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Judge Denies Dismissal of No-Poach Conspiracy Case
theodp writes "Testifying before Congress in 2007, Google's HR chief stated: 'We make great efforts to uncover the most talented employees we can find.' But according to the U.S. Dept. of Justice, Google actually went to some lengths to avoid uncovering some of tech's most talented employees, striking up agreements with Apple, Intel, and other corporations to avoid recruiting each other's employees. On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Lucy H. Koh ruled that Google, Apple, Intel, Adobe, Disney, Pixar, Intuit and Lucasfilm must face a lawsuit claiming they violated antitrust laws by entering into no-poaching agreements with each other. 'I don't want to see any obstruction on discovery,' Koh told lawyers during a hearing. According to the head attorney representing the plaintiffs, the total damages could exceed $150 million if just 10,000 entry-level engineers were affected."
It's not about the consumers, it's about turning employees into slaves.
I worked as a contractor for Google a few years ago. You would probably have to work in video game QA to find a bigger sweatshop out there.
Because all of the employees that get a lower salary due to the agreement are also consumers. It also indicates that the companies are not interested in competing with each other to produce the best products by recruiting the best talent.
It's great that they're getting hit for this, but who exactly is going to get that money?
Somehow, I doubt those effected will see a dime, and lawyers and government stooges are going to get it.
Justice for all my damn foot, why don't more people attack that part of the pledge?
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
It is not that so much as it is bad for the employees. It is the same as if all the tech giants went into an agreement together to lower all of their workers wages (since they used a monopoly position to do it they could force a lot of people to work for less money). And while this is less nefarious sounding, no poaching does lower wages, significantly.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
It’s not about the consumers, it’s about the employees. Companies want to keep their payroll down so they conspire not to hire the other’s employees. Dampens completion and thus pay.
On the flip side, I have seen a rival company hire away whole teams. All of a sudden a company had a great line of business and the next day it’s across the street. Sometimes it has been a key operations department (i.e. the department that keeps the companies’ door open, not one that makes any profit.) It can be quite stressful for a company.
In my line of business, if somebody wants to poach another person’s team (Such as all of the brokers in a office or a analyst team) the only answer is more money. On the other side, if one want’s to poach a operations team, you got to leave enough people so the company can run. Not quite fair that the 2 types of people are treated different - it's jus the way the cookie crumbles.
I'm for competition and against collusion, but that's supposed to be about the way companies sell products. How is poaching employees supposed to be good for the consumer?
To be a consumer, one needs to be a producer first (credit notwithstanding). Now, if there is a very limited number of buyers for what one produces (oligopsony) then the price you could sell your goods or services would tend to be lower.
Lower input prices (employees) generally lead to lower consumer prices.
In any case, antitrust is a waste of resources since cartels are inherently unstable barring state intervention.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
If companies do not compete for employees then they are stifling salaries and playing people less simply because they have a monopoly set up.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
It's GOT to be illegal. Companies must compete (in terms of wages, working conditions, other benefits) for workers in order to have a working system. Otherwise, you sign up for Google and they can treat you however they like, they know none of the other companies will take you off their hands, so why pay you more?
So you're saying that if you worked for Pixar you would be perfectly happy that Lucasfilm can't come and make you a better offer.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
this isn't about monopoly power; it's about workplace discrimination. If I apply for a job, it's illegal for the employer to deny me the job capriciously, including the fact that they have a side agreement with their competitors not to hire me.
How is this any different from a union? And if it's okay for unions to do it, why isn't it okay for companies?
I'm a psychologist (amongst other things).
When they do poach they get slapped with lawsuits from the company they recruited from saying the person they got can't work anywhere near a computer for a number of years. So poaching really makes no sense because of the counter lawsuits.
Are they going to deny that people have "critical information" and shut down the lawsuits that follow from poaching ?
You forgot, the consumer is not the customer, they are the product.
Care to share more details?
But mostly its about opportunity. If you're in it for the money, Google's pockets look mighty deep.
So you're saying that if you worked for Pixar you would be perfectly happy that Lucasfilm can't come and make you a better offer.
Yeah, you might end up having to work on another Star Wars prequel.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Well, no.
From TFA, all that the various companies seem to have been doing is refraining from calling up workers at competing companies to see if they could get them to switch companies.
Said nothing at all about them restricting themselves from job-hunters who happened to be working for the other guys.
So if you don't like working for Google, and want to get a job with Microsoft (or whoever), what has been going on would have had no effect on you whatsoever.
On the other hand, if you worked for Google, and were happy there, you didn't have to listen to people trying to convince you to come to work for Microsoft calling you up weekly to see if you were interested in switching.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
WOW, wow and wow. So now the little man is the greedy one!!! How....funny. What is next? The little one is paying less taxes than the BIG one? Oh, yes, i almost forgot: WHITE IS BLACK AND BLACK IS WHITE.
Dare to prove your point? Because, it is equally easy to say that they get 3-10x LESS average salary....
