Steve Jobs's response after getting a Google employee fired.
Although I get that these sorts of agreements may well have been illegal and unethical, all this outrage over the attitudes of the executives seems overblown to me.Try putting yourself in Eric Schmidt's shoes: from his perspective, the greed of an individual employee to generate recruiting commissions by violating a strict policy endangered a key strategic relationship. This could obviously not be tolerated and the lack of a strong response would make enforcing the whole landscape of mission critical policies harder. These guys HAVE TO think of the system before the individual or the system will not work.And in general, in any industry and any role, if you start a fire that the senior management team 10 levels up has to put out... you will expect harsh treatment.