The difference between then and now is that it’s now ingrained in the tech savvy executives that you cannot put anything in writing that would be construed as collusion. At best we’ll see “Call me to discuss” or “Lets get together to understand”. It’s not going to end because it hasn’t ended. Only the paper trail for the astute has ended.
Pretty much any upper body of a serious organisation would work that way. A tad bit of detachment needs to exist between doing things, and making decisions about doing things, and making policies about doing things, and judging if things were done right. This is also called 'separation of powers/concerns' in modern political lingo.
Or you will end up in all kinds of 'action paralysis' situations, and you would also end up dragging your emotions into these things which will have unintended consequences. The worse that could happen is the whole organisation could reduce to doing things for the self preservation of top individual(s) and not the organisation or people/interests they serve.
Yet we just saw a variety of directors and vps at google have discovered emails about the tvc payment scandal. Clearly they don't have the basics down.
Of course it is... that way there is no proof. I've done my own thing for a decade and I'm only worth low 7 figures in liquid assets. However I was offered 8 figures over 5 years to join a FAANG company nearly a decade ago but I don't play that game. Don't feed the beast. I was building autonomous cars more than a decade ago but didn't want to be a slave for Schmidt etc.
>As of October 31, 2013, Intuit, Pixar and Lucasfilm have reached a tentative settlement agreement. Pixar and Lucasfilm agreed to pay $9 million in damages, and Intuit agreed to pay $11 million in damages.[9] In May 2014, Judge Lucy Koh approved the $20 million settlement between Lucasfilm, Pixar, and Intuit and their employees. Class members in this settlement, which involved fewer than 8% of the 65,000 employees affected, will receive around $3,840 each.[14]
That's it. Seems so small. That is like a week's worth of pay. It goes to show how class action suits only enrich lawyers, in the end.
I opted out of my check in the settlement. Part of why it was so small is the law firm representing the plaintiffs apparently were more interested in a quick settlement than reasonable compensation. The settlement you quote there wasn't the final one; that was the one rejected as being embarrassingly too small. The final settlement in 2015 was larger, but still very small.
For me it was the personal abuse of trust that really stuck with me. Folks I worked with and respected colluded to keep my wages and the wages of my colleagues low. Illegally. I don't think they ever apologized for it either.
Nothing really. I retained the right to sue for my own personal judgement, which I have not done.
The main thing I got was the satisfaction of writing a letter to the judge pointing out that the attorneys who were representing my class ignored my attempts to communicate with them. I dug up the letter:
To the Court for the High-Tech Employee Antitrust Lawsuit,
I am writing to explain my decision to opt-out of the proposed settlement for the lawsuit against my former employer, Google, and their collusion with other employers. I was a software engineer at Google 2001–2006.
Google, Apple, Adobe and Intel are some of the leading employers in my industry. The harm they did to software engineers, particularly junior ones, is enormous. It’s not simply the lost wages in the settlement period; the market distortion set back the careers of my friends. Artificially lower wages compound for years as new jobs’ salaries often depend on previous ones. Brilliant young engineers lost opportunities to advance their careers because they were unaware of opportunities at other companies. The harm done was significant and I do not feel the settlement is sufficient.
I’m also opting out because I am unimpressed with my nominated attorneys. The fact that Judge Koh ruled the original settlement was “below the range of reasonableness” suggests my attorneys are poor negotiators and have not represented the plaintiffs effectively. I do not see wish to participate in a settlement where they receive $80M+ dollars. Also personally, I’m irritated that they cannot even do class members the courtesy of answering email sent to the published contact address of **@****.com. My emails of April 29 and May 10 both went unacknowledged.
Thank you for reading my letter. I do not wish to speak at the Fairness Hearing.
If you opt into the class settlement, you absolve the defendant of all liability so you can't sue them yourself in the future (for the same issue). If you don't join the class, you can still sue the defendant separate from the class. Not sure if that was the reason for the commenter above opting out, though.
