On 28 March 2006, Alan Eustace, then Google‘s senior vice president of engineering, wrote an email that reads less like a hiring note and more like a request for royal assent. Google wanted to offer Jean-Marie Hullot, the French engineer who had been CTO of Apple‘s applications division until the previous year, a job running a small engineering centre in Paris. Before anything moved, Eustace asked Steve Jobs for his blessing. Bill Campbell, Sergey Brin and Larry Page were on copy.The exchange, surfaced by Internal Tech Emails, goes well past politeness. Eustace noted that Hullot had agreed to abide by his non-solicit and non-compete terms, that he loved Apple, and would not do anything to hurt Jobs or the company. Then the part that has aged badly. Google’s relationship with Apple mattered so much, Eustace wrote, that if the hire threatened it in any way, Google would pass on the opportunity. A rival CEO was being handed a quiet veto over Google’s hiring.
Steve Jobs wanted to know exactly what Jean-Marie Hullot would build in Paris
Jobs took eleven days to answer, and when he did, on 9 April, he asked a single question. What would Jean-Marie be working on? “We would have a problem if it is related to cell phone handsets, etc,” he wrote.The timing explains the nerves. The iPhone was still nine months from being unveiled, and Hullot was among the people who had pushed hardest for Apple to build a phone in the first place. Satisfied with the answer, Jobs wrote back the next day that the arrangement would be fine with him.It did not hold. On 25 April, Eustace returned to say Hullot wanted to bring four engineers who had worked for him at Apple’s Paris office, and offered to cancel the entire thing if Jobs objected. Jobs’ reply the following day ran to nine words: Google should strongly prefer not to hire these guys. On 23 May, Eustace confirmed that Google would not open a Paris engineering centre at all. Hullot never joined. He built the photo startup Fotonauts, later Fotopedia, and died in 2019.These no-poach emails became evidence in a $415 million wage suppression caseThe thread entered the public record as a plaintiff’s exhibit in In re: High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation, the 2011 class action in which roughly 64,000 engineers accused Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe of agreeing not to poach each other’s staff to hold salaries down. Judge Lucy Koh rejected an initial $324.5 million settlement as too low and approved $415 million in September 2015, about $5,770 per worker.Tim Sweeney, reading it this week, needed two words: blatantly illegal.