> High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation is a 2010 United States Department of Justice (DOJ) antitrust action and a 2013 civil class action against several Silicon Valley companies for alleged "no cold call" agreements which restrained the recruitment of high-tech employees.
> The defendants were high-technology companies Adobe, Apple Inc., Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay, each of which was headquartered in Silicon Valley, in the southern San Francisco Bay Area of California.
> The civil suit was filed by five plaintiffs. It accused the tech companies of collusion between 2005 and 2009 to refrain from recruiting each other's employees.
This is a criminal matter. It should not be too hard to prove criminal intent :
> A few months later, Schmidt instructed a fellow exec not to discuss the no-call list other than “verbally,” he wrote in an email, “since I don’t want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later?”
There was both a civil suit (brought by five employees) and a criminal complaint brought by the DOJ. The criminal complaint was about a violation of antitrust law:
> On September 24, 2010, the United States Department of Justice Antitrust Division filed a complaint in the US District Court for the District of Columbia alleging violations of Section 1 of the Sherman Act. In US v. Adobe Systems Inc., et al., the Department of Justice alleged that Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, and Pixar had violated Section 1 of the Sherman Act by entering into a series of bilateral "No Cold Call" Agreements to prevent the recruitment of their employees...
Complaint against companies, not against individual actors for some reason. The final judgements in both resulted in meager compensation and achieved zero deterrence.
Why haven't Eric Schmidt or Steve Jobs spent a single day in jail or become felons? The DOJ didn't even try.
I hope the recruiter that was "terminated within the hour" ended up getting something from this lawsuit. I'm having trouble envisioning any circumstance that requires action this quickly. The employee is at least owed an investigation before being terminated.
In a lawsuit, Google would have a hard time defending themselves, as the rule this employee ignored was illegal. On the other hand, most US contracts can be terminated with 2 weeks notice, in which case employees are sent home immediately (at least that’s how it’s commonly portrayed).
Could someone explain it to me why this is downvoted? I live in Europe and we have completely different employment laws but from what I noticed it is not unusual for someone to be told "you no longer work here" and have them escorted by a guard, often carrying a box with their stuff. Is this image exaggerated?
It depends, of course, on the company and the circumstances of the separation. But, the scenario you described is absolutely common and some companies handle all separations in the manner you described. Usually your manager will read from a script (approved by HR,) then the HR rep will take over and read a bunch of other boilerplate to you. Then you'll get escorted out and your accounts/door badges deactivated. You may be offered a small severance package (on the order of weeks to months) but probably only if you sign away your rights to sue the company, if you didn't already do that by signing a binding arbitration agreement when you joined. You may or may not have a non-compete agreement that remains in force for longer than any severance you received.
I don’t know what you mean by contract, but an employer can always tell an employee they can no longer access the employer’s facilities (or log in remotely) anytime, barring an extremely weird agreement giving an employee that right.
And outside of Montana, employers can stop paying employees immediately barring an agreement that the employer cannot do that. This is called at-will employment. The most common agreement that typically does not allow an employer to do this are usually called collective bargaining agreements, negotiated by unions.
I mean it's pretty obvious that it is not happening today - as Jobs has been dead for over a decade and Schmidt has no official link to Google or Alphabet since 2020.
And yet seemingly every US company conducted layoffs of similar scales at nearly the same time with the same specious reasoning given each time just last year.
It doesn't take collusion for that. Big corps are always ready for layoffs, and if someone else does it first, it's a good time to see if you should, too.
What's stopping this from happening at current batch of companies. All of them are laying off together (and rehiring at lower rates) while delivering record profits.
So, if you are an Apple employee and apply at Google they will reject you on that ground? - (I am not an Apple employee, nor do I wish to work for Google)
Hiring you could be harmful to executive relationships. Some executives will take the hit for some hires, but it would be rare.
The no-hire list is not at the center of companies refusing to hire from competitors. There is often an understanding between executives that competing in the job market hurts all companies, and they wish to cool talent mobility. Otherwise, there would be salary races, more intellectual property would leak, the culture would get diluted, and more money would need to be spent on poaching people back.
