Comment by aresant | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aresant | Hacker News Reader

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Just to color with the facts - which only underscore your point:

"In one incident, after receiving a complaint from Steve Jobs of Apple, Schmidt sent an email to Google's HR people saying; "I believe we have a policy of no recruiting from Apple and this is a direct inbound request. Can you get this stopped and let me know why this is happening? I will need to send a response back to Apple quickly so please let me know as soon as you can. Thanks Eric". Schmidt's email led to a recruiter for Google being "terminated within the hour" for not having adhered to the illegal scheme. Under Schmidt, there was a "Do Not Call list" of companies Google would avoid recruiting from.[37] According to a court filing, another email exchange shows Google's human resources director asking Schmidt about sharing its no-cold call agreements with competitors. Schmidt responded that he preferred it be shared "verbally, since I don't want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later?".[36]

Way beyond bad behavior or accidental participant. Flat out collusion.

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt

There's some critically missing information here that muddies the water and I would like some clarification.

>there was a "Do Not Call list" of companies Google would avoid recruiting from.

>no-cold call agreements with competitors

This explicitly means that the colluding companies would not try to cold-call recruit from each other. These companies are large employers and provide thousands of jobs, cool. This does not say that they would refuse to hire anyone that worked for a colluding company.

So if someone was working for Apple for a wage they were satisfied with (after all they agreed to the wage when they accepted the position), then Google would not try to call them. If that someone decided to apply to Google and try to get a job there because they wanted a higher salary, then would this collusion work against that person? Or would Google consider them for employment as they would consider any other professional?

The effects on wages for the profession aren't what I'm asking about; I'm asking only about this situation.

It was much worse than just a do-not-call.

The evidence states that the defendants agreed not to poach employees from each other or give them offers if they voluntarily applied, and to notify the current employers of any employees trying to switch between them. They also agreed not to enter into bidding wars and to limit the potential for employees to negotiate for higher salaries.

http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/19/damning-evidence-emerges-in...

Thank you, you have more courtesy than the people who simply downvoted my question.

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