Yup. People sucked down this motto and believed it. The fast is that the nature of business is often contrary to the general public interest. This is why we citizens band together in the form of governments to counterbalance some of the negative side of business. No, this isn't a diatribe against capitalism. It is simple a recognition that capitalism has its weaknesses that must be addressed and reckoned with.
Put two saints in charge of a business and you will find that they begin behaving in ways that the wouldn't if they weren't in a powerful position. it doesn't make them evil. It is simply a response to the environment and the forces around them. Our gov't should place restraints in place to minimize anti-society behavior.
When Google puts in the "no poaching" agreement, it is acting in its own best interest, but not in the best interest of society as a whole. Citizens should be free to work in the best environment for them. This isn't a profit driven value. It is a freedom based value. Google is acting against that and should be slapped in the language that corporations understand -- the bottom line. The slap must be hard enough to change behavior, or else it will be deemed a cost of doing business.
And if you still think that we just need the right people in charge of companies, people with the right ethics and then everything will be perfect, you are absolutely deluded. Granted, we DO need strong ethics in those who hold power. But be damned sure that even those people will act against the interest of the rest of us.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Another story on this case seemed to say that it was more than just not head hunting each other's employees. That story, as I recall, indicated that the agreement included not hiring people who worked at one of the other companies who applied for a job.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Agreed, you hit it much better than I did. Thanks.
They aren't allies.
generally people are into the whole job thing `for the money`
oh ya it can be fun and intellectually stimulating and personally rewarding, but at the end of the day none of those things pay the rent or put food on the table.
I guess you could say it isn't, but the threat of workers being poached (in *some* sense) is what keeps wages from falling to zero in the first place, protecting the worker.
It happens in a different form for lower-wage workers, like in fast food or janitorial services: employers have to pay enough of a wage that the workers won't flee and go to someone else who offers more.
In high-wage tech jobs, it more often takes the form of some company actively seeking out the worker and making a competitive offer.
Either way, "competition" for workers is what keeps wages reflecting relative scarcity of that kind of labor (with a ton of caveats I won't go into, obviously. And whether or not you agree with the idea, antitrust is intended to prevent anti-competitive behavior, whether regarding consumers or workers.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
Common sense says that you are actually lacking common sense....
It is legal for companies to put agreements not to work for a competitor in a contract. While having a similar net effect, it's open. This is different because its collusion in restraint of fair employment. However a lot of these anti trust laws are predicated on the size of the companies involved.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
It is short sighted to assume that this is just about well paid programmers. Employment law applies to all corporations. If it were legal for high value employers like Google etc. to conspire to drive down wages, then it would also be legal for low value employers to conspire and do likewise. It could easily be the case that, in certain geographic regions or areas of industry, there would only be a few potential employers for certain classes of worker, and collusion between these employers could drive wages down to minimum wage, or even down to an unliveable wage for places that don't have a minimum.
The market for employees is just like any other functioning market. Companies colluding to reduce competition in the marke makes the market less efficient. If you are an economist, or just a person who favors capitalism and competitive markets, then you should be against this.
Even worse, parts of the allegations verge on blackballing: it's alleged that when an employer from company A applied to a job at company B, where A & B were part of the "no-poaching" collusion agreement, company B would not only refuse to hire them to avoid poaching, but actually rat the employee out to company A, telling them that this employee tried to apply for a job.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Some knowledgeable sources close to the discovery process say that there is a secret clause buried in these contracts. Apparently all these companies agreed not to rouse 2000 employees in the middle of the night and herd them back to work for a cup of tea and some biscuits. But Apple found a loop hole, that this clause applies only to USA and not China. That kind of gotcha tactic upset the other players who were overheard saying, "tut, tut, it is not cricket, it is not done" in the Olde Duquesne Country Club. And one of them go so upset he drank a little too much and spilled it all to some friendly guy tending to him as he was throwing up in the men's room. That is how the whole thing came out in the open.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
"It is legal for companies to put agreements not to work for a competitor in a contract. "
They can put it in the agreement. It is, however, for the most part is unenforceable. One thing that people don't seem to realize is that if a contract is deemed to be against the public interest, it is null and void. Non-competes fall in this category except for some specific exceptions.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
So what's stopping someone from applying for another job? This is all about poaching: that is, the thing Microsoft did back in the day to kill Borland by making ridiculous offers to a direct competitor's employees to effectively hobble the company. How is that not evil?
If Google was sorting through their data to determine who the top Apple/Pixar/etc developers were and making them offers they couldn't refuse in an effort to stymie competition, that would be worth bitching about. There is nothing stopping anyone from applying for a job on their own time, and none of this is about not hiring the competition... it's just about not actively seeking out competitor's employees at their workplaces.
If it comes to light that these companies were actively refusing employment and reporting applications to their competitors (for "disciplinary purposes"), then it will be evil. Not pestering employees during work hours with potentially embarrassing job offers seems more like courtesy.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
But at the end of day MS finally got some REAL object oriented language. Oh, and its compile time is breath taking (compared to c/c++ compile time).
You might want to go research which mobile platform GOOG makes the most money from.
