A court filing recently unsealed last week revealed that Facebook Inc Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg had knowledge of the practice by Silicon Valley technology giants hire each other's employees.
According to the filing, Sandberg said she was aware of an agreement in 2006 while working as an executive at Google Inc to not recruit workers from Intuit Inc, a software company. When Sandberg jumped ship to Facebook in 2008, she claimed to have declined to put a limit on hiring people from her former employer.
She said in the filing, which was in a San Jose Federal Court in California, "(In my current company) I declined at the time to limit Facebook's recruitment or hiring of Google employees. Nor have I made or authorized any such agreement between Facebook and Google since that time. (During my time at my former employer), Google agreed, at Intuit's request, to not solicit the Intuit employees who would be involved in the discussions and/or the potential partnership."
Her remarks, said Bloomberg, shed light on the controversial Silicon Valley hiring agreements that have put Google, Apple Inc and Intel Corp into court over allegations that the practice had them violating antitrust laws. The companies, along with Adobe Systems Inc, are set to go on trial in May over claims by its employees that the agreements have harmed them. Sandberg nor Facebook were named as defendants in the case, Bloomberg said.
In October of last year, US District Judge Lucy Koh allowed a class-action suit, which represents over 64,000 technical employees, to proceed their claims against Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe. The plaintiffs have claimed in the suit that the agreements have allowed the companies to held down their salaries should they get recruited by a rival.
Former Google senior vice president Jonathan Rosenberg, appeared to have backed up Sandberg's comments in her filing, and said in his own pretrial testimony, "I don't feel that I had a satisfactory response from Sheryl [Sandberg] in achieving my objective, (which was) to reduce the overall number of employees that [Facebook] was hiring from Google."
