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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.
Jobs: "If a CEO does it, it's not illegal."
While it may be true that a company can't legally prevent you from moving over to a competitor of your own free will, there are clauses in employment contracts that seek to prevent an ex-employee from poaching current employees away.
What's interesting is how the word 'poaching' has gone from the illegal murder of animals while trespassing to stealing away of top talent. The evolution of this word as well as 'hunting' and other terms typically associated with big game hunting have become part of our employment lexicon.
I bring this up because the analogy holds to some extent. Top level developers are, in a sense, hunted for their skills. While the bullet isn't what they get, they do get offers ranging from the low 6 figures to the slightly higher than that 6 figures. On the other hand, designers are paid much more than that. Take any marketing company as an example of top designers making money hand over fist. OSS could never compete with that, since there isn't that kind of money in this industry to pay for top developers. So you get the kind of brain-dead design as we see here on the /. front page. Seriously, why is there a bar with a tiny +- character there? Why is it separating the summary from the tags and comments links?
One has to wonder how Steve Jobs ever let Jon Rubinstein leave."
Simple - by forcing him to report to Steve Jobs.
You're talking about the situation where Apple's contract with the employee states that said employee may not work for competitor(s).
This is different. It's either:
Palm state they won't hire anyone who works for Apple (& vice versa).
Or
Palm state they won't actively solicit current employees of Apple (& vice versa).
Since the original article is full of speculative crap and theodp's summary is full of shrill hysterics it's difficult to tell which. IANAL but I'd guess at least the second of those is probably legal.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Jobs is, if not an innovator, then at least very clever about which trends to follow and has built a cult of personality. He is an ass, but he's a nerd's kind of ass who admires elegance and wants to get things done.
Bill Gates is a manipulator and has built a cult of anti-personality. Of course, neither one is Jesus. They're both just some corporate masters of your capitalistic destiny. Gates, of course, is the far more successful. He has the kind of power that Jobs fantasizes about; at the top of the Gates foundation, he can alter the futures of whole nations through investment and charity... or the lack thereof.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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?
It costs nothing to leave things the heck alone. Knowing when not to tinker with things is apparently much more expensive.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The problem is that if you DON'T setup these types of agreements, and continue hiring away employees from direct competitors then you open yourself up to nasty patent/trade secret disputes. You've made a business practice of hiring employees with inside knowledge and you just set yourself up for the lawsuits.. that's why they call it "poaching'.
Many business partners have these agreements, so that suppliers aren't competing with their customers for employees on the same projects... after all, why pay another company to do a job when you can just hire their best employees?
From the slashdotter point of view, the headhunting is quite bad for YOUR career. Because these companies headhunt off each other, that means they're not looking for NEW talent (which of course there is such a shortage of!!!) preferring to hire the guy away that did the last cool project that was published, skyrocketing salaries pricing you, the mid-level employee, out of the game. Consider it like salary caps in sports. The stars make multi-million dollar deals.. the other 29 guys that practice just as hard and show up for all the games too get $75k tops ... In the same way, for each of these "rockstars" there's an army of guys making barely enough to afford living 2 hours from work (in northern California mind you).. but they make the "rockstars" look good and get the product shipped on time.
This is why the companies focus on out-of-college recruiting almost exclusively (and there aren't enough new graduates willing to work like they have 10 years experience)... so they can pay sub-market wages and dangle the "rockstar" salary, eventually, rather than looking for older, meticulous, team players that get things done on time and under budget... and don't even work OT to do it! But of course they don't work for "rockstar" wages and they don't work for "newbie" wages either.
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.
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