Hint, it's not Android.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
nope
Yes they are... behind the scenes. They have many overlapping interests.. and shareholders.. They just don't have a publicly visible association like the movie and recording industries.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
When I was working a government job and was trying to go back to the private sector, I had several recruiters tell me that they couldn't hire me since the had government contracts.
In the private sector, I had seen the same as well. A company I was working for as a contractor wanted to hire me as their own employee, but their contract had a poaching clause that levied a substantial (5 figure) fee if they did so. They did do it for one of my coworkers, but he ended up leaving in less than a year so they were wary of doing it for anyone else.
I'm sorry, but 10x average salary. Hmm, I'm an engineer. Average salary is somewhere around 45K a year. I don't know any that make 450K a year. I would say 2x isn't uncommon, and some of the highly compensated might make 3x average, but 10x, no.
But then comes the muddying of the water. First, we do a job that very few can do. The drop out rate in school is >70% of the people who attempt to earn the degrees. Further than that, I don't have a number, but a fairly large percentage enter the work world, and discover they can't handle it. This leaves a very small number of people who can actually produce as an engineer. Toss in that EVERYTHING needs to be engineered. Whether due to nature of the product or due to regulation, this is just a fact of life. This creates high demand and low supply, which leads to our seemingly high pay.
But wait, now for such a needed profession, then it turns out, we're actually not highly paid, even relative to what we do. For some odd reason, especially in tech, the companies are always locals with high cost of living. This means, comparing the salary of an engineer to a farmer in the mid-west isn't really fair. Compare an engineers salary to the average in the bay area, that'd be more fair. And then of course, the average american works on average of 38-39 hours a week. The typical engineer looks at 40 hours longingly. We're all salaried employees, which means we don't get overtime, and 50 per week is fairly normal. My last job, I would regularly crack 65 and even had a couple months where I was averaging 80 hours a week. People who've never worked 80 hours really can't grasp it. I never thought 80 would be much until I did it. that's 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. You literally get up, get dressed, drive to work, work, drive home, eat dinner, get ready for bed, and sleep. That's it. For double, or MAYBE triple the national average salary. And then you throw in companies that try to hinder people trying to improve their lot a little.
You'll undoubtedly say "well, if you don't like it, then leave", but that mentality ignores some very important factors. Engineers are an odd assortment. First, we typically genuinely love what we do. We don't mind working 50 hours a week, because we love it, but that doesn't mean we don't get exhausted. Also, our work ethic is typically top notch, and we have a huge amount of pride in what we do. We take ownership in what we create and it hurts us to abandon it. We also put up with an amazing amount of BS. A lot of companies understand this, and use it to their advantage to basically turn us into slaves. Yes, not in the literal sense, but by taking advantage of our idiosyncrasies, they effectively do.
Of course it should be. People should not be locked into one employer just because any potential employer in their field has a No Poach agreement with their current employer. It seems ridiculous now, but as these companies get larger, and their reach and influence gets larger, it's only going to get worse.
If things like this are allowed to stand, how long will it be before you're basically locked into an employer for life? People laugh at the rhetoric that gets thrown around these days, like indentured servants, or serfs, but really, what else could you call employees in a situation like this? And what recourse would employees have? Leave their field entirely? Or the deliberately ignorant "Start your own business, then!!" that is thrown around whenever anyone complains about their employer these days?
It never ceases to amaze me how much the common man will fight against his own self-interest. In what possible way could these No Poach agreements benefit anyone that is not a C-level executive at any of these companies?
Not just unenforceable, but actually prohibited in California (where all this anti-poach activity is going on)..
However, there are devious ways to achieve the same result: Allege that the leaving employee possesses trade secret knowledge that will inevitably be disclosed. Whether or not that's true (and the courts tend to say it's not), the threat of litigation accompanying your hiring that person tends to have a chilling effect on the whole thing.
This is the comedy of apple suing google.
They're suing google while using google to make their own money!
Funny, isn't it.
They now have just one target to buy off. Get their own legislation put in place. etc.
Deleted
Doesn't the same argument apply to unions? Sellers in this employee market are colluding to raise prices...
I would be interested to know if this agreement was just anti-recruitment or an absolute will not hire.
If it's just anti-recruitment then I don't have a problem with it.
Here's the real issue that nobody else has touched on. Pretend you are facebook. All of the high paying profitable tech companies in the valley have agreed not to poach from eachother, but nobody ever approached you about the same. Now, if you are not part of the cabal, then your business is one of the primary poaching targets of the group. It's not just an employee issue, it's a competition issue. Facebook/Microsoft/Oracle/Yahoo/Whoever should not legally have to be subjected to a coordinated brain drain attack from a group of other companies just because they didn't sign up for the crooked deal.
So, there are no other software companies except Google, Apple, Intel, and Adobe that these enslaved employees can jump to?
"t's illegal for the employer to deny me the job capriciously"
Why?
Can they fire you capriciously (in at-will states)? Yes.
So, what's the difference?
