Around a week ago, evidence surfaced of a secret agreement between Silicon Valley giants about not poaching one another’s employees.
A lawsuit that recently arised form this from workers who believed that they were injured by these arrangements have brought up interesting emails between the companies that were obtained in the court documents. One in particular was an email between Apple’s Steve Jobs and Google’s Eric Schmidt.
Apple vs Google: Emails between Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt come out
Steve Jobs personally emailed Eric Schmidt to ask Google to stop poaching one of their Apple engineers, which Google responded to by publicly firing the employee immediately:
“Mr. Jobs wrote: “I would be very pleased if your recruiting department would stop doing this.” Mr. Schmidt forwarded Mr. Jobs’s email to undisclosed recipients, writing: “I believe we have a policy of no recruiting from Apple and this is a direct inbound request. 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.”
Mr. Geshuri told Mr. Schmidt that the employee “who contacted this Apple employee should not have and will be terminated within the hour.” Mr. Geshuri further wrote: “Please extend my apologies as appropriate to Steve Jobs. This was an isolated incident and we will be very careful to make sure this does not happen again.”
3 days later Google’s Senior Vice President for Business Operations, replied to Mr. Geshuri: “Appropriate response, thank you. Please make a public example of this termination with the group.”
For more emails that were uncovered in the court documents and involving other big companies like Pixar and Intel, check out the source link.
[via]
