“Today I’m in San Jose, attending a hearing in the salary fixing lawsuit brought against Apple, Google and other tech giants. I’ll have more on that soon,” Mark Ames writes for PandoDaily. “In the meantime, one the most interesting misconceptions I’ve heard about the ‘Techtopus‘ conspiracy is that, while these secret deals to fix recruiting were bad (and illegal), they were also needed to protect innovation by keeping teams together while avoiding spiraling costs.”
“That was said to me, almost verbatim, over dinner by an industry insider, who quickly understood he’d said something wrong— ‘But of course, it’s illegal, so it’s wrong,’ he corrected himself,” Ames writes. “The view that whatever Jobs and Google did to deny workers wages and lock up talent was necessary for innovation is likely much more widely held than publicly uttered. And yet, all the evidence in the pre-trial demonstrates the very opposite: That the non-solicitations stifled innovation.”
Ames writes, “A perfect example of this can be found in emails and deposition testimony which have emerged, and been reviewed by PandoDaily, in the run up to the trial. The episode occurs in the spring of 2006, just a year after Google and Apple first forged their core secret non-poaching agreements.”
Much more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Dan K.” and “Sarah” for the heads up.]
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