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Or they could, I don't know... go work for one of the other million tech companies out there?
What, you think being a programmer somehow cures someone of greed?
Just as businesses face real incentives to get as much work out of employees for as little money as possible, employees face real incentives to get as much money out of employers while contributing as few hours as possible.
While there are some people who are satisfied with "enough," it is human nature to want more.
I think you have it backwards.
Apple makes money from Apple products
Google makes more money from searches on Apple products.
Apple is suing Google to (try to) strengthen the Apple platform. Which would benefit both Apple and Google.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Ah, I'll remember that next time there's any discrimination lawsuit. Guess "Just go get a job somewhere else, then!" is number two on the list of "reasonable excuses" for abhorrent behavior by major corporations these days...
Hey, you can't always be on the winning side of at-will firing.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Why is that a reasonable excuse? How is that not discrimination? Why should my current employer disqualify me from a job with another one if I meet every other criteria for employment?
The motto is not "Do no evil," it is "Don't BE evil." That is important because a person can do a little evil now and then but still not really BE evil so long as he feels appropriately guilty afterwords (and tries to make up for it or not to continue doing it).
Not that this matters, of course. "Evil" is an ambiguous word, especially in an economic environment where everyone *must* compete over scarce resources.
Exactly. What happens when Walmart, Target, ShopKo, Best Buy, and every other big box retailer do the same thing? What happens when every major employer in a given field starts doing this?
This kind of crap has too much of a feudalistic flavor for me to stomach...
Ask google, then read the laws. Let me know what you find.
From http://www.ehow.com/list_6581312_legal-grievances-wrongful-termination-issues.html
The Civil Rights Act of 1964
This legislation prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, gender or national origin. The law exempts religious organizations. If the reason for firing is arbitrary but is not included in a protected class, the firing is legal. For example, an employer cannot fire a woman for being Cambodian but can fire her because he does not like women who wear large, golden earrings or something equally capricious.
Sounds like I'm right. So what's your point?
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Actually, there are limits to how a person can be terminated even in at-will states. There is a long list of things an employer can do that will open them up for litigation or regulatory enforcement. "at-will" does not equal "capricious";
I'm not saying whether it's reasonable or not. The post I was replying to claimed, "now, the employee is locked, unable to change employers", which is ridiculous.
You just don't get it. If they hired from each other, the employees who changed jobs get 20% or greater pay increases with each jump. Because they are paid more their "peers" demand more and they get 10% or more pay increases. Eventually college students, seeing how the pay scale is rising, go into the field, causing an adequate employee supply and reducing the upward pressure on pay. The pay scale for these employees would be significantly higher than it is today. By avoiding this cycle, the companies reduce their payroll costs significantly and they are doing so through collusion.
This is why the Government should stop trying to promote STEP because they keep trying to keep the cost of engineers down by granting visas to foreign workers and Mr. Obama announced in the State of the Union Address that he wants to keep foreign born US educated engineers here, which will only decrease the pay scale for all engineers. If we need more engineers then we need to let the market make it more attractive to become one, not dangle citizenship to fill the gap.
The US government have made it clear that we have no inalienable rights; any we do not defend vigorously will be taken.
Again, same thing--the post was claiming people are "locked into one employer", a ridiculous claim.
This is an interesting case. On one side (that slashdot seems to agree with) is that competing for employees is a good thing, in that it makes employers pay more, have better benifits, etc.
On the other side, employers don't want to lose valuable employees. If they have to pay outrageous salaries to keep good people, the price of goods produced will rise, hurting consumers.
There is apparantly no such thing as loyalty or respect on either side. Employees seem to be willing to change jobs at the drop of a hat. Employers don't want to create a good work environment (there is more to a good job than money). This has to be very disruptive to the economy. It takes time to learn and settle into a new job.
I do tend to fall on the side of Google, et al and I think they are on the side of the consumer, that is you and me.
This rant isn't really coherent, I think I need a coffee.....
... Google, Apple...
They aren't allies.
Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt were actually good friends for a while. Schmidt was even on Apple's board, until he had to leave when Google bought Android and it created a conflict of interest. That was one of the reasons Jobs was so mad about Android -- he felt like it was busting up his friendship.
Incidentally, if you want to help me test a hypothesis, try paying attention to the media coverage of this story to see how much the MPAA-owned media cover this story with Google as the principal antagonist/coordinator of the scheme and Apple as a secondary or unimportant player now that Google has gone to bat for us against SOPA, even though it was Steve Jobs who started the ball rolling on this whole no poach thing. Pay special attention to News Corp coverage (e.g. Fox News and the Wall Street Journal) -- my hypothesis is that Murdoch has it in for Google now and is executing a campaign against them. Let's see if I'm right.
It does indeed. But unions have a statutory antitrust exemption.
It's GOT to be illegal. Companies must compete (in terms of wages, working conditions, other benefits) for workers in order to have a working system. Otherwise, you sign up for Google and they can treat you however they like, they know none of the other companies will take you off their hands, so why pay you more?
I agree that companies should compete, but they should not steal employees from a competitor.
