you're clearly doing really underhanded things, and are even _self effacing_ about this" (citing the "let's not put on paper something we could get sued over" memos)

I (as an engineer) have my "jimmies rustled" because this sets a really worrying precedent for the behaviors of these companies I do/might work for, and is frankly the sort of behavior that makes me have implicitly low trust for people with this sort of power, which is an unfortunate state of things. (I'd really like to be able to trust people, I promise...)