In a recent article about employee poaching Mark Hendricks profiled the common practice of poaching a competitor’s talent. In the article he noted:
A while back we discussed the DOJ’s investigation into allegations that technology giants in Silicon Valley were effectively preventing computer programmers from making job changes by agreeing not to poach their competitors’ employees.
Last week the DOJ filed a lawsuit along with a proposed settlement with Apple Inc., Adobe Systems Inc., Google Inc., Intel Corp.
High-tech companies have been vigorous in their attempts to keep employees from departing to competitors as evidenced by the Mark Papermaster lawsuit filed by IBM and Steven Johnson case. According to some reports, Google and Microsoft entered into an unofficial agreement not to poach each others’ employees. Essentially, neither company would actively pursue or