No, Facebook did, by just refusing to take part in the cartel. You only need one company to start bidding up salaries for the category of employee they want to move the market if they have a big enough budget. The DOJ didn't even push for a reasonable fine, one measured in years of revenue, or reasonable punishment, like jailtime for executives and HR staff who were in on the conspiracy.
The number of amoral geniuses purely driven by technical challenge is limited. Businesses making money on the edge of ethics have to treat their employees well to keep them. When there is no "big lofty goal", you need to get people motivated someway. Adtech, fintech, crypto...
I'm not sure if I follow. How does "not trying to hire each others employees" lead to wage cartel? Wouldn't they instead have to agree to fix their wages for that to happen?
Apple pays employee x, Google offers x*1.2, Apple could retain by offering x*1.2 (or more). Apple instead decides to collude with Google to not poach from each other. Now all companies everywhere decide to do this. Wages get fixed.
It's a negative pressure on wages if you manage to get hired at one of the top companies in the country, but are unable to jump to one of the other large companies. It effectively removes the most stable companies from that employees prospects, only allowing growth if that employee moves to a smaller company.
Empirically, within a few months after publication of Facebook refusal of a "truce" with Google, Google implemented a 10% raise across the board, and a $1,000 bonus.
This was part of the lawsuit. They communicated with each other about offers made to each other's employees and agreed not to counter-offer above the initial offer.
Why qualify it with "sometimes"? I think it's safe to assume that the way a person behaves in private, among their peers, shows more about their essential character than how they behave when doing public relations.
The Schmidt and Jobs on display in the email are the essential Schmidt and Jobs. The admirable qualities are the stage show.
That's an interesting question. The cynic argues that everyone is on a PR mission and that our true self is when we are in a moment of weakness. The idealist argues that those moments are rare and far in between, and shouldn't define us. But at the heart of the debate is the question of whether there is a "true self" at all. Maybe people do just what people do.
I suspect we try to characterize people because we're attempting to build a Bayesian Model that can help us predict someone's next move. And all that is going to depend on our 'prior' and 'base rate'. In this perspective, there is no "true self" that will be observed by everyone on the planet.
It's important to consider the context here. What seems significant, in lieu of the eventual exposure of their wage fixing scheme, was what Steve Jobs didn't say in his response. Read the emoji as "that works" rather than just "I'm pleased".
Sure, but at the very best it means he did not object to somebody getting fired over it.
Legality of wage fixing aside for the moment, I don't think this should have been a fireable offense at all (reprimanding the recruiter to ensure it does not happen again would have been all that's needed to satisfy their little gentlemen's agreement).
Object to what end? That was Google’s call to terminate the recruiter. What should he have said: oh, that sucks, I didn’t want you to fire one of your people over it? The only outcome there is disagreement and why waste the energy, even if he believed that? That’s also a mixed signal contextually.
Even setting aside how Steve fired more than one person on the spot — I’m personally aware of him firing half a room in MobileMe, for example — and everything we know about him, and how the firing of that recruiter was probably the outcome he was telegraphing via the email, there’s absolutely nothing to gain in this situation challenging or objecting to Google’s move as an executive at another company, particularly on moral grounds. He’d have looked like an (exploitable) idiot, to be quite frank, given how business works at this level.
How do you think that conversation would have gone? “Oh, you’re right, we shouldn’t have done that, our bad?”
Did I say he should have objected, or to get the recruiter reinstated? I find it inappropriate to respond with a smilie when you hear somebody was just fired. Something more neutral like "I appreciate the issue has been handled" would have sat better with me (disregarding the larger context of how f*cked up the entire agreement was, of course).
Admirable qualities? I'm pretty certain that I would have told Steve to fuck off within five minutes of meeting him. Just another rich prick consumed by his ever inflating ego.
But I also wouldn't also have left the building without that NeXT station under my arm.
As a non-American I'm always surprised at how quickly people are fired there. I cannot imagine such a severe action been taking in any country I've worked in, thanks to robust workers rights.
