Steve Jobs wasn't even okay with Google hiring former Apple engineers

http://www.tuaw.com/2014/03/27/steve-jobs-wasnt-even-okay-with-google-hiring-former-apple-engi/

by anderzole • 12 years ago

189 114 12 years ago

l0stb0y• 12 years ago

Just when I thought Jobs couldn't be a bigger scumbag! Someone dig up his grave and make an example of him in front of all of Silicon Valley. It's what he would have done.

badman_ting• 12 years ago

Not helping.

sdegutis• 12 years ago

All opinions aside, I'm pretty sure Steve would have respected the dead.

martin1b2• 12 years ago

I think it's helpful to accurately represent Steve's character. Many of those who love Apple products automatically love Steve. If he wasn't what they thought, it's truthful to reveal it.

jtfrench• 12 years ago

Now I see what pg was talking about comment moderation. C'mon guys. Let's class it up.

MBlume• 12 years ago

I'm confused, has "pending comments" not been fully activated yet?

npizzolato• 12 years ago

Downvotes seem to be doing a very good job here. The text is almost completely invisible.

nezza-_-• 12 years ago

I wonder if in the ongoing process of this 'scandal' any numbers will appear on how many people were rejected because of such agreements. This is such an unfair move towards people who have great talent who might just be better off working for Google instead of Apple or vice versa because of their mindset. I hope for high penalties for the involved companies.

tsax• 12 years ago

Screw 'penalties.' Have you looked at Wall Street over the past decade? Every month or so there's some 'settlement' with a regulatory agency with some fine or the other for all kinds of issues. Class-action lawsuits also enrich the lawyers mostly. It would be best if the engineers themselves would get compensated, but not sure how it would be possible to identify the plaintiffs.

rayiner2• 12 years ago

Class-action lawsuits also enrich the lawyers mostly

Many companies love to use the public's negative sentiment against plaintiffs' lawyers to their favor, by invoking precisely the "class-action lawsuits also enrich the lawyers mostly" canard. This is a sleight of hand. The value of class-action suits is deterrence. Otherwise, it can be very profitable to steal a little bit of money or cause a little bit of harm to a large number of people. Look at it another way: if the alternative is the companies keeping the ill-gotten gains, is that better?

JonFish85• 12 years ago

And honestly, you'd have trouble convincing many people that wages were kept all that low. What's the median salary of an engineer in the Valley? [1] would seem to indicate a starting range in the low 6-figures is common. I don't know if these things go to juries, but if it came down to that, I imagine that an engineer complaining of a low 6-figure salary with stock options will convince a jury that (s)he is really being hurt that much will be very tough.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/record-salaries-for-valley-pr...

Edited to fix grammar.

fidotron• 12 years ago

There are two things here that are new. Firstly it's got an international angle, and laws around the world do definitely differ on things like poaching and anti-competes.

More interesting is Alan Eustace's comment about the value of the Apple relationship to Google, in 2006. Were they really that close? I struggle to think of why they viewed their relationship as of particular strategic importance at that time.

fiatmoney• 12 years ago

Eric Schmidt was on their board.

sytelus• 12 years ago

Apple was putting Google Search and Maps in front and center of iPhone experience among other things. This would be hugely valuable relationship, ofcourse.

minwcnt5• 12 years ago

The iPhone didn't come out until 2007.

malandrew• 12 years ago

What shocked me is that Steve was seen as such a sociopath that he didn't even dare go back and ask why out of fear of messing up whatever relationship he had with Steve and Apple.

jburwell• 12 years ago

Do no evil?

gaius• 12 years ago

Do know evil

laureny• 12 years ago

This is such an unfair move

Which unfair move?

Google could have gone ahead and hire these people anyway. Nothing prevented them from doing so except their decision to not risk angering Jobs.

PythonicAlpha• 12 years ago

Unfair against the people that deserved those jobs.

jjoonathan• 12 years ago

This isn't about being intimidated by Jobs, it's about colluding to defeat an iterated prisoner's dilemma that lies at the heart of the value proposition of free market economics. They are capable of thinking more than one move ahead.

Jobs's wrath was a tiny concern next to the prospect of losing tens or hundreds of millions a year to engineers that could suddenly start playing big companies off one another.

psbp• 12 years ago

I've read all the released documents, I get the impression that most of this was instigated by Jobs. Sure they played along for this purpose, but the threats and escalation started with the Job's emails in 05.

kolbe• 12 years ago

What I'm mostly learning though this saga is that an uncomfortable number of SV executives are feckless weaklings in the face of a sociopath like Jobs.

jarsin• 12 years ago

Yep if I ever started a company that became as prominent as google etc I cant imagine a scenario where some ahole ceo of another company like jobs calls me and bitches me out and I just say yes sir and roll over and start doing fraudulent illegal shit like these douches at google did.

nobbyclark• 12 years ago

It probably began as a friendly gentlemen a agreement. "Don't steal my engineers. I won't steal yours. Helps keeps costs down. It's all in the shareholders interests right?"

ascendantlogic• 12 years ago

The problem is that even as powerful as Google is, Apple eclipses everyone in the money-and-power department, especially in the late 2000's. Also note that having Google services kicked off of the iPhone in the late 2000's simply was not an option for Google. It's easy to do armchair quarterbacking from behind your keyboard but when there's billions of dollars on the line it's not as simple to give someone the middle finger.

