Guy who colluded with other high level corporate officers (see techtopus) to artificially limit the salaries of tens of thousands of highly skilled workers, now asked to advise the government on how to do innovation. For purely moral reasons I'd disqualify him from the position. I suspect he'll find some way to leverage this to benefit himself and/or his friends and won't consider any harm to the public. I don't want this guy in this position.
Just to color with the facts - which only underscore your point:
"In one incident, after receiving a complaint from Steve Jobs of Apple, Schmidt sent an email to Google's HR people saying; "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. Thanks Eric". Schmidt's email led to a recruiter for Google being "terminated within the hour" for not having adhered to the illegal scheme. Under Schmidt, there was a "Do Not Call list" of companies Google would avoid recruiting from.[37] According to a court filing, another email exchange shows Google's human resources director asking Schmidt about sharing its no-cold call agreements with competitors. Schmidt responded that he preferred it be shared "verbally, since I don't want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later?".[36]
Way beyond bad behavior or accidental participant. Flat out collusion.
There's some critically missing information here that muddies the water and I would like some clarification.
>there was a "Do Not Call list" of companies Google would avoid recruiting from.
>no-cold call agreements with competitors
This explicitly means that the colluding companies would not try to cold-call recruit from each other. These companies are large employers and provide thousands of jobs, cool. This does not say that they would refuse to hire anyone that worked for a colluding company.
So if someone was working for Apple for a wage they were satisfied with (after all they agreed to the wage when they accepted the position), then Google would not try to call them. If that someone decided to apply to Google and try to get a job there because they wanted a higher salary, then would this collusion work against that person? Or would Google consider them for employment as they would consider any other professional?
The effects on wages for the profession aren't what I'm asking about; I'm asking only about this situation.
The evidence states that the defendants agreed not to poach employees from each other or give them offers if they voluntarily applied, and to notify the current employers of any employees trying to switch between them. They also agreed not to enter into bidding wars and to limit the potential for employees to negotiate for higher salaries.
He's also very supportive of government surveillance and has spent a substantial amount of his career cultivating relationships with officials.
All this is thanks to the Microsoft anti-trust lawsuit which led Google to choose someone like Schmidt to ingratiate the company with lawmakers to prevent a similar lawsuit.
If anything private sector driven surveillance can be creepier-- it's a total "wild west" without even the pretense of public oversight and virtually no regulation. Only the most insanely creepy things like capturing video from your house and using it for analytics might run afoul of the law, and even there you'd have to prove it and prove harm and it would likely be civil not criminal. The NSA and CIA at least technically answer to the public and are subject to regulations about what they can do with the data.
To quote Steve Rambam from HOPE: "If you're angry about what the NSA is doing, you should be furious about what Google and Facebook are doing."
IMHO the Amazon Echo and similar beyond-Orwellian devices will someday be looked back upon with the same amount of "what were they thinking?!!?!" as stuff like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core
To continue with the nuclear analogy: I've been predicting a privacy/security "Chernobyl" event related to mobile and/or IoT for many years now. It'll be something like a corporate whistleblower revealing that a company has been running all ambient sound from all customers' houses through speech to text for over a year, then putting it all in a database and selling access more or less indiscriminately. Customers, it will come out, will include organized crime, foreign governments, etc., and some of the data will turn out to be from the homes of US Government Secret and Top Secret clearance employees, CXO level corporate personnel, police, etc. Only a matter of time. I'm counting the days.
A list would be tough. I'd personally bet on a Chinese vendor or a perhaps yet to be born startup with explosive growth on a trendy home automation product.
I'd say by 2020 or so there will be a major well publicized leak or scandal from such a vendor.
It'd be hard to place a bet though, since it'd be hard to decide if/when a bet were actually won.
Before 1 January 2020. Company will be a recent entrant into the fortune 1000. By recent, I mean not in the Fortune 1000 as of 1 January 2010. $1 says it happens. If 100 people bet against me, I pay out 1 cent to each. If more than 100 bet against me and win, I pay a cent to first 100.
I'm not sure how other lines of betting work, but interested in proposals.
Thanks. That's too general for me. I would bet if you gave me a smaller list of companies (eg Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft), and a more specific list of incidents.