As a European, I was also surprised to find out that the US has a very low unemployment rate compared to what I am used to. Then I moved to the US, and on a few occasions found myself in a position to be able to consider hiring a lot of people very quickly (and hence taking on a substantial amount of risk, both for the company and those employees). I can definitely tell you that if the US had the same workers rights as Europe, I wouldn't have hired nearly as many people - not even close, less than half for sure. In one instance it was the wrong call to hire so quickly, and all other instances it was the right call and generated value for both sides.
I know that in Europe you can let people go if the company is experiencing financial difficulties and all that, but there's no question that the commitment to any new European employee you hire is higher than in the case of their US counterpart. And it would be foolish to assume that by increasing the decisioning barrier there wouldn't be some kind of an action-reaction happening in the market. As an employer, you never have 100% certainty that a new initiative will pay off - there's always this doubt in the back of your mind. Well, if the cost of failure is higher in one case than another, you are simply going to initiate fewer bets and will also give fewer people an opportunity to benefit from them (and those bets that you do initiate, you will approach more carefully and with fewer people).
Does this explain the entire gap in unemployment? Of course not. But I really do think it is a factor. So what's better - a bulletproof job that fewer people have, or a more risky proposition that more people can get access to? I don't think I have an answer to this, but I certainly don't think that the answer is always in increasing the decisioning barriers.
This perceived gap in unemployment needs some actual sources.
Unemployment in northern Europe is lower than in comparable places in the US with the same labour rights.
I can imagine unemployment in Southern Europe to be higher, but I am curious what you think you are comparing.
Here is something else to think about: it's safer to hire Americans because they will work 60 hours a week, never take a sick day, won't get pregnant and even if you give them vacation days they won't use them. So they are about 3/5 of the price of your typical European employee. A much better value proposition.
In return some of this will burn them out and put them on edge. This will likely have cultural, political and social consequences. If only we could give our American friends the sleep, reflection and family time they so much deserve.
You talk about sources, and then you immediately dwelve into myths about how much US workers work. They do work more than the western Europe, on par with more hardworking EU: Poland, Romania, Greece etc. It's not 50% more https://data.oecd.org/emp/hours-worked.htm
You should also cosider wages and disposable income. The US worker will have a substantially higher wage, and because of lower taxes and living costs, a higher disposable income.
If you think its reasonable to use Poland, Romania or Greece as your benchmark for Europe, i think its reasonable to use Puerto Rico, Missisipi and Lousiana as the benchmark for the United States.
>You should also cosider wages and disposable income.
As one would consider purcasing power, healthcare costs, student debts, good public infrastructure, public spaces, physical safety, quality of water, quality of air, amount of people owining firearms, amount of conspiracy nuts, reliability of things like heat and electricity, the level of institutational racism, human rights, freedom of speech, etc. Lets not even dive in the fact that healthy high quality food is so much more expensive in the US.
This notion that you are rewarded better for the same work in the US is just not true. You have to work more, you have to put up with more abuse, you have to spend more time travelling to work, your roads are shit, your public transit is none existing. If you get into a small car crash, you have to worry for a bit if the other person will drive on (stucking you with a bill), or bring a gun (because they might just be angry and armed!). Your kids live in a cage in suburbia and after working all those hours, you will have to drive them around for them to go anywhere except their own house.
It is part of the reasoning. Another part is that Europe generally has better unemployment benefits and health care not tied to employment. This drives people to take worse jobs in the U.S.
In addition you have to ensure you look at comparable statistics on who is counted as unemployed. This is toften tied to receiving unemployment benefits or being able to work etc. so different statistics might count based on different criteria.
I’ve found most private English firms have no difficulty letting people go if they need to.
It seems a different story for public orgs like schools and government positions. But private companies have a lot more freedom than some in here have been suggesting.
It’s likely a different story elsewhere in Europe though. There’s a lot of countries with their own laws in Europe
I think the other thing is that the US can hire people for very cheap (like 2$/hour) with the idea that maybe the actual customers can contribute to the worker's salary to make it up. Often you need to get another job to reach a living wage. It's a great way to enslave people and get good unemployment numbers.
