Emails Reveal Battle Over Employee Poaching Between Google and Facebook

colinneagle (2544914) writes "Apple, Google, and a slew of other high-tech firms are currently embroiled in a class-action lawsuit on allegations that they all adhered to tacit anti-poaching agreements. With that case currently ongoing, we've seen a number of interesting executive emails come to light, including emails showing that Steve Jobs threatened Palm's CEO with a full-fledged legal assault if the company kept going after Apple engineers. There is also correspondence between Sergey Brin, Marissa Mayer, Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg, and Google's Jonathan Rosenberg discussing the threat that Google saw in Facebook hiring its engineers. The discussion elevates, with Sandberg pointing out the hypocrisy of Google growing to prominence by hiring engineers from major Silicon Valley firms. Rosenberg then hints at the potential for a 'deeper relationship' that Google would be willing to reach as long as Facebook stops hiring its engineers, going so far as to tell Sandberg to 'fix this problem.'"

Comments

Amusing? sentence before the redaction:

[Anonymous Coward]

"Finally, we (or basically I) have not done a good enough job of high rewards for high performance." - Sergey Brin

Re:Amusing? sentence before the redaction:

[bobbied]

This is why it's always ultimately best to work in government. The pay isn't high, but the work environment is ideal.

Huh? My first job as a college graduate engineer was with the DOD as a civilian. The pay is OK, but not great as you suggest. But I can tell you that the work environment is NOT ideal, even in the best of circumstances. I had great people to work for and with. They where among the best I've had in my 25-30 years so far. But, it is maddeningly frustrating to work for the government, if you care even a small amount about doing the job efficiently the right way. Maybe I'm just too frugal, but I found the wholesale waste that happened due to all the rules and laws to be frustrating to watch. Things such as spending $250K to get a $750K worth of equipment purchased, or throwing away 90% of a certain kind of part because they where so poor in quality that we had to test and select parts that met specs to repair equipment. Then we'd end up having to re-repair things because these junk parts drifted out of tolerance quickly.

If you have the right mindset, I suppose government work is fine. But if you try to care, or actually do the right thing by your customers in the most efficient way possible, it's an exercise in frustration.

Google and Apple conspired to do evil?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh the humanity.

Ultimate fanboi war!

Re:Poaching is bad for employees too

[SpzToid]

Poaching and wanting H1-B rules relaxed means I.T. workers whose knowledge is perishable in the marketplace as technology evolves are getting screwed from the tech billionaires. Been that way for decades, and if that's not enough to make you puke, young Zuckerberg and his buddies even started a PAC to lobby on their behalf.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Innov...

This is NOT slavery

[sjbe]

For employees it is evil a sort of substitute for slaves and indentured servants.

Seriously folks. Let's not for a moment pretend that this is remotely similar to actual slavery. We're talking about two companies to collude to suppress wages for employees that by all objective standards are paid pretty well and have pretty good lives. Are you seriously going to claim that that is in any way comparable to being the property of another human being?

Yes this collusion is wrong. No it isn't even close to slavery. Claiming that the two are anything similar is unbelievably clueless.

Re:This is NOT slavery

[geek]

For employees it is evil a sort of substitute for slaves and indentured servants.

Seriously folks. Let's not for a moment pretend that this is remotely similar to actual slavery. We're talking about two companies to collude to suppress wages for employees that by all objective standards are paid pretty well and have pretty good lives. Are you seriously going to claim that that is in any way comparable to being the property of another human being?

Yes this collusion is wrong. No it isn't even close to slavery. Claiming that the two are anything similar is unbelievably clueless.

Is it that far off really? Many engineers come out of school with 100k+ in debt. They go to work for one of these companies and can never leave because of secret agreements from the execs. Their wages are kept artificially low in a high cost of living area. Between rent/mortgage and other costs of living, they simply can't afford to drop the job and go elsewhere without having another job in the wings.

This isn't much different from indentured servitude. Only with indentured servants there is typically a contract up front, after X number of years you're free to move on. In Silicon Valley its all backroom deals, under the table and out of sight from the public. Your "owners" own you without you explicitly knowing it, there is no end date and there is serious direct career consequences if you try to change it.

They may not be subjected to beatings but they are certainly subject to economic ruin if they try to change or improve their station. I've seen it happen. I've seen good engineers leave engineering altogether because they became untouchable simply because of who they once worked for.

This is why I became a leftist

[meta-monkey]

When I was little, my daddy told me "never attribute to malice what might as well be ignorance." And I believed this. So I was a libertarian and was suspicious of regulations on business. Let companies compete in the free market! Leave them be, government busybodies!

But then I grew up.

It is not the purpose of government to serve the people. It is the purpose of government to preserve the status quo. To keep the rich rich and the poor poor. These corporations give massive amounts of money to both political parties, and they get what they pay for. Fat government contracts. Protection from competitors, foreign and domestic. You think they give a shit about unemployment? Hell no. They LOVE unemployment. Keeps the workers in line knowing there's 5 other people who would love to take their job if they get uppity. Student loan debt forgiveness? Hells no. Debt keeps the slaves tied to their wheels. And if our barristas have Ph.Ds, all the better. Damn tech workers think they're entitled to a middle class lifestyle? Haha, bring in the H1-Bs! Secret backroom deals to cap salaries! The nerve thinking Americans should earn middle class wages...in America. Working at the most profitable companies in history. We need that money to maximize shareholder value! The Dow's through the roof with massive unemployment? Perfect!

