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Apple Allegedly Sought Non-Poaching Deal With Palm
theodp writes "A Bloomberg report that Apple CEO Steve Jobs proposed a possibly illegal truce with Palm against poaching their respective employees is sure to pique the interest of the US Department of Justice, which already is investigating whether Google, Yahoo, Apple, Genentech and other tech companies conspired to keep others from stealing their top talent. 'Your proposal that we agree that neither company will hire the other's employees, regardless of the individual's desires, is not only wrong, it is likely illegal,' former Palm CEO Ed Colligan reportedly told Jobs in August 2007." The article notes that Apple was probably reacting to Palm's hiring of Jon Rubenstein, who had been instrumental in developing the iPod and went on to spearhead the Pre for Palm (and has now become Palm's chairman and CEO). "It's the story about the importance of charismatic engineers," said veteran Silicon Valley forecaster Paul Saffo. "People don't work for Palm. They work for Jon Rubinstein. One has to wonder how Steve Jobs ever let Jon Rubinstein leave."
Apple wasn't looking to screw over their employees. They merely wished to make the Apple employment experience more simple and elegant. With other employers, employees must make complicated and confusing decisions about raises and other job opportunities, resolve conflicts between competing employers, etc. At Apple, it's a simple "You work here" interface.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Indirectly eliminating your vocational opportunities by working at Apple: that's not a bug in your employment contract, it's a feature.
I'm only allowed to jerk myself off.
Jobs: "If a CEO does it, it's not illegal."
These cases come up all the time, they fall under restraint of trade. If Apple want to stop someone working elsewhere by contract shenanigans, they have to pay that employee until the contract dates expires.
One has to wonder how Steve Jobs ever let Jon Rubinstein leave."
Simple - by forcing him to report to Steve Jobs.
Never, why would Steve Jobs do something like that? Jobs is a cut throat CEO, who for some reason people think is so much better than Bill Gates when the two are practically the same, the difference being that at least Gates gives to charity daily, where as Jobs does not. Don't get me know I think that Apple has amazing technologies, but they are definitely overpriced when they don't need to because Jobs himself thinks he is better than so many.
Just because you are wrong and I called you out on it doesn't mean I am a Troll.
How could that not be illegal? It goes against everything our allegedly free market stands for. Top talent should command top dollar. Like athletes, developers have a finite number of peak production years. They should be able to work for the highest bidder.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
This is why you never, ever trust an employer to do right by you. All the incentives are aligned the wrong way, and to rise high in a company, you practically have to be a slick sociopath. The same guy that asks you how your day went by the water cooler would have you chained to a desk 14 hours to day if the law would let him get away with it.
Speaking of getting screwed - why are there specific regulations in the federal labor laws that exempt "certain computer workers" from overtime pay?
He has class. The guy wanted to leave, and he let him without begging or throwing chairs.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
Insightful
Best response thus far: http://www.fakesteve.net/2009/08/likely-illegal-bitch-please.html. Glad he's back, honestly.
that Rubinstein will exploit any Apple secrets that he knows of. I had a feeling Apple would try and do this.
Good thing I am a PC though...
The more rotation of new employees you have, the more training and orientation they need, the less productivity you get out of your staff. On the flip side, this can be self-correcting because employers will look unfavorably at someone who has changed jobs 6 times in the last 8 years, encouraging people to pick their jobs carefully and stay a while.
People don't work for Palm. They work for Jon Rubinstein.
Interesting... I used to work for a guy like that. I and several people I talked to joined the company solely based upon our interview with him. After he got let go following a dispute with upper management, most of those under him left as well. He was somewhat notorious for ignoring the anti compete policies and having a band of loyal followers where ever he went.
The guy cared about the people under him, and would try to help them advance their careers. Their appreciation of that was only natural. Combine that with a strong sense of direction and a willingness to take command and you've got a pretty effective leader. Only problem is getting his direction to line up with the business... so maybe guys like that just belong at the top, or running their own gig.
I know for a fact that a certain large-ish hardware company has an OEM agreement with a certain very-large-ish company that involves not hiring employees away from each other.
The people ranting about antitrust and collusion don't have a clue what they're talking about. Companies make strategic agreements all the time - advertising, technology, manufacturing, patent cross-licensing. Antitrust only comes into it when markets are threatened. Last I looked, Blackberry still dominated the smartphone market.
Except in this case, it's an agreement to not poach.
A non-compete prevents an employee from working at a competitor.
