Source: Apple And Google Agreed Not To Poach Workers
While Google CEO Eric Schmidt was on Apple's board of directors, the two companies had an agreement not to hire away each other's workers, a former Google employee with knowledge of such matters has told us. We have since confirmed this with other ex-Googlers.
Context & Ripple Effects
Eric Schmidt's dual hat is the backdrop: he sits on Apple's board while running Google, and Business Week reported the day before that he took no pay for the Apple seat — an arrangement that already signaled how entangled the two companies' leadership had become.
Now ex-Googlers are telling TechCrunch that during Schmidt's board tenure the two companies agreed not to hire away each other's workers. Neither Apple nor Google has acknowledged such an agreement, so this rests on former-employee testimony — but it lands amid visibly cooling relations between the two firms, making any labor-side pact politically sensitive for both boards.
First-order effects
- Engineers whose skills straddle the Apple-Google overlap lose the cross-offer bidding war that would otherwise bid up their compensation — the agreement suppresses mobility precisely where the two workforces compete hardest.
- Both companies' recruiters are operating under a constraint neither will confirm publicly, which leaves each exposed the moment a journalist, regulator, or litigant asks the same question on the record.
Second-order effects
- Bay Area competitors outside this pair become the pressure valve: talent that would have flowed between Apple and Google instead exits to startups and other large employers, redirecting the valley's recruiting competition outward.
- If similar pacts exist or spread among other board-linked tech companies, smaller firms face a thinner senior-engineer market and growing incentive to buy whole teams rather than hire individuals.
Third-order effects
- Agreements between employers not to hire each other's staff sit squarely in antitrust territory: if the pattern generalizes, expect scrutiny of 'no-poach' arrangements as labor-market collusion rather than routine HR hygiene.
- The deeper structural shift is Silicon Valley's talent market functioning partly through informal coordination among incumbents — a quiet substitute for wage competition that persists only as long as employees never learn the ceiling existed.
The trend: Board-level ties between rival tech companies are doubling as channels for labor-market coordination, quietly reshaping how Silicon Valley competes for engineers.