Lets take this down another path...
lets say you are a small startup software company. You employ 10 people, and you are on the verge of becoming the next great search engine. Google comes in and pulls your top 5 people from under you, effectively killing your company. Now don't you wish there was an anti-poaching law?
Thank you. I don't understand the urge to compare the salary for jobs that take a high degree of training and skill with with the average salary, and treating it like a bad thing. They aren't the same thing at all. The extra education and skill the jobs take should have benefits like better pay, so long as you can really do the work.
I'm not an engineer, tried physics, but it wasn't what I wanted in the long run. Still, had I kept with it I would have expected a good rate of pay and a lot of hard work.
"According to the head attorney representing the plaintiffs, the total damages could exceed $150 million if just 10,000 entry-level engineers were affected."
How do you poach entry-level engineers?
love is just extroverted narcissism
I had an acquaintance who worked as a contractor for Google for a year. According to him, generally things are really rough as a contractor but get way better if they elect to bring you on as an employee.
(Of course, my story is jhust as anecdotal as the preceding one by an AC, so take both with a grain of salt or two.)
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
... does not contain too few non-single negatives, no?
Of course, that goes the other way around. What is to stop Microsoft from poaching Google's employees?
I guess you could say it isn't, but the threat of workers being poached (in *some* sense) is what keeps wages from falling to zero in the first place, protecting the worker.
You exaggerate a bit. The average wage you would get in a world without the threat of workers quitting or getting hired away is basically W = (R + T) / 40 + U, where W = annual wages, T is the cost of training the worker, R is the cost of providing the basic necessities of the future worker from birth to the start of their career, and U is the annual upkeep of the worker (food, shelter, water, clothing, health care, transportation to/from work and stores). The '40' is the length of the worker's career, generally assumed here to be something like 24-64.
For a software developer, that comes out to something like:
R = $270,000
T = $150,000
U = $20,000
W = ($270000+$150000) / 40 + $25000 = ($420000) / 40 + $25000 = $10500+$25000 = $35,500 annual after-tax income.
Which is still obviously way lower than the competitive salary of a developer.
I am officially gone from
I see. Google benefits by being sued by Apple. From Apple's perspective this is perfect logic and reinforces their walled garden mentality concerning the internet.
The reality is that every corporation is exploiting someone to make money and soon the consumers at the bottom of the food chain will have all been consumed essentially crashing the entire ecosystem.
Changing jobs may get you a salary increase, but it doesn't come without costs. In reality this creates at some point an equilibrium. An employee who bounces from one job to the next is not likely to be viewed as that attractive to an employer unless they have a very special and unique talent. In that case, why shouldn't they be allowed to use it as part of their negotiation? Sports teams confront this issue all the time. They make contracts to lock people in. This would be far preferable arrangement all around rather than letting the owner's to collude so that players must play for next to nothing, simply because of their ability to lock anyone out of the game. Its a question of balance. Its not simply a question of what is good for one company or another, because there are third and fourth parties here, namely the employee and the general consuming and non-consuming public, which although not necessarily buying what either of the litigants are selling may still be affected by the transaction.
Shouldn't the best players in the league be paid more? Even sports teams have what are called free agents. If companies want to retain employees they need to get them to sign a contract that stipulates not only the amount of their pay, but also the duration. From a business perspective this would create more stability than trying to engage in non-poaching deals.
Actually, in the US, they can deny you the job capriciously. If you go in for an interview, and they deny you the job because they just don't feel like hiring you, that's legal.
What's not typically legal is failing to hire you because of race, gender, religion (except if the organization is a religious group), age (although this one is often violated), marital status, military service (although lack of military service could be relevent), national origin, or union activity. So if they either specifically make it clear that's the reason you aren't hired, or there's a distinct pattern in who's hired and who's not, that will get the NLRB interested.
IANAL, TINLA, YMMV
I am officially gone from
that most here have no idea how these "No Poaching" agreements actually function. The way these agreements work is two (or more) companies agree to not actively recruit the others employees. The employees are still free to move between the companies anytime there is a job opening. As someone who has worked an a "no poaching" company, this is much to do about nothing. As a side note it was interesting back in the late 90's to see Dell put up giant billboards across from Compaq Headquarters to steal their employees. These agreements are to stop that type of behavior.
In my line of business, if somebody wants to poach another person's team (Such as all of the brokers in a office or a analyst team)...
Brokers? As in stock brokers? No wonder the world's economy crashed if they're as poorly educated as you seem to be.
Free Martian Whores!
And the good news is that to be competitive with Chinese workers employees everywhere will soon have to get used to working 80 hr/wk for about $22.00 per day. Most corporations like Apple, which essentially employ Chinese under conditions that approach slavery, have figured out this is the easiest way to maximize profits and that is all that capitalism is about. Apple admitted to this, when they officially claimed in testimony to Congress that their role in society was not to benefit society as a whole, but merely to make "good products" (ie profitable ones).
Keep in mind that when you bite into that shiny apple, it is rotten at its core.
