It's totally different if they refuse to hire someone who sends their resume (without having being recruited). The article mixes up these two concepts.

Recruiters at Google were not to seek out people from these companies. People that worked there were free to apply to Google without repercussion.

* If some of the top companies are implicitly not competing for you (as an employee), it means your value as an asset is lowered. There is simply less desire for another company to lure you away with more money, better benefits, a more attractive project to work on, etc. Once you work at one of the companies "on the list," none of the others will come knocking. Your value is also lowered in terms of being able to negotiate a better salary, for instance: HR (and perhaps your manager) knows that you do not have an offer from Yahoo or Google just waiting to whisk you away.

* The basic effect on general engineers' salaries is thus: the less it costs Google/MS to hire a Silicon Valley A-lister, the less incentive they will feel to look for bargains by hiring outside the circle of "made men". Thus they will hire fewer such relative-newcomers, at lower salaries. Thus there will be less upward pressure on non-Silicon-Valley-A-list salaries: fewer engineers will leave the broader pool for Silicon Valley and those that do will be receiving less money to do so, so the competitive pressures on the non-SV-A-list employers are weakened too. So less salary for SDEs broadly. This knock-on effect is likely minimal for junior ASP.NET bank programmers etc. but likely significant for hotter engineers at more high-powered dev/research/etc. workplaces throughout the US.

* Because certain kinds of employees' labour mobility is lowered, it means that access to engineers is somewhat more limited. Your company may not be able to get the rockstar/ninja/hip term of the week who already knows the valley, doesn't need to relocate, and just wants to pay off his SF condo more quickly. Inversely, you may not want to compete for top graduates from places like Stanford with the 90k/100k first year salaries that Facebook and some others have been throwing around. This means you can either get second-tier native talent that may need relocating or that hasn't proven itself yet ... or you can play the H1 visa game and get a much cheaper foreign programmer who is contractually tied to your company, often fears for his immigrant status, and is thereby much less likely to leave your company for another one. This is a bad thing for US graduates or relatively inexperienced programmers, as it depresses their salaries, as well. In terms of the free market, I guess it's only a natural expression of international labour mobility.

* The lack of commentary on the above may be due to the current economic conditions and the "thank $DEITY I still have a job" attitude I've seen quite a bit. On the other hand, we got plenty of people on here with the kind of inside knowledge who would be able to tell us more on this subject.

But how is it wrong to choose to not actively recruit from your partners, or even your competition? Is the solution really to mandate headhunting certain companies?

These are questions. I don't know the answers. If I seem to have something wrong, please let me know; I'm posting this out of confusion.

It wasn't -universal-, but widespread enough to catch the eye of regulators. And, historically, by the time federal regulators move on a problem it's far larger and more serious than most realize.

You've missed my question. What is "it"? We won't what? We won't recruit from you, or we won't ever hire anybody with you on the resume?

It's two completely different things and munging them together is confusing and wrong.

Similarly, collusion to raise prices is illegal, raising prices is legal. Enforcing this law amounts to "do not collude", and does mean "do not raise prices", "raise prices" or anything at all about raising or lowering prices.

That's a hiring discrimination. What about the right to employment for a qualified, top-notch information retrieval candidate?

A "right to employment" only exists when nobody with the means to employ someone has any right to their own property.

Sorry, discrimination is discrimination, and discriminating somebody just b/c they worked on a company x, in a very systematic way (and colluding with other companies on this), seems very anti-competitive. At the end, is the employees that suffer b/c there is less competition for their skills.

Oh wait, you don't like that? Yeah, it's called conspiracy.

You have the right to do whatever you want with your property, but you can not conspire with your friends against a helpless segment of society that's trying to make a living .. or any other segment for that matter.

:)

Oh wait, you don't like that? Yeah, it's called conspiracy.

Well, "conspiracy" often implies secretiveness, so I'm not sure you qualify. Don't worry, though, since unlike if our positions were reversed, apparently, I don't want you thrown in jail for advocating mass downmodding.

Discrimination is the ability to tell things apart. If Google has a rule against poaching from their friends and partners, that's fine with me; if they're underpaying all of their employees, what you're really saying is that someone who doesn't participate in the cartel gets their choice of the top technical talent in the valley. If you seriously believed this, you'd be raising money for a startup to exploit it, rather than complaining about it on news.yc.

If it is just a "we won't actively recruit", then it doesn't make sense to me. This seems a valid thing to do. Actively recruiting vs. denying hiring are two radically different things, and the Feds getting involved in the decision of where to recruit from seems silly.

And it affects my mobility a lot, and my maximal output. BTW, I am not underpaid, i am actually paid well, but I probably could do better. There is a tacit knowledge that as an H-1B you can't ask too much money, as the company that is hiring you, will have to spend money on lawyers and paperwork and other government bs to keep you here.

(and not all H-1Bs somebody just landed from india/china with a thick accent. Some of us are very high skilled and well integrated in society. I have been in this country for 11 years (finished high school and college), yet i am not that close to green card).

Frustrating, and it hampers mobility and economic output of an individual, and also the more junior/average american dev who wants to move up skillset wise.