The Justice Department is investigating whether large tech companies illegally conspired over employee poaching. It's an open secret in the Valley that tech companies have agreements not to actively recruit one another's workers; Kleiner Perkins partner Randy Komisar called these "gentlemen's understanding[s]" in the New York Times today. It appears the Justice Department may have finally decided to make an issue of the practice on antitrust grounds.

If that's the case, some of the largest tech companies are at risk. The Times quoted a former Google recruiter saying the company distributes a list of companies whose workers cannot be approached. Then there's the email:

A December 2007 e-mail message written by a Google recruiter and obtained by The New York Times suggests that the company might have had an agreement with Apple on recruiting.

Laura Sheppard, a contract recruiter at Google, sent the e-mail message to a job candidate asking him to put her in touch with another potential candidate. "It is a bit touchy since he works for Apple," Ms. Sheppard wrote, adding that Google had "a nonsolicit agreement with them."

Google declined to comment on its hiring practices or on the e-mail message, whose authenticity could not be independently verified.

There you have it: When it comes to immigration controls or the taxation of stock options, tech honchos are all about the free market. But when it comes to the sort of competition that most benefits your average Silicon Valley worker — competitive hiring — suddenly they turn into feudal lords. Is that really so "gentleman"ly?

[Times]

The Washington Post's anonymous sources said the Feds are investigating whether the firms illegally negotiated "the recruiting and hiring of one another's employees," in violation of antitrust law.

Silicon Valley companies have been known to compete fiercely for top talent, including immigrant engineers. When Google hired computer scientist and former Carnegie Mellon professor Kai-Fu Lee away from Microsoft, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was famously said to have thrown a chair across the room in anger.

The upshot of competition for immigrant workers is higher wages. Free marketeers who advocate for more H1-B worker visas, like the American Enterprise Institute, should know that better than anyone.

Logically, then, if tech companies suppressed competition for H1-B visa holders, they were retarding immigrant income growth. By treating workers like so much property, they would have inhibited the very prosperity they claim to support.

Tech companies wouldn't talk to the Post about the investigation. But they should reverse that chance as soon as they can: The Valley's image as a center of immigrant wealth and opportunity is among its strongest political assets.

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Why is Roche rocking the boat? Its stake in Genentech already provides a large part of its earnings; owning all of Genentech would maximize Roche's take. But this could be a classic case of killing the goose that lays the golden egg. Genentech's top scientists are already wealthy from stock options; loyalty to Levinson is mostly what's keeping them at the company, writes the In Vivo biotech blog. And Levinson, who has already been at the company for 28 years, is likely to walk if Roche's buyout goes through.

That could be very good for Bay Area biotech startups, and the venture capitalists who fund them. Unlike today's Web startups, which are frustratingly cheap to launch, biotech ventures require real money, which means VCs have something to offer. An exodus of talent from Genentech could turbocharge the sector.

And what of Levinson himself? He could well expand his role at Google. Both Larry Page and Sergey Brin, tellingly, are married to women with biotech backgrounds, and have a fascination with the subject. They see the human genome as just another part of the world's information, which they've made it their mission to organize. Could Levinson become part of Larry and Sergey's intellectual petting zoo — like Vint Cerf, the father of the Internet? It sounds like a better gig than sitting in an office in South San Francisco taking orders from the Swiss.