That is not ignorance. That is malice.

So, fuck 'em. Fuck 'em hard. I am a socialist.

Re:This is why I became a leftist

[Cyberax]

A few years ago I read a financial magazine on an airplane (quick googling tells that it was WSJ, I can't find a direct link but this blog post describes it: http://blog.rongarret.info/201... ) about how companies should watch their stock options closely and do not allow 'unnecessary' employees like chefs to get them. Because if a company grows big then these peons might actually become members of the Rich! And little people totally do not deserve it.

I wanted to break a window and throw this magazine out.

The final soultion.

[VortexCortex]

Shaka, when the walls fell! Gorbachev and Regan, at Geneva. Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra!

Google, when the being wasn't evil. Zuckerberg, his fucks dumb. Eric Schmidt, with nothing to hide. Dathon and Picard at El Adrel.

Custer, his last stand. Murphey, his law unbroken. Snowden, his PRISM wide open.

Re:There is a major difference

[IamTheRealMike]

Hey Kasper,

It's Mike H, remember me? We used to work together in SRE ;) How is the startup going? I have also recently moved on from the big G.

Now. When this thing first started to bubble up, I didn't feel very concerned either. OK, so I got fewer emails from recruiters than otherwise would. No big deal, not like there was exactly a shortage of those.

However, I just want to point out one thing:

I would only consider there to be a real problem, if facebook would reject resumes submitted by candidates, just because they happened to work for Google. I have seen no evidence of such a practice existing.

Did you read the article? It seems that the only reason such a situation did not occur is because Sandberg told Google to pound sand. During the time in question, these emails clearly show that a very senior Google executive was directly asking Facebook not to hire Google employees, even if they employees in question wanted to go work there and what's more, good corporate relations were being pegged to that demand.

I must admit, I never knew much about Rosenberg and don't have many memories of him (can't even recall what he looks like). But regardless, this paints Google in a very negative light indeed. Rosenberg was willing to threaten other companies in order to make them stop not just pursuing but actually hiring "his" people. Facebook refused, but who knows what other companies didn't? Was that really the only time he took that approach? Was this a Rosenberg-specific moment of madness/idiocy or does it run deeper? I await further discovery with great interest. Even if this was a brief failure on the behalf of just one executive, that's still completely unacceptable and Rosenberg needs to be fired, now. Employees are not assets whose freedom of employment can be traded for corporate deals and to treat them that way is completely unacceptable.

Re:There is a major difference

[synx]

I encourage anyone with skin in the game to read the court documents, they are easy to read and really lay out the case for how anti-recruitment agreements (whereby Google agreed not to directly recruit from Apple and vice versa) directly affect overall pay scale. It is laid out clearly, concretely, and isn't just a wishful case. There are a few solid narratives which I think will put google under severe pressure at trial (eg: giving EVERY employee a 10% raise because of Facebook's aggressive recruiting).

First off, it's a FACT that Google's (and other companies) agreements are illegal. That isn't even what this case is about - the DOJ came to a settlement and Google is no longer allowed to make such agreements. This case is about wage impact and class impact. Now that the class action was certified by a judge, there is good chance that in a trial a connection between the illegal activities the companies in question were conducting and class-impact and wages were affected.

Since you used to work at Google, presumably you're a smart person, I hope you can see how your own personal feelings about how recruiters from other companies should or should not behave have little bearing on the actual illegal activities that Google was undertaking.

Now, as a Google employee, you certainly know about the pay bands, right? That your pay is not at the sole discretion of your hiring manager or your manager, but set in a company wide policy that employees of job title X get paid between $A - $B with GSU/RSU/option grants in a specific range as well. There are pay bands for every single title in the company (except maybe executives). Google (and Intel, and many companies) make it a high priority to keep internal equity between employees at given titles (eg: SRE II), so if too many employees were being recruited away and retained they would have to adjust pay, either by giving promotions or adjusting pay bands.

As we know, Google had to elect to do the latter. In response to Facebook recruiting, Google gave across the board 10% raises, and specific raises to SRE titles as well. This is all laid out in court discovery, and is a fact, even Google's lawyers dont deny that.

The class filing has a lot of discovery, a strong narrative, and statistical modeling to demonstrate there was "class wide impact" (aka YOU were affected by your coworkers inability to discover their true worth via getting unsolicited job offers).

Now, finally, you said "some people have argued... shouldn't even be actively be contacting candidates." The question is ... why is this justified? Where's the legal basis for such a strict restriction? Also how does it affect overall market dynamics? Maybe if there was an country-wide law for this, but what purpose would it serve? In a market based economy wages are set by companies bidding for employees. Since a lot of people in this field have jobs nearly all the time, the only way to find out they are unpaid is to be offered a job with a higher pay. There are only 2 ways for this to happen, one is for the employee to seek, the other is for companies to reach out. Why restrict companies?

I think a lot of your arguments are around the notion of definitions of "aggressive", polite or decorum. Legally speaking there isnt any distinction here, and I am not sure the common good is benefited by restricting the function of the market of jobs and employees.