Steve Jobs & Eric Schmidt Agreed Not to Hire Each Other’s Employees, Email Reveals

Tweet

Apple, Google and five other companies that have allegedly engaged in “no-poach” agreements at some point in the recent years, and they are targeted by a class action suit proposed by five software engineers that are accusing the companies of “conspiring to keep employee compensation low by eliminating competition for skilled labor.”

Reuters reports that Steve Jobs himself wrote an email in March 2007 to Eric Schmidt to ask him to stop hiring Apple employees:

“I would be very pleased if your recruiting department would stop doing this,” Jobs wrote.

Schmidt forwarded Job’s email onto other, undisclosed recipients.

“Can you get this stopped and let me know why this is happening?” Schmidt wrote.

Google’s staffing director responded that the employee who contacted the Apple engineer “will be terminated within the hour.”

He added: “Please extend my apologies as appropriate to Steve Jobs.”

Apparently that’s not the only email that has been discovered in the lawsuit. An other note, also from 2007, reveals an alleged agreement between Intel’s Paul Otellini and Google’s Eric Schmidt:

“Let me clarify. We have nothing signed,” Otellini wrote. “We have a handshake ‘no recruit’ between eric and myself. I would not like this broadly known.”

Both Intel and Google disagree with the accusations, and that’s probably what other companies targeted by the class action suit will also declare. Apple has not yet commented on the newly revealed email exchange between Jobs and Schmidt.

It’s certainly understandable that such companies would want to protect their main assets, the employees that help develop the interesting products that we use on a daily basis, but that does not mean the employees would appreciate such agreements. It will certainly be interested to see where such class action suits are heading especially considering that in 2010 Google, Apple, Adobe, Intel, Intuit and Pixar have agreed not to enter in any “no-poach” agreements following a probe from the U.S. Justice Department.