Three negatives! Did anybody else have trouble parsing that sentence?
I didn't lack any difficulty failing to be unable to misunderstand what they didn't intend to deny.
" I don't understand the urge to compare the salary for jobs that take a high degree of training and skill with with the average salary,"
Perhaps it comes from the realization that in actuality even the janitor is as equally indispensable to the operation of any corporation as is the CEO and although may not be paid as much, should be recognized with a sufficient measure of dignity and salary necessary to keep civilization stable rather than heading pell-mell toward the dissolution of civilization because a few people have figured out by using the asymmetry of human interaction they can perpetually game the system to their advantage.
Why does everything have to be about the consumer? What about the worker? Poaching employees can be good for the worker because it represents a larger market for their skills. Without it, their potential market is artificially closed down.
No, no. It's ok to do that to the lower classes, because this keeps costs down, which lets the upper classes get more. This increase in wealth will eventually trickle down to the lower classes in the form of more shitty, underpaid jobs. Because, you know, companies just hire people out of the goodness of their hearts when they have more money. It has nothing to do with the level of demand at all.
Yeah but Apple has a great reputation to work for.
Absolute not-hire. Even if the employee came to the company on their own, they couldn't extend an offer.
Further, both situations are completely shitty, as both represent a cartel attempting to exert their power to control the price of a resource for the rest of the market. There is absolutely no reason why any of this shit should be allowed to stand.
I don't give a shit if there are or not. An agreement like this should not be allowed, period.
I think you'd be hard-pressed to say that me and the others in my department are the "heart-blood" of my corporation
What do you think if you and your co-workers just decided to not do anything all day?
I see nothing inherently immoral or unethical about this; it just makes good business sense.
I'm sorry, that makes you a complete and utter pile of shit. I don't give a shit what "business sense" it makes, they are colluding to artificially limit the market for that employee's skills.
The people who write comments on here obviously have never owned a business in the real world.
And go fuck yourself. Why should anyone have to "own a business in the real world" in order to see that this is not right, and is another example of Big Business attempting to use their size and power to exert more control on the rest of us?
Not true.
Having google searches capable on an apple product enhances the value of the *apple* product.
So both parties benefit, but you don't hear of google suing apple.
Such agreements aren't limited to engineers. There have also been stories of coffee shops doing the same shit. So if you're a barista making close to minimum wage in a smaller city, if such shit is in place, your ability to negotiate for conditions at your job just plummeted. Now, since you have far fewer alternative places to work, your bargaining power is far lower, meaning you either have to bend over and take it from your employer, or you get to starve on the street.
I see your point, but you sort of speak against yourself by bringing up the CEO pay example. After all, isn't the complaints about CEO pay by everyone just a plea for someone to collude to keep people with certain rare skills (Executive Management) from making as much as the market will bear? You may not think much of CEOs, but it's the same thing. The only difference is that you either simply don't like CEOs or you devalue their skill set, and while there are definitely some sociopaths out there in the CEO position, I'd argue that it is a position you need some very stong skills to do successfully.
In any event, people with rare skills are not the general worker population that unions and such would be working for. Unions tend to cut down people who try to use their skills to rise above the norm in terms of pay and benefits, instead, they usually insist on a seniority basis for any sort of increased compensation.
I'm not saying that I like that CEOs make as much as they do, but I often wonder if it even matters how much they make. Do lottery winners suddenly become threats to society with that money, simply because they have a lot of it? Honestly, this country isn't going to fall apart because some people make more money than others, it's going to fall apart due to our attitudes about what is good to do with that money, and that's something that reaches right down into the "lower" classes as well. We seem to care more about how much someone else makes and pay no attention to what we do with what we do make. After all, isn't that what the mortgage crisis was all about? People taking out loans they simply couldn't afford, just because some loan officer told them it was okay for them to spend as much money as they could?
There's always going to be someone like a CEO out there. If you abolish them, then the rich people will be the political leaders or the union leaders. If you abolish money or private ownership, then the rich people will be the Leaders of the Revolution. Pointing at these people is like pointing at the sun for being too hot and wondering why someone doesn't just take that big ball of gas down a notch.
Being a janitor doesn't take a high degree of training or skill. While I agree that they should be recognized with sufficient measures of dignity and salary, comparing their salary to that of an engineers is absolutely stupid.
But why not? A company may refuse to hire you for all sorts of silly reasons. In fact, there are only a few "special" reasons (like race, sex, etc.) that they can't use. We're talking about eight of... say... 10,000 tech companies. What stops you from working for one of the other 9,992 companies? (I work for one, we're desperately looking for engineers, and I would love to have Google's sloppy seconds).
Google makes more money on searches on iOS than it does on Android.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
It is legal for companies to put agreements not to work for a competitor in a contract.
When I stop working for that company, the contract no longer applies. And many of these companies are based in, or operate in California, where non-competes are not valid if you're no longer working at the company.
The only time a non-compete should be valid at all is when the company is paying you. They stop paying, and the non-compete should stop having any effect.
At least you used your real fake name.