And, of course, we would have to agree on odds. Eg, if you are really sure you could offer to pay me 5 USD if your prediction comes true, but I'd only have to pay 1 USD otherwise. (Or if I feel more sure, I could offer eg to pay 7 USD for every 4 USD you wager.)
Indeed. This was the big lesson from the MS Antitrust lawsuit. In comparison to the kind of entrenched, wasteful lobbying going on today, Microsoft in its heyday was naively pursuing market dominance and utterly overlooked the need to cozy up to officials.
While corruption won't be good, the rational might be Schmidt is a "lesser evil". Is corruption preferable to ignorance? In other words, are decisions made to serve a few, or with ignorance, serve chaos.
More than corruption, my concerns would be respect and understanding of privacy, checks and balances through neutrality, transparency, and decentralization, and creation of open standards and protocols, etc.
Schmidt is a technocrat-for-hire. He is able to effectively lead and represent an organization's views. However his worldview is out of the industrial age. He was largely responsible for building Alphabet, a modern IT conglomerate built on the same principles as any conglomerate. We need to demand more from our government than competent technocrats.
I would not say Schmidt is corrupt, he is acting fully in the interest of his firm or organization. Like a defense attorney helping a murderer avoid jail his actions are broadly ethical, but if you consider in aggregate all of the betrayals of "don't be evil" that Google suffered under his command, it's clear that he is not in any sense a leader in any area where values or principles are important.
Net Neutrality is a perfect example of an issue where Google has a big stake in a particular outcome, and there is nothing idealistic or principled about its advocacy of one side. This is fine as an aspect of the incentives of capitalism, but the scary part is that so many people bought into the propaganda and did not see Google's true motivation.
I think that quality was probably THE reason why he was hired for such a position.
Hypthetically:
Pentagon builds some massive surveillance program for US government which is blatantly illegal and in violation of constitution. You need someone who can get it done without leading a paper trail, help friends in government and then lie when confronted. Eric clearly has all those qualities.
Pixar CEO Ed Catmull was a huge inspiration to me, and it was disappointing that he also participated in the collusion.
His book on the Pixar team has a lot of useful info, but it's interesting to read it knowing about the collusion to depress salaries.
All I can say is humans are good at compartmentalization. Once some tactic becomes commonplace in an industry, insiders don't even consider it shady any more.
We all need to get paid, and as long as we're not the worst offenders, then at least we're not as bad as those other guys, right?
Not that I am ok with it, but the collusion is a double edged sword. Let me explain myself: On one hand it is bad that the employee gets less than the market and the company is willing to pay. And that should absolutely be corrected somehow.
On the other hand, now that the salaries have exploded in SV, you can see the transfer happening towards the real estate owners. I can bet on it, that if the salaries go down, the real estate in SV/SF will take a hit.
So. the business owner has to face this: if I let the salaries go up, then it will be difficult to bring in entry level people since they won't be able to enter the market. And they'll have to go with shared apartments and other similar arrangements, which is untenable in the long run.
Plus, it is not sure the employee will be able to retain much of that salary increase.
I know, it sounds paternalistic for the employer to think this and maybe it is better to let the market settle the current salaries/living costs tussle. But my argument is that maybe Catmull had other considerations aside from the business bottom line. The employee pipeline is actually more important.
Silicon Valley has to take a lead when it comes to working remotely. At the very least, let the well paid people work from a list of co-working spaces around the country or something if renting an office in Portland, Oregon or New York, NY is a problem and you won't have people working from home.
Yes, this. Which startup ought to be spending millions just maintaining a hip SF office instead of executing their plan, hiring good people, and making product? Of all industries, you'd think this one would have shed the old school, suit and tie, butt-in-chair HR mentality?
Perhaps they might need one or two people in SV to be in contact with VC people or something. I've never worked in a startup and so I can't tell you about the dreaded f word that ends in ing (funding). But should everyone be in SV?
BTW, how does one go about finding a developer job (not a senior role, have work experience in .NET but I'm willing to do something new) in New York City? I feel like I don't have the connections I need to land a job here. I have a BS in Mathematics and a BS in Computer Science if that helps.
> the business owner has to face this: if I let the salaries go up, then it will be difficult to bring in entry level people since they won't be able to enter the market
I was tech designer for the Letterman Digital arts center in Presidio...
Lucas' companies were all merging to one campus.
