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Steve Jobs Threatened Palm To Stop Poaching Employees
An anonymous reader writes with more news about the no-poach agreements that seemed to plague tech companies. From the article: "Steve Jobs threatened patent litigation if Palm wouldn't agree to stop hiring Apple employees, says former Palm CEO Edward Colligan in a statement dated August 7th, 2012. The allegation is backed up by a trove of recently-released evidence that shows just how deeply Silicon Valley's no-hire agreements pervaded in the mid-2000s. Apple, Google, Intel, and others are the focus of a civil lawsuit into the 'gentleman's agreements,' in which affected employees are fighting for class action status and damages from resulting lost wages, potentially reaching into the hundreds of millions of dollars."
Jobs is the reason I have never owned nor ever will own an Apple product. Evil man.
Nor Oracle products, or use Facebook.
Yeah, kind of lame, but if everyone would say, enough is enough, things might change. Not holding out much hope for that...
Are you going to extend that to all the other companies that participated in this? For example Google? Because if you read that link, Eric Schmidt not only complies, but even is on record as wanting to do things verbally so there are no paper trails.
This is a BUNCH of people being fucking colluding dick bags. Singling one out lets the others off the hook.
I wish some of this stuff had come out while he was alive.
A lot of it did. His asshole rep was pretty well-known long before he died. It just couldn't penetrate through the mass of fanboy and media adoration.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
It's a general corporate douchebaggery problem.. not a problem with an individual corporate douchebag.
Though what is being said about Jobs isn't probably off the mark, either...
They are certainly all to blame. That does not prevent us from saying someone specific is an asshole because of that, and does not make it less true either. I am tired of seeing people here thinking that being one among others makes you less guilty than if you were doing it alone.
But the issue of Poaching or Employees going to a competitor is a problem.
It is only a problem if you haven't made it so that your employees really *want* to work for you. You can do that a lot of ways: high salary, really really nice offices, free lunches for everyone, a 40- or even 36-hour work week, really cool code, etc.
I am officially gone from
So now employees are slaves?
A company does not invest in employees, it pays them for their time. They are not things to own. If the company wants to avoid any "investment", they can only hire employees trained in exactly what they want. If none can be found the company can feel free to close up shop.
I sell my time, if you want to make my time more valuable to you by training me during this time I am selling you that is your choice. Once the time you have bought has come to an end I owe you nothing. If this was not the case then I would have a pension, and raises that kept me at market salary. Instead we now have to switch jobs to get the market rate as raises never increase at that rate.
Define poaching.
Palm employees have every right to speak to Apple employees when those Apple employees are not on the clock. Why should calling an Apple employee be any different than calling any any person?
Apple does not own these folks, and has no right to say who they can speak when not on the clock. Steve Jobs was such an asshole he stole from Woz. You know the guy that without Apple would never have even existed.