This is so... dirty.
First we have a culture where discussing your salary is taboo, which only benefits the company, then we have a coordinated effort to prevent companies from recruiting top talent. I can only hope that this class-action lawsuit goes through.
I cannot imagine how frustrating it must be for both the recruiters and the jobless seeing this kind of thing break. I do programming, and the idea that being well-positioned would lead to me having problems down the road is infuriating.
Marketplace just did a piece yesterday about how union membership has fallen to 1930's levels, and may fall further as younger professionals in growing industries have a perception of the union model as obsolete. I wonder if agreements and practices such as these, if escalated, would lead to a new union model? I can't shake the idea that there's little difference between the engineers of our grandfather's age and the engineers of today other than labor scarcity. http://www.marketplace.org/topics/economy/labor-union-member...
We're a profession, the existing model to follow if we wanted to organize would be forming a professional body. The IEEE has been trying to fill that role, and we've largely (and for good reason) ignored it. To see why consider being regulated by the kind of people who call themselves "software engineers" and mean it.
what? I thought they were a geniuses and job creators who understand art.