

Google recruiter: Company kept 'do not touch' in hiring list - johns
http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_12514244?source=most_viewed

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ATB
So far, I don't see a lot of people asking the really tough questions of what
this non-competition for employees (especially engineers / developers)
actually means.

* If some of the top companies are implicitly not competing for you (as an employee), it means your value as an asset is lowered. There is simply less desire for another company to lure you away with more money, better benefits, a more attractive project to work on, etc. Once you work at one of the companies "on the list," none of the others will come knocking. Your value is also lowered in terms of being able to negotiate a better salary, for instance: HR (and perhaps your manager) knows that you do _not_ have an offer from Yahoo or Google just waiting to whisk you away.

* The basic effect on general engineers' salaries is thus: the less it costs Google/MS to hire a Silicon Valley A-lister, the less incentive they will feel to look for bargains by hiring outside the circle of "made men". Thus they will hire fewer such relative-newcomers, at lower salaries. Thus there will be less upward pressure on non-Silicon-Valley-A-list salaries: fewer engineers will leave the broader pool for Silicon Valley and those that do will be receiving less money to do so, so the competitive pressures on the non-SV-A-list employers are weakened too. So less salary for SDEs broadly. This knock-on effect is likely minimal for junior ASP.NET bank programmers etc. but likely significant for hotter engineers at more high-powered dev/research/etc. workplaces throughout the US.

* Because certain kinds of employees' labour mobility is lowered, it means that access to engineers is somewhat more limited. Your company may not be able to get the rockstar/ninja/hip term of the week who already knows the valley, doesn't need to relocate, and just wants to pay off his SF condo more quickly. Inversely, you may not want to compete for top graduates from places like Stanford with the 90k/100k first year salaries that Facebook and some others have been throwing around. This means you can either get second-tier native talent that may need relocating or that hasn't proven itself yet ... or you can play the H1 visa game and get a much cheaper foreign programmer who is contractually tied to your company, often fears for his immigrant status, and is thereby much less likely to leave your company for another one. This is a _bad_ thing for US graduates or relatively inexperienced programmers, as it depresses their salaries, as well. In terms of the free market, I guess it's only a natural expression of international labour mobility.

* The lack of commentary on the above may be due to the current economic conditions and the "thank $DEITY I still have a job" attitude I've seen quite a bit. On the other hand, we got plenty of people on here with the kind of inside knowledge who would be able to tell us more on this subject.

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ars
Article mixes up two things. I can understand if google won't recruit from
certain companies.

It's totally different if they refuse to hire someone who sends their resume
(without having being recruited). The article mixes up these two concepts.

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mahmud
The filter is applied to resumes in the queue, regardless of the
origination/sourcing method used to obtain the resume in the first place.
Therefore I think they're discriminating against _applicants_ who submitted
their resume to google.

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duskwuff
Is it? The article didn't give me that impression - all I got was the sense
that Google's recruiters were discouraged from _seeking_ employees from these
companies.

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brk
Article URL appears borked. This one should work though:
[http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_12514244?nclick_check=1&fo...](http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_12514244?nclick_check=1&forced=true)

~~~
tlb
Changed in posting

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jerf
I'm a little unclear on why this is worth federal time. If the companies were
colluding to _not hire_ people from the various companies, this would make
sense. If your resume got tossed simply because it showed "Google" or "Google
Partner X", I can see how that's bad; the net effect is to destroy the job
market on the employee side.

But how is it wrong to choose to not actively recruit from your partners, or
even your competition? Is the solution really to _mandate_ headhunting certain
companies?

These are questions. I don't know the answers. If I seem to have something
wrong, please let me know; I'm posting this out of confusion.

~~~
mahmud
_If the companies were colluding to not hire people from the various
companies, this would make sense_

That's a hiring discrimination. What about the right to employment for a
qualified, top-notch information retrieval candidate?

~~~
byrneseyeview
_What about the right to employment for a qualified, top-notch information
retrieval candidate?_

A "right to employment" only exists when nobody with the means to employ
someone has any right to their own property.

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ardit33
dude you sound like those people 30 years ago protecting discrimination
against certain races/classes: "It is my property, i don't want to rent it to
Black/Asian/whatever race you don't like."

Sorry, discrimination is discrimination, and discriminating somebody just b/c
they worked on a company x, in a very systematic way (and colluding with other
companies on this), seems very anti-competitive. At the end, is the employees
that suffer b/c there is less competition for their skills.

~~~
randallsquared
Trying to turn "people have a right to control what's theirs" into something
you can't say? :)

~~~
mahmud
Well, I hope everyone reading this downvotes randallsquared and goes through
his posting history for a similar treatment.

Oh wait, you don't like that? Yeah, it's called _conspiracy_.

You have the right to do whatever you want with your property, but you can not
conspire with your friends against a helpless segment of society that's trying
to make a living .. or any other segment for that matter.

~~~
randallsquared
_Well, I hope everyone reading this downvotes randallsquared and goes through
his posting history for a similar treatment._

:)

 _Oh wait, you don't like that? Yeah, it's called conspiracy._

Well, "conspiracy" often implies secretiveness, so I'm not sure you qualify.
Don't worry, though, since unlike if our positions were reversed, apparently,
I don't want you thrown in jail for advocating mass downmodding.

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ig1
Every partnership agreement I've worked under for a large company has had a
"no employee theft" clause. I don't think they're uncommon.

~~~
ajju
Those require that if YOU move, you won't recruit your colleagues or people
who work for you. This was a company wide policy at Google that prevented
their own recruiters from hiring from certain companies. Big difference.