They later came to me to talk about setting up a design studio in Singapore... the quote from the CIO to me at the time was "Why pay these prima donna salaries for animators here in the states when I can get animators in singapore for $20K per year?"
Globalization is coming for all of our jobs. If we can just make it so that AI gets our jobs first, then maybe the AI will take care of us, 'cause the market sure won't.
> If we can just make it so that AI gets our jobs first, then maybe the AI will take care of us
That's not how 'Capitalism' (as currently practised) works - the owners of the AI reap the benefits and avoid paying taxes while certainly not taking care of you, why would Walmart AI or Disney AI care about plebs like you?
> Globalization is coming for all of our jobs
As a 3rd worlder, I say it's about time. It's unjust to have the world as your market without having to compete against everyone else. Maybe you should hire whoever is lobbying for American farmers because their subsidies are destroying farming elsewhere.
> That's not how 'Capitalism' (as currently practised) works - the owners of the AI reap the benefits and avoid paying taxes while certainly not taking care of you, why would Walmart AI or Disney AI care about plebs like you?
JabaAI would take care of the plebs. JabaAI loves plebs. I mean wonderful, wonderful people. JabaAI loves them. And everyone loves JabaAI. Because JabaAI is worth a lot of money. JabaAI is success. I hear it every day: "JabaAI, we love you."
Wow, even if it was only 15k developers (which it wasn't) that is still very bad. Does he have to screw over 1 million people? 1 billion people? Seems like a very low bar we're setting here.
I think this is just a stepping stone for Eric until he head's the Trump Admin's Trust and Safety Council. After all, if you're a good person you have nothing to fear
It's silly how people view this situation here. If one company has the resources to manipulate the market, they will do so outside the talent pool. Apple could buy up most patents and restrict anybody from using them. THEN, you would see the problem. But when it's human resource, you want the free market to be free.
"I do not believe with the Rochefoucaults and the Montaignes that fourteen out of fifteen men are rogues. I believe a great abatement from that proportion may be made in favor of general honesty. But I have always found that rogues would be uppermost, and I do not know that the proportion is too strong for the higher orders and for those who, rising above the swinish multitude, always contrive to nestle themselves into the places of power and profit. These rogues set out with stealing the people's good opinion, and then steal from them the right of withdrawing it, by contriving laws and associations against the power of the people themselves."
American government was intended to be limited. That would limit the number of people, and the power that they have in government.
Today, our government is huge, and has a lot of power. This means that often times the people that get into government aren't doing it as a servant to the people, but instead as a service to themselves.
We need more servants. Viewing this reality and calling it Apathy or not Apathy is a perspective. We are all free to our perspective, and I think the wider variety, the better.
I think that his accomplishments may outweigh that transgression, which likely affected 15,000 software developers at most. He did manage to help vastly increase Google employees' personal wealth through a meteoric rise in their stock value.
In this case, it's probably best to match the malfeasance with the risk. What do you think he is likely to harm within government program management?
Edit: my original estimate of 15k was way off base. A subsequent poster has suggested it was a minimum of 64,000, probably substantially more.
I would say it affected an entire industry. If the salaries have a certain value in SV then everybody else will use those as a signal and adjust their offers accordingly.
edit: not really difficult to do, you can compare the salaries per region (averages, median and distributions) pre and post lawsuit.
> which likely affected 15,000 software developers at most
Where does this number come from? When the wage fixing agreement was canceled, Google immediately issued an across the board raise, and compensation has increase very quickly since then. That's 15k software devs right there, not even considering the second-order effects, which are surely non-zero.
15k barely covers the engineers employed by Google alone at the time. The class action lawsuit covers 64k employees, and that's a subset of the employees affected. If your argument is that Eric Schmidt's entering in the agreement only affected employees at Google, that's clearly false. A single company no-poach agreement would clearly be worthless, so it must be the case that Eric Schmidt's actions affected employees at other companies. If you believe some of the latest news, the agreement spread to enough companies that 1M employees were directly affected: https://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles-wage.... Schmidt and Jobs were central in creating the agreement and its spread.
As for the second order effects, do you know a hiring manager? Ask them about how competitive offers have changed since the no-poach agreement was canceled. The effect is much larger than just having to keep up with the across the board raise Google gave to their employees when the agreement expired, which was itself non-trivial.
