Jobs told Google to stop poaching workers: filing
(Reuters) - Apple's Steve Jobs directly asked former Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt in 2007 to stop trying to recruit an Apple engineer, according to a court filing. — The email from Jobs to Schmidt was disclosed on Friday …
Context & Ripple Effects
TechCrunch reported back in August 2009 that Apple and Google had struck an agreement not to poach each other's workers, but that account rested on unnamed sources. This court filing supplies the first hard document: a 2007 email in which Steve Jobs himself complained directly to Eric Schmidt about Google trying to recruit an Apple engineer.
The disclosure lands awkwardly for Schmidt, whose publicly warm remembrance of Jobs after his death in October 2011 (Eric Schmidt on Steve Jobs) now sits alongside evidence that the two CEOs personally policed the boundary between their engineering staffs. It also explains why the story traveled fast across both Apple- and Google-focused outlets on the day it broke.
First-order effects
- Plaintiffs in the pending staff-poaching litigation against Apple, Google and Intel gain documentary evidence that the no-recruiting arrangement was enforced at CEO level, not merely rumored.
- Google's recruiting teams face immediate exposure: approaching Apple engineers is now documented as conduct that drew a direct complaint from Jobs to Schmidt.
Second-order effects
- Other Silicon Valley companies with similar bilateral hiring understandings must reckon with discovery risk — any comparable executive email could surface the same way in their own litigation.
- Recruiting costs shift upward for companies that honored such pacts, since sourcing talent without cold-calling rivals' staff narrows the candidate pool and pushes firms toward costlier channels.
Third-order effects
- If courts accept executive-brokered no-poach emails as evidence of an unlawful labor agreement, Silicon Valley's informal talent cartels convert from industry folklore into antitrust liability, reshaping how senior executives communicate about hiring at all.
The trend: Silicon Valley's informal agreements not to hire each other's engineers are moving from sourced rumors into courtroom evidence, dragging CEO-level conduct into antitrust scrutiny of the tech labor market.