You're describing so-called "server wages," which only apply to businesses with tipped employees (and do not apply in the seven "equal treatment" states, including California and Washington). I don't think it makes a huge difference in total unemployment numbers, because tipped workers represent something like 2-3% of all US workers.
(I agree that the concept of server wage is pretty awful and should be eliminated as a matter of policy.)
there might be a correlation to how quickly companies form, projects start, and innovation progresses in America (entrepreneurship) compared to Europe, and how the robust workers' rights might figure into making companies reluctant to hire a batch of workers that they can't easily terminate.
Any such correlation wouldn't be down to causation imo. I've always assumed the American attitude of "Do first, ask forgiveness later" was the more likely candidate for many of Silicon Valley's success stories.
It's also worth noting that there's plenty of innovation happening in Europe too.
edit: I'll add a little more detail as to why I don't agree with your theory: in Europe you can still make employees redundant relatively easily. So if a company hires 100 employees then realises it's not cost effective, it can easily make 80 of them redundant. The catch is you cannot rehire for the same roles (basically you cannot make someone redundant to get around firing them), but given the purpose of your thought experiment was to cull staff after initial growth, redundancy works perfectly fine here.
Europe also has such as thing as short term contracts. Not contractors, though we obviously have that too, but FTEs that are hired for 6 months / 1 year rather than indefinitely. I'm sure America has this too.
So there isn't really any need to hire people with the intention of firing them shortly after. In fact any company that does this would get a pretty bad reputation pretty quickly. That's true for America too.
I've also seen people fired at short notice in the UK too so it's not like it can't happen in Europe even with greater worker rights. Heck, I was unfairly fired from one job -- but I hated the job anyway so it wasn't worth my time taking the company to court. Instead I used that energy to find a job I did like.
Chill buddy, I wasn't claiming to know the answer. I was just saying I think your hypothesis is unlikely and gave a counter-theory. That's generally how discourse works and it's definitely not a personal attack.
I will say calling your own hypothetical link as "sensical" is a little presumptuous though. The very fact I disagreed in the first place should be evidence that it's sensical to everyone. :)
I heard all sorts of hypothetical links suggested in microeconomic circles. Some of them contradict other hypothetical links and it's hard to really prove these things given the huge number of variables involved. However this particular suggestion still seems rather unlikely to me.
It's the at-will employment where employer or employee can cancel the relationship without cause. In ENG you have crazy lengths of time to give notice like 2-3 months. Not a very pleasant experience for the employee. You also see attempts by European employers to AVOID taking on permanent workers. E.g. in ENG it used to be 2 years of contracting required a FTE contract but they'd cancel the contract three months shy. You also have terrible zero hours contracts in ENG.
I think that many companies prefer to fire their employees immediately in exchange for money, typically what the employee would have been paid if he stayed for the notice time.
It is expensive, but often better than dealing with a disgruntled employee for 2 months.
Honestly I could see this happening in Europe, mainly when such high profiles are involved.
Even with robust workers rights this still happens a lot. If the company wants you out they'll get their way. Employees can always dispute at the employment court, but it's overwhelming so few do so and companies leverage that.
It's crazy to me as someone who believes in mutually consensual relationships in all things (including business and trade) that doing something last week is implicit requirement that one does the same thing next week, and that withdrawing consent to additional future trade is seen as a "severe action".
"A job" is really a fictional abstraction. Every day one works is additional services-for-money. Either party should rightfully be able to say "no thanks, that's enough, tomorrow is a new day" at any time.
This is a fine mentality when you're running a lemonade stand, but gets complicated when you're talking about a person's livelihood in a country where something like 60% of people are living paycheck to paycheck. If ONLY we lives in a society that valued itself over the profits of a few individuals.
It's nothing to do with livelihood and everything to do with the liquidity of the labor market.
If a person can get another job immediately, you aren't harming them by declining to continue to be a customer. In fact, you employing them is no power over them at all (unless you were overpaying them relative to their market value).
It regularly happens in reality. I know people who have walked out of one job, crossed a street, and walked in to another less than a half hour later. With construction, bartenders, kitchen and waitstaff, bussers, and security it is ridiculously common.