WRONG. A story about this in Bloomberg said that even if the employee came over on their own, answering a job ad, they were still not allowed to extend an offer. Meaning if you worked at Google, there was absolutely no way you could get a job at Apple.
I agree that companies should compete, but they should not steal employees from a competitor.
Why not? That's exactly what competition is. How can you and I compete for the same employee if there isn't the threat that the employee will leave you for me? Further, if you don't have that threat, what incentive is there for you to actually keep that employee happy?
lets say you are a small startup software company. You employ 10 people, and you are on the verge of becoming the next great search engine. Google comes in and pulls your top 5 people from under you, effectively killing your company. Now don't you wish there was an anti-poaching law?
Sorry, but no. The negative effects of this on workers far, far, far outweighs any benefits to be had.
No. If they can offer more money/better conditions than I can, they deserve the workers. You don't OWN your employees, they're yours until a better offer comes along. Employees don't owe their employer anything outside of fulfilling their contract.
There is no such thing as "Stealing" employees any more than there is "stealing" customers - offer me a better deal and I will move. It's as simple as that - market forces.
I fail to see how that has any bearing whatsoever on this discussion. There are small tech companies that they could work for, but the absence of the big guys in competition still has a negative effect on the worker's potential.
There is apparantly no such thing as loyalty or respect on either side.
Nope. Employers killed that a long time ago.
Employees seem to be willing to change jobs at the drop of a hat.
Employers are willing to drop employees at the drop of a hat, too.
I do tend to fall on the side of Google, et al and I think they are on the side of the consumer, that is you and me.
Obviously you're not a worker, then. Because the harm for all workers, if these agreements are ruled to be ok, far outweighs any marginal benefits for consumers
Only a Sith talks in absolutes.
Anti-trust isn't about absolutes, it is about unfair barriers.
Whatever the Engineers (Creators) are paid, it will always be less than the salesmen (type-a conmen) - sometimes to the point of of an ipecac-type response.
My last job, I would regularly crack 65 and even had a couple months where I was averaging 80 hours a week. People who've never worked 80 hours really can't grasp it. I never thought 80 would be much until I did it. that's 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. You literally get up, get dressed, drive to work, work, drive home, eat dinner, get ready for bed, and sleep. That's it.
Really? Interesting. I've worked 80hrs+ in a week a couple of times in the past, but for me when I entered my hours I usually saw it was more 3-4 18 hr days and then overall slacking. Ah ... good times ...
Life is great! (as told by Lady Susan)
Nope. Employers killed that a long time ago.
Employers are willing to drop employees at the drop of a hat, too.
Granted that. That was kind of my point.
I do tend to fall on the side of Google, et al and I think they are on the side of the consumer, that is you and me.
Obviously you're not a worker, then. Because the harm for all workers, if these agreements are ruled to be ok, far outweighs any marginal benefits for consumers
I admit I have worked management, and have been a small business owner. I have always treated my employees as well as I have been able. I still say poaching employees is an overall detriment to the economy. It also gives a disproportionate amount of power to large companies over small.
In short, I do think this is an area where (impartial) government intervention is necessary. To protect both sides.
OK, yes impartial government is an oxymoron....
In some sense, you could say slavery is good for consumers, because it lowers costs. The problem is that it screws over the slaves. It's the same here: poaching is good for employees, because it allows market forces to work, and for employee salaries to rise to the level appropriate for the demand for their services. Collusion against poaching only serves to artificially decrease employee salaries, and that's bad for the employees. In the long run, it's also bad for society (just like old-time slavery was): if all the salaries for a certain career are depressed, who's going to want to go into that career? The smart people will go into different careers, decreasing innovation in that field.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. Looks like I woke up exactly the kind of deluded victim (with mod points) I spoke of.
After all, isn't the complaints about CEO pay by everyone just a plea for someone to collude to keep people with certain rare skills (Executive Management) from making as much as the market will bear?
You make many good points, but I never argued that CEOs shouldn't be paid whatever the market (and perhaps their own sense of decency) decides they're worth --I argue that a double standard is blatantly unfair. Have you heard of any anti-poaching agreements or union-busting activities affecting CEOs? My rant is about fairness; I'm not advocating socialist ideals.
You may not think much of CEOs, but it's the same thing. The only difference is that you either simply don't like CEOs or you devalue their skill set, and while there are definitely some sociopaths out there in the CEO position, I'd argue that it is a position you need some very stong skills to do successfully.
You're right, it's certainly a skill (and I don't think much of most of them). However, there's an enormous difference between CEOs and their workers. Being at the top of the pyramid means that, other than your buddies on the board (if subject to one), you answer to no one and approve your own raises and benefits. No one above you colludes to limit your pay or hamper your efforts to job shop other premier employers. Again, my issue is fairness.
In any event, people with rare skills are not the general worker population that unions and such would be working for. Unions tend to cut down people who try to use their skills to rise above the norm in terms of pay and benefits, instead, they usually insist on a seniority basis for any sort of increased compensation.