A non-poach prevents a company from actively trying to hire another company's employees.
The difference is, a non-compete prevents employees from willingly seeking employment elsewhere, which is illegal. A non-poach prevents employers from actively trying to "steal" employees. In a non-poach, employees are free and willing to seek employment at the other company.
In this case, it would keep Palm from actively recruiting people from Apple, and Apple from actively recruiting from Palm. It does not prevent any Apple employee who wants to work at Palm from seeking employment at Palm on their own volition, and vice versa. Hell, Apple employees are free to work at Microsoft, if they wish, because there was no non-paoch agreement (that we know of) between the two companies.
It's the same deal between Apple and Google. Apple agrees not to recruit people from Google, and vice-versa, but individual employees are still free to leave and join the other.
These non-poaching agreements aren't really a big deal - they don't prevent employees from leaving and joining the other company (or any other). It just prevents companies from actively targeting employees at the other company. Examples include say, setting up a little booth off campus (but where employees walk by anyhow) offering jobs to them, having headhunters that will then call employees at their desks, or putting up billboards saying stuff like "Apple employee? Come work for Palm!" in full view of the Apple campus (EA did this to Radical - rented a billboard right outside the Radical offices).
At worst, it's a form of collusion between two companies which might be used to keep salaries low, but there's enough other companies out there that employees can work for.
It's like two car dealerships agreeing not to steal business away from each other - the customer is free to shop between the two (and haggle), but one dealer won't go and say "buy a car from me instead of this guy!" to customers visiting the other guy's lot.
I know someone who moved from the iPhone project to Palm. He was at a high enough level to be screamed at by Steve Jobs in person, and he didn't like that. He waited until the iPhone shipped, then left for a company with sane management.
If I had worked for any of these companies and found out that I was now a pwned slave to them with no ability to move to another strong company worth working for I'd want the Feds to clean their clocks out -- and give me my share of the damages!
How many PHBs here were rubbing their hands together with glee at review time knowing that the employee they were about to dump on had no option to move to any other comparable company no matter what they were told?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
"Likely Illegal"
"Mostly Harmless"
"Somewhat Pregnant"
Oh yea, it's illegal. We're not harmless. You are or you are not, whether you know it or not.
This will be fun. Our current Administration could take this opportunity to start exercising some antitrust muscles and spank some bad boys and girls.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
that if this were microsoft, people would be yelling and screaming, and calling ballmer an evil bastard.
But noooo.... since this is apple- half the freaking people will defend them even if they're being evil.
Look- it does not matter how shiny or great your new mac is- the corporation that made it is just as underhanded and evil as its main competitor, just less successful at being evil.
This wrap-up article appears to be a Palm piece designed to attach them more firmly to Apple in people's minds. Trying to imply Palm is so great that Apple is trying to stop them and also imply that Palm is just like Apple, in fact they have half of Apple's engineers!
The real kicker is the last part. "These people work for Rubenstein". Yeah, maybe that's true for Mike Bell. Pete Alexander (who used to work for Mike Bell) just quit Apple (was forced out) and will be working at Palm within 3 months.
But there are a lot of people for whom this doesn't apply. I used to work for Rubenstein and I can tell you he's so much not a people person it's ridiculous. He makes 2000-era Al Gore look personable. He would periodically get up and address the team and he would say things that clearly showed he didn't any real connection to us or even know what we were doing. For example, he once rallied us by saying the software/hardware release we just did was the best one we had ever done. The whole crowd groaned because we knew it wasn't, that it was pushed out the door and in fact we had a plans for a near-term emergency .0.1 update and a rapidly following .0.2 update.
Maybe if you work directly for the guy day-to-day you can form an attachment to him, but to anyone lower down in the ranks, it isn't the same.
As to why Steve Jobs "let" Rubenstein leave, I'm sure it was similar reasons as why Tony Fadell left. Because both realized they wouldn't be the next CEO of the company. Steve Jobs only action then of "letting" them leave was to not step aside and let Rubenstein or Fadell be CEO. Rubenstein got out, and lo and behold he's now the CEO of Palm.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Apple is just as evil as any other corporation...actually, it is more evil than most!
That being said, I still want an iPhone! Please come out with a 4G LTE phone on Verizon!
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
There are two types of anti-poaching agreements.
The first states that if an employee worked at company "A", they can't be hired by company "B". The second states that company "B" won't call up people they know who work for company "A" and offer them jobs. If that employee goes to company "B" on their own accord, that's fine. It's just that company "B" can't openly recruit company "A" employees.
