I will always remember him as the guy who would willingly collude with other mentees of Bill Campbell to not hire engineers from each others companies. Willingly trying to keep the salaries of engineers low is pure evil. They even tried to rope-in Zuckerberg into this gentleman's agreement. Zuck asked them to buzz off. When Eric is involved in shady practices like these, how do all other leaders on twitterverse who are singing his praises justify their pandering. I wonder if Eric would have survived now as a Google CEO. Half the company would walk out today, if they came to know Sundar is in bed with his other CEO buddies and has agreements not to poach employees from each other's companies.
More likely Zuck correctly saw that Google as the incumbent had much more to gain from such a scheme. Facebook wouldn't be where it is today without aggressively poaching employees from Google, in their early acquiring tech chops phase they were basically the inofficial open source arm of Google because they hired so many googlers who wrote near 1-to-1 clones of internal Google tech and later also released them as open source long before Google ever got around to releasing the real thing (buck, thrift, ...). These days of course, Facebook itself is a powerhouse of original tech.
Apparently FB hyper-targeted Google employees with ads based on the profile these employees had happily volunteered when creating their FB profile. (Wish I had a reference link).
Also, from what I understand (again, only hearsay, I don't have any proof for this), there were many employees at Google who thought "Don't be evil" was a joke.
And so they decided they will go to Facebook, which was more closely aligned with their morals, as explained in this rhyme -
> there were many employees at Google who thought "Don't be evil" was a joke.
Well, and the wage theft conspiracy amongst other things proved them right. A smart and experienced CEO like Eric Schmidt would certainly have known that what he was doing was illegal and also that it would be profitable, zero risk to himself and low risk to the company, even if caught. His only possible mistake was to underestimate Facebook as a competitor and the cost of giving them probably more of a leg up than was wise in retrospect by handing them a huge bidding advantage for top tech talent by "defecting" from the collusion. In retrospect it might turn out to have been one of the most expensive rounds of prisoner's dilemma ever played ;)
In a perverse sense, it's a display of markets working effectively. The more big tech players entered into a cartel, the greater the incentive got to defect and pick up talent that wouldn't have been affordable otherwise. That doesn't imply anything noble about the practices of the people who defected, but it's an interesting display of how such things fall apart even without requiring any moral action.
He actually mocked an early engineer who voiced the "this is evil" mantra in a meeting after he joined Google. If not right then, definitely in a TV interview a few years later.
If Google and other companies did this, the employees ought to unionize. Normally I am not in favor of that, but Google et al. were colluding to gain an unfair advantage on their side; that invited the same on the labor side. Companies colluding to keep wages low means workers ought to collude to make them higher and counterbalance the companies.
...higher salaries in one place tend to pull up salaries elsewhere too. And conversely, if you push down the top, you also push down the middle (under the optimistic assumption that the bottom can't go any further down...).
Also, it's easy for other industries to then justify with: "hey, even Google is doing it, and they were they guys supposed to 'do not evil', amirite?".
That's the problem with unethical behavior, we're all into copying and generalizing stuff :|
Indeed- I thank the FANGs everyday for pulling up my salary. In 2013 I was making about 1/3 what I am now in the financial industry in NYC doing algo trading/HFT. I was reluctant, but after years of seeming to miss out on the big money that everyone talked about finance people making, I finally just decided to look outside the industry. I got a remote job with a company in the valley, and got a 60% increase in comp, that after 3 years grew to just a hair shy of 100%. I was pretty much the first defector to leave finance for tech in my circles, but more followed. I jumped around one more time, with a financial company who truly pays top tier salaries (to match tech companies), and am now making a full 3x what I was just a bit over 5.5 years ago, with a much better work life balance and general work environment.
I can't imagine this would have happened without Goog/FB/Apple/Netfix, etc. Every day I reap the benefits of their competition for talent without having worked at any of them.
It’s happens a lot more than it’s talked about. When a few people left the company I worked at for Rackspace who was paying a lot more the CEO of my company talked with Rackspace into agreeing to stop interviewing people from my company. I moved on from that company after the CEO admitted to the agreement.
It’s a practice older than IT. Hard to judge the man on that alone.
Sorry but this is just hopelessly naive and one sided. Sillicon valley is more then google and apple, and if the competition is only between them with regards to salary then those engineers have nothing to complain about.
It is... but the top tier companies pay dramatically more than the next tier down. Like, we're talking 30-50% difference once you count total comp.
(it's interesting, base salary is somewhat comparable... but stock and bonus are a big part of comp if you work at a FAANG company, and those... largely don't exist at third-tier companies.)
The top-tier employers also do a lot to bring up salary pressure on the lower tiers; if the FAANG companies didn't pay so much, the most desirable people wouldn't leave the lower paying companies, wouldn't make room for someone less desirable, etc... That's how I got my start; I didn't go to college, but I did work my way up through those smaller companies, into larger companies that paid better and better.
Very few companies include bonus as a part of a software engineer's compensation (large SV companies are more or less alone in this). Bonuses are generally reserved for executives (excluding sales staff, of course) in most industries, including mine (defense).
Though, salary for software engineers has been ticking up lately. I suppose I can thank the demand for engineers created by these tech companies for that.
>Very few companies include bonus as a part of a software engineer's compensation (large SV companies are more or less alone in this). Bonuses are generally reserved for executives (excluding sales staff, of course) in most industries, including mine (defense).
Yup, that's what I'm saying. I'm just a sysadmin; I'd never gotten a bonus in my 20 years working as a programmer or sysadmin, mostly at tier 3 tech companies... not until I started working at a FAANG company these last few years, but the bonus + equity is a really significant portion of my compensation now, and brings the whole package from "nicely comfortable for someone who didn't go to college" to "wow"
I'm much too old to work at a FAANG :), I do make a pretty good salary for the area of the county I live in, though.
In any case, moving to SV would only be worth it if salary+bonus were close to half a Megabuck, and I doubt there are more than a dozen engineers in the world making that kind of money as a FTE.