Let me share a relevant experience. Two years ago, I was employed at a large tech company, but not FANGMAN. It had no-hire lists with its competitors. When I applied to one of them, a close friend in management of my former employer let me know the executives got wind of this, and they were upset. Consequently, my application was ignored. And my friend let me know that it will probably always be ignored. It felt very gauche, but there is not much one can do about these situations - knowing and being able to prove it are separate things.
I do not believe no-hire lists exist as an isolated ceremony in large companies. They stem from efforts to cool competition. Executives are often friends and it would be impractical for them to not form cartel agreements. What is a regulator going to do about an unwritten agreement between friends? Many good (but ingenuous) people think that just because "it's the law", so it shall be.
So where a union is the concentrated collectivization of labor and talent, capitalization is the dissolution of concentrated collectivization of labor and talent.
I like it. It adequately puts goal posts at either end, and illustrates succinctly how anything good for your employer is probably a race to the bottom for the employee.
It didn't necessarily affect the application/hiring process. It had to do with recruitment policies on "poaching".
To conceptualize it, Google/Apple/Pixar/etc were paying (hypothetically) 100k each for SEngs. The rest of the industry was paying 80k. The aforementioned companies would only poach from the lower paying companies, with an offer to bring the employees up to 100k, thereby ensuring that all of the best talent was funnelling in to the big companies.
To ensure that talent stayed cheap, they (under the table) agreed not to poach from each other, since the only companies that could compete (generally) with their current salary would be the other big names.
So, they got the best of all worlds. The best talent. At deflated rates. And the talent would naturally gravitate to their preferred employers/optimal workspaces via proactive applications.
No, back when this was going on, it is alleged that if you applied at Google, you would not get the position at Google AND YOU WOULD BE MARKED FOR TERMINATION AT THE EARLIEST CONVENIENCE OF APPLE.
It's an example of why systems people should be paid like pro athletes and have agents, given their extreme value to the organizations they support, both garage and conglomerate alike. [But the industry went the other way, reaching into grade schools with efforts like Code.org and, I Kid You Not, homeless shelters like https://youtu.be/l6p0VYIP5M8 in a failed attempt to flood the market with Supply so they could continue to prey upon their fellow human beings. Even the whole paradigm of Object Oriented Programming going mainstream was FIRST AND FOREMOST (but not exclusively) an attempt to reign in labor costs, as per Mitch Kapor's numerous lectures on the topic back in the day. A generation before that, They were pushing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_One_(software) and, well, you know what those "deep pockets" are up to these days with AI coders.
No, You as a hypothetical Apple employee at this time should never receive a cold call from a Google recruiter. If you contacted Google directly they would have no issue with hiring you.
I believe the broader context is that after Schmidt saw the iPhone demo at an Apple board meeting, he tried to double the salaries of the entire Safari team to slow down the iPhone project and kickstart Chrome.
Thanks Obama for enforcing the Sherman Antitrust Act:
> SECTION 1. Every contract, combination in the
form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is hereby declared to be illegal. Every person who shall make any contract or engage in any combination or conspiracy hereby declared to be illegal shall be deemed guilty of a felony, and, on con-viction thereof, shall be punished by fine not exceeding $100,000,000 if a corporation, or, if any other person, $1,000,000,
or by imprisonment not exceeding 10 years, or by both said punishments, in the discretion of the court.
“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
Context:
> High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation is a 2010 United States Department of Justice (DOJ) antitrust action and a 2013 civil class action against several Silicon Valley companies for alleged "no cold call" agreements which restrained the recruitment of high-tech employees.
> The defendants were high-technology companies Adobe, Apple Inc., Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay, each of which was headquartered in Silicon Valley, in the southern San Francisco Bay Area of California.
> The civil suit was filed by five plaintiffs. It accused the tech companies of collusion between 2005 and 2009 to refrain from recruiting each other's employees.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...