Apple's anti-poaching agreement with Google was of the second kind. Apple wouldn't try to recruit currently active Google employees and Google wouldn't actively recruit Apple employees. If an Apple employee went over and applied to Google for a job, that employee would be fair game for Google to hire, and visa-versa. I am assuming that Apple wanted a similar agreement with Palm. Apple doesn't want employees who are unhappy with their job. What they don't want is a competitor simply hiring whole departments away from Apple which is sort of what happened with the Palm Pre division.
It's amazing that no one here has so much as questioned the source for this report. The Bloomberg article doesn't say anything specific about what kind of source they have, except that it involves "communications between the two executives obtained by Bloomberg".
I don't have a good feel for how reliable Bloomberg is on stuff like this, but surely this kind of allegation merits the benefit of the doubt until we get a little more solid info about the source, no?
I don't know which sport you're talking about but in the NFL the guy with no pro experience makes a minimum of $310,000. The NBA is $457,000. And Major League Baseball is $400,000. Hell, the minimum for someone with any experience in the Minors is $65,000.
...and why isn't there a "Moderate" button NEXT to the moderation popup? You have to scroll to the freaking end of the page, then hit the moderate button.
You should be able to pick the moderation value in the popup, hit a moderate button RIGHT THERE, then the page would reload to the exact same place with the moderation added.
is sure to pique the interest of the US Department of Justice
And why is it going to pique their interest if it never happened? The DOJ can do nothing if it never happened. It isn't even likely to be admissible in any other legal challenge Apple may face. In California it is actually illegal to poach employees within 90 days of leaving a company but it happens anyway. I've been poached at least twice in my career.
Why bother
Apple's technologies are "definitely overpriced when they don't need to because Jobs himself think he is better than so many"??
1. Companies price their products at whatever price the market will bear. If they don't, they go OUT of business due to lack of sales. Apple is having no problem moving their products at their asking prices. (In fact, they're still building more Apple retail stores at a time when most companies are closing them!)
2. The average person you run into who thinks that Steve Jobs is a "better" person than Bill Gates usually believes that because they've heard so much negativity about Microsoft's products and claimed "anti-competitive" behavior. In most situations, people like to root for the under-dog, all other things being essentially equal, and that's really what you've got here. Microsoft has the lion's share of the operating system market, and Apple stands out as the only company making a serious effort at offering a commercial alternative to that operating system. Outside of "tech geek" circles, I doubt most people know much of anything about the personal lives or behavior of EITHER man.
3. I haven't heard it mentioned very often, but sometimes I wonder if Steve Jobs really has sort of a disdain for "geeks" and techie types who obsess over things like computers and gadgetry? I've read that in his personal life, he likes keeping things pretty basic (having gone for long periods of time owning places that don't even have any real furniture in some of the rooms). We certainly know his clothing choices are pretty basic (doesn't get much more basic than blue-jeans and a black t-shirt). He's also traditionally been obsessed with very "clean" design that sticks to basic shapes, and always seemed to be in pursuit of a very quiet, unobtrusive computer (even when removal of the fans resulted in system temperatures running near the thermal limits of the hardware). He seems to be proud of the company's achievements on the whole, yet dislikes the "hard core" fans enough to financially gouge early-adopters who "gotta have the shiny new product first!" (Polar opposite strategy of what one might expect, where early-adopters get some kind of price BREAK or extra incentive to buy a first revision product....) It reminds me, in some ways, of George Lucas and his treatment of science-fiction fans who blog and rave about the Star Wars franchise. He's often made it clear he can't relate to those types - despite putting out products that would seem to target them directly.
Who the heck modded that comment as "Troll"? "Troll" does not mean "Disagree."
Bikes, I'll be lookin' out for ya in metamod, man.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
At Apple, it's a simple "You work here" interface.
I always thought Apple was fond of saying "You just work!"
Or something like that...
(By the way, how do you make an Apple employee angry? You push his button...)
jeko (179,919) :-)
easyTree (1,042,254)
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
See how many special interest groups you can offend with less than 30 words.
Bah; use perl and you can do it in 12
I have seen situation where my then employer was providing consultancy using a software made by a UK company. They also provided support in their geography to other users and acted as resellers. There was an greement between these two companies under which they could not hire an ex-employee of the other company for a period of 6 months after the employee having quit. It seems like a fair deal. BTW, there was no case of any person leaving and joining the other company for close to 10 years. They just did not interview such cases.