We all know that high-tech firms do their best to retain valuable employees. Salaries and stock options are just the beginning. There are also awards programs, aid for ongoing education, and many more perks. Some of the industry's biggest companies have the most creative retention programs—for example, Google's laid-back Googleplex workplace is specifically designed to help the company attract and keep the programming cream of the crop.
Given the competition over scarce superprogrammer resources, you would expect high-tech companies to raid each other's cubicle farms like crazy. But according to documents recently made public by the U.S. Department of Justice, that is not the case. In fact, just the opposite has occurred. It appears that top execs at Google, Apple, Pixar, Adobe, Intel, Intuit, and Lucasfilm made gentlemen's agreements not to recruit each other's employees.
According to the documents, the six companies not only agreed not to “poach” employees from each other, but they also agreed not to give employees offers if they applied voluntarily. The companies even agreed to notify each other when employees tried to switch jobs. The agreements were apparently made at the companies' very highest executive levels. For example, the court papers include an e-mail message from Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen to Apple's Steve Jobs titled “Recruitment of Apple Employees.”
The problem with these agreements is that they can be illegal—especially if they are made for the purpose of preventing bidding wars for talent, hindering employees' efforts to negotiate for higher salaries, and artificially keeping compensation low.
The Department of Justice examined the documents in 2010 and negotiated a settlement with the companies. The six companies did not have to admit wrongdoing, but they had to promise to end their illegal hiring practices.
Now a group of employees has launched a class-action suit against the companies. The plaintiffs are seeking compensation for salaried employees who worked for the six companies during a four-year period during the late 2000s. If the suit is successful (or if a settlement is negotiated), a lot of tech workers could receive a lot of money.
The case will be heard starting next week by Judge Lucy H. Koh in United States District Court in San Jose, California.
Web recommendation: This page made me laugh out loud. And the more I poked around the site, the more impressed I was at the resources that were gathered there. J.D. says check it out.
J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He is finishing this blog early so he can go for a short walk before the sun sets.