Judge Denies Class Action Status In Tech Workers' Lawsuit 103
We've mentioned a few times the "gentleman's agreements" which some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley used to reduce the risk of employee poaching. walterbyrd writes "This comes from the same judge who awarded Apple $1 billion from Samsung. 'A federal judge on Friday struck down an effort to form a class action lawsuit to go after Apple, Google and five other technology companies for allegedly forming an illegal cartel to tamp down workers' wages and prevent the loss of their best engineers during a multiyear conspiracy broken up by government regulators.'" The lawsuit itself is ongoing (thanks to a ruling last year by the same judge); it's just that the plaintiff's claims cannot be combined.
Don't Be Evil (Score:5, Informative)
Documents filed in the lawsuit indicated executives knew they were behaving badly. Both [Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of Google] Schmidt and Intel CEO Paul Otellini indicated that they were worried about the anti-recruiting agreements being discovered, according to declarations cited in Koh's ruling. Nevertheless, Schmidt still fired a Google recruiter who riled Jobs by contacting an Apple employee, according to evidence submitted in the case.
Well that seems a bit evil, wouldn't you say?
Re:Silicon Valley companies. (Score:2, Informative)
"Really, who writes their own middleware anymore? "
The military or anyone that wants to not be exploited and hacked within seconds.
That makes for nice Slashdot rhetoric, but it's not true in reality. The record business being done by those solution companies and the almost complete disappearance of middle ware develop jobs proves it.
I know a manager that stopped posting development jobs because they would get over a hundred qualified applicants. They just ask their current employees for referrals now.
This programmer shortage is only in the minds of a very loud minority and isn't reality.
Re:Don't forgot (Score:4, Informative)
The judge in question is Lucy Koh. That pretty much says it all.
Re:Don't Be Evil (Score:0, Informative)
Quit spouting your FUD. Google doesn't sell personal details to anyone. Companies submit ads to them and Google matches those ads up to the appropriate person/query combinations.
Based on the rest of your post, though, you sound like you're biased anyway. How much is MS paying you these days?