Note I do not condone the behavior and would have liked to see it turn into a thermonuclear bidding war for engineers just like everyone else. But I sure as hell understand why a lot of these people rolled over. I do like that Facebook told Apple to get fucked though. That was nice to see.

snowwrestler• 12 years ago

It was in Google's best interest to make the agreement and to enforce it aggressively. It helped keep salaries down and it reduced the flow of proprietary info out of the company.

I'm not saying that's right--because it's not. I'm just saying, thinking that Apple pushed Google around is the wrong reading. Google did what they did because they wanted to.

GVIrish• 12 years ago

I don't think it's necessarily that other SV executives were weaklings, it's that they thought the non-poaching agreement was in their interests too. Jobs was definitely cunning and ruthless but he wasn't all brute force, he set up a deal whereby these other companies would see things his way due to their own greed.

I think that scenario played out a couple of times in Jobs' career. He would do something ruthless or somewhat distasteful, but because the people he was pushing his idea on stood to profit in some way they agreed with it, even though it enriched Jobs a lot more than it enriched them.

lambdasquirrel• 12 years ago

On the other side of things, it provides a nice reason to not hire those people. I've seen managers take it on as a bit of "rationalization debt." If you can't give a good reason for something, find something or someone to blame it on.

derefr• 12 years ago

Jobs was definitely cunning and ruthless but he wasn't all brute force, he set up a deal whereby these other companies would see things his way due to their own greed.

So, basically, he did the same thing for employees that he did for iTunes music licensing.

cwaniak2• 12 years ago

Funny how this comment made me think "Putin vs. West"

_greim_• 12 years ago

Can someone speculate as to why Jobs would have been opposed to this? The only thing I can come up with is that Jobs was trying to minimize the amount of times that "I know a guy at Google" was spoken in the halls of Apple.

evan_• 12 years ago

He might not have wanted engineers to carry knowledge of Apple's programs and projects to a competitor.

bane• 12 years ago

Every employee signs an NDA, problem solved.

brianpgordon• 12 years ago

Perhaps because they were good engineers, and they would turn a profit for his competitor (Google). If you could make an important decision for your competitor, wouldn't you try to undermine them?

coldtea• 12 years ago

Isn't it obvious that this is related to the culture of silency around future products at Apple?

He wouldn't want Google to know "hey, we're making a new thing called the iPad/whatever and it's like so and so".

mynameisvlad2• 12 years ago

It's not like Google would know. Those engineers signed NDAs and non-competes, just like practically everyone in the tech world.

daniel-cussen• 12 years ago

Having read his biography, I strongly doubt the reason was something anyone else would find defensible. I'm not even sure he felt it was defensible. Pretty sure it's yet another one of his "asshole" moves, the likes of which fill the book.

leoc2• 12 years ago

Don't forget, by the way, that when Steve Jobs left Apple to found a new company in a line of business perilously close to Apple's he took a number of important Apple people with him, despite giving a misleading promise not to do so.

MBCook2• 12 years ago

Jobs had a personal scorched-earth vendetta against Google ever since they stabbed him in the back with Android (as he seems to have viewed it).

I imagine if he thought there was any way he could accomplish it he would have banned Google employees from buying Apple products or getting within 1000 feet of an Apple store.

doktrin2• 12 years ago

Your comment doesn't apply here. Android was released in 2008 and these emails were written in 2006.

This is not correspondence between companies at war. On the contrary, Apple was leveraging their strategic partnership with Google to block the hires.

adamio• 12 years ago

Definitely a good reason why he would be paranoid about his employees doing the same; the wage suppression it seems is a negative side effect

leoc2• 12 years ago

To a large extent they're two sides of the same coin, though, since you persuade key employees not to leave (partly) by increasing their compensation.

spinchange• 12 years ago

Adding a bit more context to these emails, a 2008 article from TechCrunch details that Hullot and other members from Apple's Paris engineering team were actually given pink slips.

So he was not okay with Google hiring former engineers Apple let go. Unbelieveable.

atomicfiredoll2• 12 years ago

I guess that when Jobs told them, "you'll never work in this business again" he was serious.

cwaniak2• 12 years ago

It might come as a total shock to you, but "this business" doesn't end with Apple and Google.

allochthon• 12 years ago

Unbelieveable.