I'm with you there. Many modern unions are malignant shadows of what they once were; and many have become something that does more harm than good. But attacking workers' rights to collectively bargain isn't the answer to fixing them. Reforming unions is a whole different thread.
I'm not saying that I like that CEOs make as much as they do, but I often wonder if it even matters how much they make. Do lottery winners suddenly become threats to society with that money, simply because they have a lot of it? Honestly, this country isn't going to fall apart because some people make more money than others, it's going to fall apart due to our attitudes about what is good to do with that money, and that's something that reaches right down into the "lower" classes as well. We seem to care more about how much someone else makes and pay no attention to what we do with what we do make.
Some people probably do feel that way, but I think the class envy meme is a deliberate mis-framing of the attitude of myself and most of the middle class. We really don't care who makes a billion dollars a year, we're outraged that they find tax dodges, offshore our jobs, and use obviously unfair advantage at every turn. No one can honestly say these abuses of power are good for America. Communism isn't the only system where the hopelessness of getting ahead can crush peoples' ambitions.
Ask me about my sig!
Looks like I woke up exactly the kind of deluded victim (with mod points) I spoke of.
Speaking of my Flamebait mod --not your post. (Sorry if that wasn't unclear.)
Ask me about my sig!
It probably doesn't matter how much CEOs make - although one does wonder why CEOs make orders of magnitude more money now than before. What does matter is when CEOs don't seem to lose their salaries and bonuses when the company is ran into the ground (sometimes bonuses even improve!). Anyone in a position of power with an incentive to do damage is a significant threat to the society. If murdering people improved someone's chances of winning the lottery -- then yes, that person would be a major threat to the society.
add to that the fact that smaller shops usually have lower salary structures.
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And the company that you applied to then informed your current employer that you were looking around for work. Justify THAT.
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Right, and be essentially forced into a pay cut because small shops usually offer lower salaries. Justify THAT.
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I still say poaching employees is an overall detriment to the economy.
Nowhere near the amount of harm done by allowing employers to shrink the potential job market like this.
Interesting. Like a lot of things it isn't black and white.....
Absolute not-hire. Even if the employee came to the company on their own, they couldn't extend an offer.
Correct. At one point I was told that I would have to quit my current job before I could be interviewed for a position at another of these companies. Naturally, applying for a position while newly unemployed would handicap my salary negotiating ability. The businesses viewed the anti-poaching deals as convenient for their HR operation and containing payroll costs. No pesky counter-offers...
There is a heck of a difference between having a contract that explictily says "Thou shalt not work for Apple" and Apple making a silent agreement with your employer not to hire you.
When I go to my boss and say I think it's time for a pay raise, knowing I can switch to the competition helps me get more. If he knows I can't switch because of a secret agreement, I'm stuck.
The person to whom I responded also included Facebook, Yahoo, and Oracle with Microsoft. That's leaving too many companies off the list.
I agree that such collusion is not a good idea.
Hell, I don't even like Microsoft so insert your own other favorite company if you hate them so much.
I didn't mean to show hatred of Microsoft, well not in that post. :-)
Good question. I don't have an answer for you except for "eternal vigilance" which is admittedly difficult when one works 50 hours a week and your opponents can pay people to focus on it 50 hours a week.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
I see your point, but you sort of speak against yourself by bringing up the CEO pay example. After all, isn't the complaints about CEO pay by everyone just a plea for someone to collude to keep people with certain rare skills (Executive Management) from making as much as the market will bear? You may not think much of CEOs, but it's the same thing. The only difference is that you either simply don't like CEOs or you devalue their skill set, and while there are definitely some sociopaths out there in the CEO position, I'd argue that it is a position you need some very stong skills to do successfully.
I think this is much less rare a skill than it seems. There are a combination of factors that massively inflate CEO pay far beyond what they are actually worth to the company.
A lot of it is 'risk avoidance'. If I, as a board member, bring on someone who has a reputation for being a great CEO (or at least, being a CEO at all) I'm much less at risk for shareholder lawsuits than if I choose some random schmuck from the rank and file of the company.
Barring that, bringing in someone I know personally has a CEO feels much less risky than bringing in someone else. If you look at the boards of large publicly traded corporations, you'll see that it's actually a very small network of people, most of whom serve on the boards of multiple companies. That really limits the pool of friends.
And lastly, if I'm a CEO, I can claim that, since the company is profitable, I'm doing a great job, and I should be paid more than the CEO of that company over there that isn't doing as well. But, of course, while a CEO can have a huge influence on whether or not a company does well, the CEO is certainly not the only determining factor. Also, some CEOs are much better at handling certain kinds of situations and not so great at others. As the economy changes and fluxes, this means that CEOs rise and fall. Their pay is almost never reduced of course, but whenever the right combination of factors and skill puts a CEO on the rise, their pay goes up.
I argue that this combination of factors is what causes CEO pay to be so ridiculous as compared to a rank and file worker. Even though I would also argue that the rank and file workers, in aggregate, have a far bigger impact on whether or not a company succeeds.
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