[knuckleheadsmif]

This crap happens all the time between companies.

When I worked at Apple around 1990, Steve who was as we all know was CEO of NeXT at the time was recruiting 6 Apple folks (including me) to help add the internationalization infrastructure to NeXT OS. We were invited to dinner at his Woodside home (the one where the Ducati motorcycle was parked inside at the bottom of the stairs which I can confirm to be true.)

The first thing, after we sat down for dinner, is Steve read us a letter that the Apple Lawyers sent him threatening to sue for poaching employees. He then sat down and we had a wonderful vegetarian meal prepared by his two ex. ahead Panisse chefs.

What was memorable about the meal was that Steve was still very emotionally attached to Apple and most of dinner was him asking us about Apple.

None of us took him up on the Job offer and I letter learn that the Apple lawyers found out about the meeting before hand because one of us (who I’ll kept nameless) alerted them about the meeting.

[knuckleheadsmif]

A decade or so later I worked at Intuit where Intuit, Adobe, Apple, Google, Pixar (and one or two other companies that escape me) had an anti-poaching agreement not to approach anyone for a job (if they however we approached by someone they would consider them.) All the companies were later fined (I think it was a court case) and employees between certain years at those companies who were looking for jobs got a significant settlement.

I missed the date of qualifying for the settlement by one year but I know for a fact that this was indeed true because as a hiring manager at Intuit HR more than one time told me I could not cold call people at these companies to recruit.

[knuckleheadsmif]

As another aside to this story, when I was at Intuit Bill Campbell who was on the Apple Board and CEO/Board Member of Intuit in 1999 or 2000 arranged for my project (An entirely internet version of Quickbooks as a subscription service) to support the then crappy Macintosh Microsoft IE browser that was the main Mac browser.

You have to remember that Microsoft IE on the Mac was a completely different code base than on windows, did not have any debugging, and not feature compatible especially as far as CSS and DOM functionality is concerned. So we did meet with Apple but told them that we could not support what they wanted unless we could get a debugger for that Mac IE at a minimum. The response from them was just to debug on IE in windows. We laughed and left the meeting.

I think Apple got that response from a lot of early web app developers and was a factor into them taken control of their browser destiny and eventually releasing Safari.

By the way, although I left Intuit in 2007, our product is the version of Quickbooks that they mainly sell, and is supported by all the modern browsers but in 1999 when the project was started developing a complex easy to use web app was a challenge.

[lern_too_spel]

It was an insignificant settlement. This agreement was in place at the start of the mobile wars. Apple spent a lot of money suing its competitors instead of spending that money paying engineers to leave its competitors. Immediately following the ruling against the companies, salaries shot up industry-wide, by far more per year than each engineer got from the settlement for multiple years of illegal activity.