At the level of principle, I agree. At the level of practicalities, knowing a little about Steve Jobs, this is believable, unfortunately.

soperj2• 12 years ago

Hopefully history remembers him as the dick he really was.

Natsu• 12 years ago

I'm amazed by how much of this agreement seems to have been driven by him. I know these investigations take a really long time to process, but part of me wonders if his passing on had anything to do with this being discovered.

drawkbox• 12 years ago

Nothing really made me not like Jobs previous to this but I feel the same way, this was his doing and it changed my opinion of him. However I never thought he treated Woz right and that should have been a tell on how he saw engineers no longer working with him.

High talent fields do seem to get pretty sport/league like where talent are locked in by agreements/contracts, only here the companies got the sole benefit. Maybe we need a Programmers League with free agency.

raghus• 12 years ago

Steve Jobs wasn't okay with Google hiring anyone who ever applied for a job at Apple. Or really, even people with last names that began with "Mac"

johnrob• 12 years ago

I think these poaching agreements had more to do with IP than salary escalation. The interaction here makes it clear - the employees were no longer with apple, hence there was no hypothetical counter offer to give.

elwell• 12 years ago

Very good point. I haven't heard anyone mention that facet yet.

rhizome• 12 years ago

There are already laws against transmitting IP, there was no agreement necessary to deal with it. Risk-minimization, perhaps, but companies have been dealing with business secrets since before the Industrial Revolution. Frankly, I think an unexamined angle is the fragility of these companies that the agreements imply.

pbreit• 12 years ago

I'd be surprised if any CEO was OK with former employees going to an arch competitor.

TheCoelacanth• 12 years ago

It's perfectly legal for them to not be OK with it. It's not legal to get the competitor to agree not to hire them.

dannyr• 12 years ago

I hope Apple and Google would get penalized aside from paying penalties.

Both companies have plenty of cash so even a $100 million penalty won't make a difference.

I don't have any idea though on what they could be penalized with aside from money.

me2i81• 12 years ago

I always thought collusion was one of those things for which executives could be personally prosecuted and jailed if they were found guilty, but I'd guess it depends on the jurisdiction.

martin1b2• 12 years ago

Sounds to me like Steve was a serious control freak.. Article after article, it's the same thing... Don't get me wrong. The stuff his company did was cool, but cheesh..

qq66• 12 years ago

The tone that Eustace, a Senior Vice President at Google, uses with Jobs is beyond deferential.

"Based on your strong preference that we not hire the ex-Apple engineers, Jean-Marie and I decided not to open a Google Paris engineering center. I appreciate your input into this decision, and your continued support of the Google/Apple partnership."

I'd be surprised to see one of my peers use this kind of tone with the President of the United States.

lclarkmichalek• 12 years ago

The POTUS seems a tad more sane than Jobs with regards to taking offence to trivial matters.

frade332• 12 years ago

As a CEO, this situation is more than complex. There are times when you are working with 'partners' or anyone in the same industry. And you can not avoid collaborating with each other. Apple needed Google, as much as Google needed Apple.

However then there is the ugly part, since your partners are in the same industry, they are ultimately your competitors too. It's not about laws or specific rules. It's about human nature, you will be less pissed if someone hooked up with your Ex, but things could be entirely different, if your Ex is hooked up with one of your friends.

This is perhaps not a smart analogy, but it's somewhat relevant, remember a time when Eric was on Apple board, and then they went on to launch Android? It certainly leaves a bad taste in the mouth and incites a war.

mempko• 12 years ago

So what you are saying is that the "everyone acts in their self interest" free market ideology is bullshit and that we are all in fact people after all? Avoiding the ravages of the market is important for profit. Capitalists always hated the market when it comes to their own business...

frade332• 12 years ago

I am not saying what Apple did was right. Actually this is anti-competition and as a consumer I hate it. However I was making a totally different point, being a CEO of small enterprise myself, I just pointed out, that perhaps I would have the same restrictions in place, but it does not justify them.

jaunkst• 12 years ago

Don't know a clever way to say this but.. Bureaucracy sucks. List a million reasons why it impedes a happier life.

slantedview2• 12 years ago

Worse than the anti-competitive angle of this story is the idea that Jobs prevented engineers, with families, from obtaining jobs. That's just inexcusable.

jroseattle• 12 years ago

Wow Google, as if your embarrassment couldn't go any further on this story.

Not to get dramatic, but we're talking about dignity, integrity, the moral center to understand the difference between right and wrong. Didn't anyone at Google have the ability to get beyond groupthink?

All that money and resources and control and influence, and the only thing that mattered to everyone was....getting more of it. How sad for all of you in those companies to act like this and affect the livelihood of others, all in the name of a few bucks.

Funny thing about money; it's so damn expensive.

abc_lisper2• 12 years ago

Very well put :)

The surprising thing is people tend to get worse as they get richer.

Steve Jobs wasn't even okay with Google hiring former Apple engineers

Related Stories