Right. I'm sure that he knew better than they did, it was fine for him to limit their choices through collusion as long as he also took actions which helped some of them a little and himself a lot.
When your costs don't increase in line with profits then share price rises. The easiest way to do this is wages. In the 1980s it was through massive layoffs.
I was under the impression this agreement, at least initially, was to prevent anticompetitive poaching.
Suppose Apple wants to dominate search. One way to do so is to poach every Google search engineer by offering to triple their salaries. These companies agreed not to do that.
Yeah, it's illegal, but what options did these executive have? California effectively bans noncompete clauses. And there's enough money in the system and teams are typically small enough that dismantling a competitor is feasible.
Google Engineer Sarah shouldn't be paid triple Google Engineer Jessie just because she works on a product that's valuable to Competitor X.
Edit: original post not clear enough. Reproducing a reply below:
>The problem was with using money to prevent your competitors from doing business. Doing so subverts the free market.
Suppose every time a competitor rented office space, you bought the building and evicted them.
Suppose Walmart opens a store in SoMa that sells groceries at a tenth of what surrounding stores sell, then jacks prices when those stores fold.
To ELI5: you run a lemonade stand. Your neighbor Susie also has a lemonade stand. Susie's mom doesn't like your parents and wants you to fail, so she pays the store $500 to not sell you lemonades. Yeah, the market price of exclusive lemonade rights is now $500, but unreasonable sums are being spent to prevent competition. Something's wrong.
There are laws against most anticompetitive practices, but not all.
Part of the motivation behind the poaching agreement was filling a gap. You could dismantle a competitor by paying everyone and anyone in their product's critical path to simply not work there anymore.
The solution, an antipoaching agreement, was illegal.
> Google Engineer Sarah shouldn't be paid triple Google Engineer Jessie just because she works on a product that's valuable to Competitor X.
If they want to keep the employee, they absolutely need to match what others are willing to pay. That you suggest otherwise is nonsense in the american job market.
Cheating to get a better price is as you acknowledged, illegal, and most of the time you will find the market begins to even out those weird bumps by creating incentives for others to learn/work on that skillset (because of the higher rewards.)
This is very equivalent to "Well why should we pay engineer X more when they are working the same number of hours as marketing person Y?"
Its a comparison that doesn't make sense unless you want to pretend that the employer does not benefit as a result of the value the employee produces.
If the engineer is 3x more valuable to the other company and not to your bottom line, its an obvious time for that engineer to move, not be made a slave by anti-competitive agreements between employers.
Hopefully you will be able to find someone to work on your product at a price point that your business can derive some value from, but if not, its probable that your business sucks.
I agree it's wrong. I was just elaborating on the reasons it happened, as I haven't seen it explained in press and I know people who were affected in 2005 when this started.
Let me get this straight. CEO Schmidt gets payed 100x more than both Google Engineer Sarah and Google Engineer Jessie just because he gets to manipulate their salaries.
I think that's a straw man. Buying out a competitor's employees en masse is an anticompetitive tactic that, if used widely, arguably may negatively affect the health of the industry as a whole.
Not saying these executives' actions were right. Just that there were considerations other than saving a buck on salaries.
Hmm, I don't think the original post was clear enough.
The problem was with using money to prevent your competitors from doing business. Doing so subverts the free market.
Suppose every time a competitor rented office space, you bought the building and evicted them.
Suppose Walmart opens a store in SoMa that sells groceries at a tenth of what surrounding stores sell, then jacks prices when those stores fold.
To ELI5: you run a lemonade stand. Your neighbor Susie also has a lemonade stand. Susie's mom doesn't like your parents and wants you to fail, so she pays the store $500 to not sell you lemonades. Yeah, the market price of exclusive lemonade rights is now $500, but unreasonable sums are being spent to prevent competition. Something's wrong.
There are laws against most anticompetitive practices, but not all. Part of the motivation behind the poaching agreement was filling a gap. This was illegal.
Extending your logic, suppose one company spends a hundred million on online marketing and you can spend $80. Guess who goes out of business first? More money wins over less money. There is no way to get around that without fundamentally altering the economic model.
There are 100 stores on a 20 miles radius. Surely Susie's mom has better things to do than to spend $50,000 and untold time to convince the managers of every single store in the metro to not sell lemons to u/peyton.