It becomes more common the lower skill the job becomes, as the fungibility of the worker increases.
Notice how the USA is the top country in the world for getting ahead. If you want to work hard and become rich, that's your spot. Places with "robust workers rights"? Not-so-much.
I disagree with this actually - the effective savings rate is generally lower in the US compared to a lot of countries with "robust workers rights" if you're working in the US you end up losing a lot of wealth to problems that are generally societally insured elsewhere in the world.
I would look into stats on social mobility by country.
Social mobility in the US is still pretty good last time I checked. Most European countries have have lower income income inequality, but less mobility. Eg, the difference between the bottom and top 25‰ is smaller, but your birth class is more predictive of your future income.
Unfortunately, no data on social mobility was used in the making of this ranking.
The authors picked several factors like which they assume lead to improved social mobility (like births/woman), score countries out of 100, then perform a simple numerical average them to form the mobility index. Look at page 205 of the report for the list. They don't validate that the factors are actually related in any way to mobility outcomes.
Sure, it takes other things than income into consideration as well, but it's probably better that way if you really want to understand how easy it is to improve your life in each country. They do consider income as well: "In Denmark or Finland, for example, if one’s parent earns 100% more than another, it is estimated that the impact on a child’s future income is around 15%, compared to about 50% in the United States...".
>Sure, it takes other things than income into consideration as well.
In fact, mean income feeds 0% into the index ranking. Intergenerational change in income feeds 0% into the index. Income inequality (fixed in time), feeds in 10% to the index.
> They do consider income as well: "In Denmark or Finland, for example, if one’s parent earns 100% more than another, it is estimated that the impact on a child’s future income is around 15%, compared to about 50% in the United States...".
That is a reference to another study in the section explaining "why social mobility matters". It was NOT included in the Index ranking. That line data isn't sourced well, so it is hard to follow up on what exactly they are comparing and how.
That's quite possible. Americans also lose a lot of money unnecessarily to utilities (the cellphone bills are ridiculous) and keeping-up-with-the-joneses expenses like a starbucks a day. I think it's pretty hard to distinguish those costs as we can see similar or higher standards of living elsewhere - but I do think the out of pocket expenses hurt a lot (and they hurt even more when you stop drawing an income - retiring in the states is a huge gamble).
Starbucks and fastfood, etc, I don't see it as keeping-up-with-the-joneses expenses.
I feel in the US there is a lot of subconscious decision making that's essentially about buying more time with money, but in an actual monetary transaction as opposed to some implicit trade off. They seem to be chronically starved for time.
> If you want to work hard and become rich, that's your spot.
Maybe, maybe not. I'd argue there are far more who tried and failed than who succeeded, but I don't know if that ratio of success is better or worse than in other countries today (yes, today - not when the US economy was booming relative to other countries, or when immigration was easy, or in the early days of Silicon Valley, or back during the Gold Rush(es) etc).
In any case, though, I would argue this argument applies to a narrow slice of the population, namely those whose main goal is to get rich. Not everybody wants to "work hard and become rich". Not everybody wants life to be a competition to get ahead. Plenty of people are not deeply invested in a career and simply want to work 40h/week for a decent salary and still be able to afford a decent life.
Others feel a calling to a profession that will generally not make you rich, but is still valuable to society. Case in point: teachers. Extremely valuable to society and extremely badly compensated in the US. If I wanted to be a teacher, I'd much rather be in most European countries than in the US.
> Switzerland and Luxembourg are way WAY richer per capita than the US, and have much robust employee rights.
When you say per capita, are you referring to median or mean figures?
Hong Kong is richer per capita than Switzerland at the median and does not have nearly as robust of employee rights.
The US is richer at the median than Germany and does not have nearly the worker protections. The US also has vastly more low skill labor immigration (for 40+ years now), which persistently debases its median figures. Why are German workers so relatively poor, if the claims about worker rights is accurate? Surely the dynamo of Europe, the German economy, combined with such potent worker protections, should lead to enormous median wealth.
