This has very little to do with Jobs. It sounds like the employee broke a known rule and Google reacted once they were informed (although I'd argue they acted too harshly).
That "rule" is an illegal collusion that's probably worth billions in salary, ISOs, bonuses, etc. That is, the totality of the crime here is that the participants in the collusion literally stole billions of dollars from salaried employees.
How obsequious the HR people are in this is a minor factor. This is a Bernie Madoff-sized crime. What Madoff did was a more visible crime, so he was punished like a common criminal. But if you shave a few tens of thousands of dollars per year off a few tens of thousands of engineers' salaries and your motto is "Don't be evil" (or if you do something really big, like diddle the LIBOR rate) people think different, for some reason.
Really? Equivalent to a $50 billion ponzi scheme in which thousands of people lost their pensions and become destitute? That's the same as denying a few thousand dollars to already very highly compensated engineers? I'm not excusing what they're doing but the Madoff comparison seems off.
Is it a smaller crime if you take smaller amounts from more people? Had these been outright unpaid wages, the answer would be clear. The dollar value here is probably similar.
They're not poaching each other's workers, so let's say that Tom works for Apple and makes $90,000 per year. Google could attempt to recruit Tom and offer him $100,000 per year, but they don't. So Tom loses $10,000 per year. This is probably the worst-case scenario for an individual engineer. Of course, Tom is still earning a very nice salary over that time, and who knows, maybe he actually ends up making more, but let's envision a worst-case scenario in which an engineer loses $100 grand over ten years, because of this policy.
In order for the dollar value to be similar to what Madoff stole from people, that scenario, or a higher wage loss, would have had to happen to five hundred thousand engineers. All working at a handful of companies.
Or to 100k employees for 5 years. Or if it's not just cash but ISOs and bonuses that are also depressed, maybe just 50k employees. Multiple large tech employers are involved, over a span of perhps longer than 5 years. It adds up quickly.
It may be illegal (I agree it is) but I don't think that changes anything. It's not like the employee was whistleblowing or protesting the illegality of the rule, they just broke it through negligence.
I am not an expert; and could be way off base, but I would assume, that knowingly following a corporate policy that is against the law, would be illegal, even if you aren't the one who implemented it. I am also making the assumption from what I read that everyone knew what this policy really was, from the way the emails between the two companies framed things. Again, this could be off base as well.
