Damning Evidence Emerges In Google-Apple “No Poach” Antitrust Lawsuit
The evidence states that the defendants agreed not to poach employees from each other or give them offers if they voluntarily applied, and to notify the current employers of any employees trying to switch between them. They also agreed not to enter into bidding wars and to limit the potential for employees to negotiate for higher salaries.
In one particularly juicy piece of evidence from May 2005, Adobe’s CEO Bruce Chizen emailed Steve Jobs regarding “Recruitment of Apple Employees”. In the message, Adobe’s SVP for human resources writes “Bruce and Steve Jobs have an agreement that we are not to solicit ANY Apple employees, and vice versa.”
Additionally, documents state that there is “strong evidence that the companies knew about the other express agreements, patterned their own agreements off of them, and operated them concurrently with the others to accomplish the same objective.”
For example, Lori McAdams of Pixar wrote an internal email to others at Pixar in April 2007 stating, “I just got off the phone with Danielle Lambert [of Apple], and we agreed that effective now, we’ll follow a Gentleman’s agreement with Apple that is similar to our Lucasfilm agreement.”

kris 4:27 pm on January 22, 2012 Permalink |
Interesting comment on the article:
Allowed??? Seriously? So this person literally thinks we should be slaves? These companies have all kinds of tools to retain employees – but they instead chose to make these kinds of agreements so they wouldn’t have to do anything positive to keep people.
Assholes.
Aaron 5:18 pm on January 22, 2012 Permalink |
Haven’t you heard? We all exist to serve companies & drive innovation.
kris 5:28 pm on January 22, 2012 Permalink |
Stuff like this is why I don’t feel the least bit guilty leaving jobs.