Luxembourg has 613,000 people. That's a pretty ridiculous comparison. You're comparing a giant country of 330 million to a modest size city like San Francisco.
germany is only 10% or so behind the US in terms of PPP. They also have more vacation, fewer layoffs, cheaper housing, generally lower cost of living (by more than 10%), and many other things.
Perhaps they made a different trade off, more leisure, less work?
I've only brought up the two most obvious examples (there many others) that negate entirely that silly notion that somehow human rights are incompatible with technological advancement, which borders on hate speech.
I mean, should we really go back to slavery to become space-faring species? Not the kind of future I want to live in.
Could it be that NYC is simply garbage to begin with?
Norway (lets ignore because oil, but really it's not oil), Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Iceland - also better? Longer vacations, better transit, definitely less hobos from what I remember, and no pervasive urine odour.
And bigger median annual incomes.
The weather is brutal in some parts of Nordics, I'll give you that. Not sure if I'd trade cold weather for urine vapours though. Very very difficult question, so I guess NYC isn't entirely hopeless just yet.
Interesting, because this sounds like wild speculation - yet you've stated it as if it is a cold hard fact. Do you have any sources or statistics to back this up?
In 2018 the Swiss financial sector accounted for 9.1% of GDP. For comparison, in 2018 the US financial sector accounted for 7.4% of US GDP. To claim that it is _entirely_ banking is just plain wrong. To insinuate that there is no innovation elsewhere, (but there sure is in good ol' America), is just insulting.
>Financial markets in the United States ... In 2018, finance and insurance represented 7.4 percent (or $1.5 trillion) of U.S. gross domestic product[0]
>Switzerland’s financial sector ... as a share of gross domestic product (GDP). In 2018, it represented 9.1%[1]
Somewhat more true of Luxembourg than of Switzerland.
> Luxembourg remains a financial powerhouse – the financial sector accounts for more than 35% of GDP - because of the exponential growth of the investment fund sector through the launch and development of cross-border funds (UCITS) in the 1990s. Luxembourg is the world’s second-largest investment fund asset domicile, after the US, with $4 trillion of assets in custody in financial institutions.
3rd most globally competitive economy in the world.
Sure, yeah. no innovation at all at Sandoz, Nestle, Novartis and Roche, and ~200 other companies in life sciences and another 300 in precision manufacturing.
Many are simply legal predators using their enormous funds for legal lobbying. Selling repackaged water, sweetened water, sparkling sweetened water, coloured sweetened water.
I never understood it either. It's usually the wrong, honest, helpful employees that get fired first.
I'm not a loyal employee. I do most jobs just good enough to get by, and alway looking for a angle to extract more money out of an organization. (It was easier before being surveiled with cams). I always like a few coworkers, and we become friends, but despised the corporation, and everyone in charge.
I think there is a lot of context being left out here, and people who were not in the industry during this time period will wonder whether this is legal or whatever. The answer is, no it is not legal and there was a class action lawsuit.
Also, to be clear, the lawsuit was not defending any company's right to hire from anyone they want. The class action lawsuit represented the employees of the companies involved in the anti-competitive behavior.
A cash penalty is always good, if it's big enough it's capable of making change pretty efficiently. Hits the bosses of the bosses of the bosses, that is the shareholders; then shit rolls down and throws some assholes off the feeder (a "reorg"). In fact there isn't really any other efficient way of making changes to organizations from the outside, other than putting the right people in prison, which would definitely be too much here.
I am not impressed by Google's response here. I am not so sure that this recruiter deserved termination. They were hired to find personnel. I haven't seen this "do not call" policy, but it seems unnecessarily restrictive to not allow people to put out feelers and instead require them to sit and wait for candidates to come to them. There is more that is not known in this story, it's possible Google recruiting had a manager that was putting pressure on them to find perfect candidates or else and they were feeling desperate.
Bad managers exist in every company, Google would not be an exception to this and rules go out the window when executive gets involved, as happened here.
It really is ludicrous when you read it.
Google fired someone they hired to find people, for trying to find people just because it would please the CEO at another company that Eric was on the board of directors of.
