Did you sign up for the national do-not-call list when it came out a couple years ago? I can't say whether it really made a huge difference or not. My wife has always seemed to get most of the sales calls for some reason. Are you on any do-not-call lists you didn't even know about? Say, for example with prospective employers?
As much as the big tech companies are known to compete for and lure over competitors' top executives (i.e. Mark Hurd and Leo Apotheker), it's hard to believe that there is a need for the Department of Justice to eliminate gentlemen's agreements between them when it comes to poaching other companies' employees in general. But six of the biggest names in tech, including Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, Adobe and Pixar, recently agreed, with a little encouragement from the DOJ, not to continue their no-cold-call-recruiting arrangements.
In times of record unemployment, this sort of collusion may sound like an urban myth (like Congressman Phil Hare considers the national debt). No, big companies really have been playing by these rules in their hiring. Contrary to the free market they esteem for their products and services, this defensive agreement has been considered a mutual advantage among the big players. It's an even bigger advantage to sit on boards of more than one of these companies, or have your CEO sitting on another firm's board, but that habit has come under scrutiny recently as well.
Along with the new corporate hiring glasnost, according to a new SIM survey in eWeek, most executives plan to increase IT salaries in 2011, with a specific focus on business intelligence.
