Apple’s Steve Jobs sealed a secret and illegal pact with Google’s Eric Schmidt to artificially push their workers wages lower by agreeing not to recruit each other’s employees, sharing wage scale information, and punishing violators

Bill Campbell, a member of Apple’s board of directors and senior advisor to Google, emailed Jobs to confirm that Eric Schmidt “got directly involved and firmly stopped all efforts to recruit anyone from Apple.”

Later that year, Schmidt instructed his Sr VP for Business Operation Shona Brown to keep the pact a secret and only share information “verbally, since I don’t want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later?”These secret conversations and agreements between some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley were first exposed in a Department of Justice antitrust investigation launched by the Obama Administration in 2010.

To the naysayers. This isn't hard to understand. It isn't excusable, and it is theft of not only wages, but of career opportunity.

Imagine you were a hot shot Apple employee a few years back, Working at the pinnacle, where tech meets art, and Steve Fricking Jobs, is telling (demanding) that no one- NO ONE- dare to poach one of his employees.

If this anti poaching agreement didn't exist, that Apple employee could have (potentially) doubled her salary by becoming an executive at Yahoo or Intel. Two companies which would have paid through the roof to get some of that Apple pixie dust. But since they were afraid to incur the wrath of Jobs, the workers lost out, and they had no idea that they were secretly blacklisted.