Where I live, the banks talk to each other to make sure that they're paying roughly the same for a given type of position. Every time I or others complained about our perceived low pay, they said that they don't give cost of living increases and that they compare with their peers and that they are not out-of-line with what the other banks are doing.
Well you know.. this kind of collusion is called price fixing.
Does the initial forwarded message imply that the SRE who received the recruiter's offer forwarded it to Stebe, or that it was picked up surreptitiously as it passed through Apple's email system to the intended recipient? I just can't imagine any SRE getting so pissed off at receiving a recruiter mail that they would forward it to their CEO.
Or maybe he knows Eric Schmidt doesn't take orders from him and therefore it's politically inaccurate to make a demand? Many leaders with people skills will say "i prefer if you did x" or similar when appropriate because they know they can't control everyone, it gives the person they are talking to an out and preserves everyone's ego, etc.
If memory serves, Erik personally had a business relationship with Apple at the time. He may have been a board member or advisor... So he actually did take _some_ orders from Steve.
This also isn't the only threatening email from Steve to Erik. There was a Google labs project that had been approved by apple legal that got an angry email from Steve too. The lawyers signed off, so Google was protected but it didn't prevent swift action. (The lab project was taken down but the dev was not in trouble.)
Yes, Eric was on the board so he would be in the position to order, board member don't take order from CEO, they give. In this case, I think it was a friendly communication between two tech leaders.
This is also the guy who basically wrote a letter to the public / app developers that said 'you can't use flash' so blatently the DoJ, SEC and FTC were roshambo'ing each other to see who got to sue him first.
It's both, either, or neither. The spelling he used is common and widely accepted. According to legend Rochambeau played it, but there is no evidence for that. The earliest written reference to the word doesn't spell it like the French general's name, though similar enough to plausibly be a corruption of it. However it may also be a corruption of the japanese name for the game.
Anyway, I'd guess he was downvoted because a lot of people here have an old justified hate of flash and thought his comment signaled tribal allegiance to the opposite camp.
suggesting that you know that saying "Rochambeau" is unconnected from the French name Rochambeau is a folk etymology. Saying we can't identify any connection between this word and a person with the same name is closer to the truth.
SFGate[1] reported at the time that exactly what I said happened happened. IIRC Apple later mooted any regulatory action by reverting their developer policy change. But for a while, it was looking pretty sketchy. And I think it's telling that the Thoughts on Flash letter is no longer available, taken offline at around the same time antitrust suits started up again.
Not having a coordinated effort to effectively avoid wage inflation due to competition would be a more reasonable approach too. Then again, the law says this wasn't a reasonable course.
Yes. Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, Lucasfilm, and Pixar were all conspiring to keep wages down. Big lawsuit.
US$425 million settlement. See link above.
There's a followup email in the same thread saying that Jobs was cool with other companies hiring anyone that approached them directly, but not cool with companies doing "systematic solicitation" - https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1402650278105583620/ph...
Even though the person is paraphrasing what he said, doesn't that make sense? It's scummy and illegal to block a move once a person has decided to switch companies - but it doesn't seem to be the case here. It may be ok to target a specific person that you think may be a great fit.
However, is it ok to systematically target entire teams(regardless of whether or not this actually happened)? The answer to that may still be yes, but I haven't made up my mind on that yet.
Yes, it was illegal. But the harm is to employees, not Google. Google was cooperating along with the others so that Apple would not make competing offers to their employees, either.
They do, but the lawsuit was brought by the class of affected employees, not by the companies. The companies were all in on the anti-competitive behaviors
Gotta wonder why Jobs was so upset over random headhunter spam. Isn't it obvious that's what this message was? Everybody whose email address is publicly visible gets a dozen of these a month, don't they? If Jobs had bothered to check his spam folder, I'll bet he would've found a couple of messages trying to recruit him to Google.
Yes, there was an illegal, unethical deal in place, but I wouldn't think this message alone would trigger such a conversation at the highest levels.
Side thought: it always annoys me when people change a subject line. I think I get it - it’s like a subliminal or contextual message. But it still seems odd and off, sort of.
