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A high-stakes negotiation is taking place in Silicon Valley among some of the biggest names in the industry — Apple and Google among them — over accusations that they were involved in a collusion to prevent their employees from being hired at rival companies.

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Steve Jobs, the chief executive of Apple at the time, could not have been any clearer of his intentions to collude with Google and prevent his company from hiring away employees from his frenemy and vice versa.

“If you hire a single one of these people that means war,” he told a Google executive.

Apple’s human resources sent out a note:

“Please add Google to your ’hands-off’ list. We recently agreed not to recruit from one another so if you hear of any recruiting they are doing against us, please be sure to let me know.”

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Google’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, was just as explicit in an email after Mr. Jobs queried him about why Google was trying to hire one of his employees. “I believe we have a policy of no recruiting from Apple and this is a direct inbound request,” Mr. Schmidt wrote to his team. “Can you get this stopped and let me know why this is happening? I will need to send a response back to Apple quickly so please let me know as soon as you can.”

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Mr. Schmidt clearly understood the legal jeopardy such an arrangement could create. In another similar email chain about the policy with another technology company that was ostensibly part of the no-hire cartel, he told a colleague to communicate it “verbally since I don’t want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later.”

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How deep was the no-hire policy? When Google sought to hire an Apple employee based in Paris, Google literally sought permission from Mr. Jobs first. “Google would like to make an offer to Jean-Marie Hullot to run a small engineering center in Paris. Bill, Larry, Sergey and Jean-Marie believe it is important to get your blessing before moving forward with this offer,” a Google vice president wrote to Mr. Jobs. “Google’s relationship with Apple is extremely important to us. If that relationship is any way threatened by this hire, please let me know and we will pass on this opportunity.”

Mr. Jobs later objected and Google rescinded the offer to Mr. Hullot’s team. “Steve is opposed to Google hiring these engineers,” the vice president wrote. “He didn’t say why, and I don’t think it is appropriate for me to go back for clarification. I can’t risk our relationship with Apple to make this happen over his objections.”

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psyconaught said:

i remember reading about this. If i remember correctly i believe IBM also had no competition clauses in their contracts, so if they hired someone they would be legally banned from working from the competition even if they were fired, so they would hire lots of talent then promptly fire them just to remove talent from the work place.

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zappaisgod said:

I hope these fuckers get stripped of every dollar they ever collected.  Fucking cunts.

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