Companies Conspiring to Keep Salaries Down and Undermine Competition

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 14, 2025

People who do all the practical work are being paid less and made to work for much longer

The Daily Links published a few minutes ago included two among many reports about Google "garden leave" [1,2] in the context of preventing staff taking their knowledge to another company, either creating a rival or joining a rival. Google already earned notoriety for getting staff to sign ridiculous contracts that say something along the lines of, if I create some project (outside of and) after work, then the so-called "IP" will be Google's, not mine. Many people once knew Google as the company that had literal chefs and let staff do anything they wanted (experimental personal projects) once a week. Those days are long gone. In more recent years Google and other companies conspired not to allow staff to move from one to another; the goal was to lower salaries, not to retain key staff.

And "apropos the two DeepMind 'garden leave' articles," said a reader, linking to [3] and another old article ("Borland Charges Microsoft Stole Away Its Employees", The Wall Street Journal in 1997), consider what happened nearly 30 years ago: "Borland International Inc. filed suit in California state court, charging Microsoft Corp. with an illegal recruiting blitz aimed at taking Borland programmers and thwarting its financial turnaround. The charge adds to the litany of complaints by Microsoft's rivals, who have claimed the software giant engages in predatory business practices. The dispute highlights an increasingly contentious issue, as companies vie for a limited pool of high-level developers."

Make no mistake about it. The net effect is, there are fewer choices in the market and salaries go down.

Despite Android's rapid growth, Google has just laid off hundreds of workers, many of whom connected to Android.

This isn't the 90s; the market has changed a lot since then. █

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1. Google DeepMind's Weapon in the AI Talent War: Aggressive Noncompetes

   Google DeepMind has put some employees with a noncompete on extended garden leave. These employees are still paid by DeepMind but no longer work for it for the duration of the noncompete agreement.

2. Google Is Allegedly Paying Top AI Researchers to Just Sit Around and Not Work for the Competition

   Known as "garden leave," this type of cushy clause is the luckier stepsister to so-called "noncompete" agreements, which prohibit employees and contractors from working with a competitor for a designated period of time after they depart an employer. Ostensibly meant to prevent aggressive poaching, these sorts of clauses also bar outgoing employees from working with competitors.

3. [Old] Borland and Microsoft settle lawsuit | ZDNET

   The Borland suit accused Microsoft of "systematically raiding" its personnel in an "insidious" attempt to weaken the smaller company's efforts to right itself. Microsoft used lavish signing bonuses, sabbaticals and vacations to woo Borland employees. Borland said it lost 34 key software architects, marketing managers and engineers to Microsoft over 30 months.