Judging by that headline, you’d imagine this post is going to be some sort of slag off of Sir Martin’s empire.
It’s not.
If truth be told, I respect him and them.
No seriously, I do.
After all, I’ve worked for them twice in my career, though I am pretty sure Sir Martin wishes it was none.
Especially after this episode.
Or this.
Anyway, while I might not value everything they value, I can’t deny they are an incredibly well run organisation who do some excellent work.
Some.
No, the reason for that title is because there’s a legal case running in the US about tech firms who’ve been found to have been operating a private agreement that ensured they’d never hire people from their respective organisations.
In essence, they operated a secretive ‘restricted hiring’ policy … which might have made [sick] sense for the companies involved, but was utterly shit for the talent involved.
Not that they knew about it at the time.
Those poor sods … because of their employers paranoia and secret dealings, they were inadvertently in a situation where they faced limited career opportunities, salary growth and development.
And they say China has bad working practices!!!
Anyway, while you can sort-of understand why Google wouldn’t want people from Apple trying to steal their staff and vice versa, it’s come out that one of the companies that had also ‘signed an agreement’ with the ‘no stealing’ policy was WPP.
Yes, WPP.
Of course, a cynic would say ‘why would anyone from Google want someone who works at WPP’ in the first place, but that’s just bastard talk because not only is WPP Towers full of smart, bright individuals, Google’s Creative Lab was started by an Ogilvy man, Andy Berndt.
But that aside, if you are a talented technologist – or anyone really – who one day aspires to working at a company like Google [or countless others tech companies included in ‘the agreement’] would you really feel comfortable taking a job in an organisation that you now know was once happy to sign an agreement that ensured you could never work for your dream employer?
Would you trust they’re now operating in good faith?
Would you believe there are now no barriers against achieving your goal?
To be fair, I don’t actually think this had anything to do with WPP. What’s far more likely is Google instigated this policy after I – in a roundabout sort of way – ended up in Mountain View via a dalliance with a Sir Martin outpost and the nerd crew realised they’d just let a culture virus enter their pristine halls and could never take the risk of doing that again … even if it meant they’d have to sacrifice the opportunity to get their hands on the talented and the good within WPP.
So to all the people who missed out on a job at Google because of errrrm, me – I’m sorry.
Though it also explains why Sir Martin once referred to the mighty G as frenenemies.