I know that their was a (laughable) settlement for the employees whose wages were depressed because of this, but I wonder if the fired recruiters had a case as well.
Probably yes, given recruiters are supposed to recruit and need to actually find people lest they get a bad performance review. It might have been policy to not cold call/cold email people, but culture could have dictated otherwise to meet quotas.
> their was a (laughable) settlement for the employees whose wages were depressed because of this
There also used to be tens of millions in wages paid out to people employed by cigarette companies. The conduct of the industry, and the individual employees themselves, will generally impact how people see them and thus how employable they are over time.
Reminds me of Charles Hoskinson (Cardano) who ranted about some competitor trying to pouch his employees. Somewhere in this interview with Lex: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKh8hjJNhWc
Below, there's an email from Sergey Brin to google's exec team about another call from Steve Jobs on the same kind of topic. But there's a kind of funny line at the end:
> on another note, it seems silly to have both firefox and safari. perhaps there is some unification stretegy that we can get these two to pursue.
Which of course brings to mind the ol' "Standards" xkcd:
Standards are great until they get too complex, making the price for interoperability steep and forcing every implementation to pay for it (in actual money/time). There's a reason there are very few browsers.
I'm immediately skeptical of anyone I meet in the tech industry who doesn't think Steve Jobs was an absolute raging asshole. Yes, he accomplished some interesting product shipments. But the number of direct first person anecdotes of him being a complete dick to people is too great to ignore.
I'm writing this from a Macbook Air. One of the reasons why I use MacOS is because it's based on the NeXT heritage. There was some amazing stuff there. But Steve was just not a nice person.
Depends on what he was known as an asshole for. For one, what he did to his daughter's mother puts him a bit past the "only tips 5%" end of the scale of assholery.
And why does he have to be nice to the people around him? To be a leader, he needs to say things other people can't say, or won't say. He is brutal, yes, but without this brutality, the products or teams or the company would be mediocre. Everyone is happy with nice words, but nice words don't always get you nice products and results.
It's not even a mistake. They tried to recruit a presumably well qualified person, that they had every legal right to recruit. Fired for literally trying to do their job.
How do you know person was not very well aware of the policy, and while their colleagues did adhere to it, the person in question did not, and attempted to benefit themselves financially/whatnot by breaking the said policy?
Why do you think ":)" === CEO is happy about a person getting fired?
That's why I asked "Why are you disgusted?" (thanks for downvotes everyone while asking a simple question)
It might be fair to be "disgusted" that CEOs put a policy forbidding cold outreach to competitors employees (but I personally wouldn't use such an emotional word)
But I don't get why you feel disgusted about a different thing and why you expect a CEO of a multibillion company with thousands of employees care about a random person in another company breaking another company policies and getting fired for it?
People get fired for violating policies. A CEO is happy that the issue is handled. What's the problem with that? You can sue if the policy is illegal, but before the lawsuit settles, it is not.
Don't push your current ideology back on historic matter. Whether something is illegal is dynamic and dependent on the era. Smoking weed would get you in jail not too long ago. So is that right or wrong? Things are not always black or white. Stay open-minded
There's nothing to be open minded here. A person got fired because they violated an illegal policy, that was illegal the moment Google and Apple started their collusion, not when they were sued for it.
That this wasn't legal was not some big surprise or innovation in law in the "historic" times of 2007 either. (indeed, according to evidence from the case Schmidt explicitly mentioned not discussing the policy by email to not create a papertrail).
You know what gives an enormous satisfaction? Responding to Glogle recruiters "I can afford false negatives in my current job search, thanks no thanks". Screw you all Glaplle, Schmarmazon and others... and you folks stop being so desperate.
I'm going to go against the grain here and point out that in Sergey's email he says that Steve is fine with Google hiring Apple staff if the employee initiates the contact with Google. (ie apply for the job)
I don't think its unreasonable for two business owners to be upset about actively attacking each others business.
I think if Apple and Google had agreed to not interview or hire staff that worked at each others company then that would be crossing a line. IN this case they are harming their own business by not hiring the best candidate for the job.
