You all keep trashing companies for no-poaching agreements because it lowers your wages. Let's look at this from perspective of employer. There are costs associated with obtaining well performing employee: * Hiring: people spend their hours filtering prospective employees. Usually HR does that, but bigger companies have separate hiring department. Expensive. * Idling: newly recruited employee rarely has intimate knowledge of all technologies, systems used inside a company and surely has no idea how they are tied together. This takes some months to grasp. Recruits often wreak havoc and as a result produce very little net worth. And you greedy recruits want your 6 figure salary for your havoc. * Training: employees are trained. Be it actual courses, conferences or just unsuccessful internal startup its still training. And having a team work on a doomed to be killed project for a year is again expensive. In order to compensate for these no-worth-generating expenses employers are left with 2 choices: lower the salary or invent a way to keep the employee. Lower salaries are usually not an option because, well, who you will hire then in the first place when rivals often much better packages? Companies are left with an option to try and keep the employees.

In intimate atmosphere of Silicon Valey it is hard to keep employee salaries/benefits and skills a secret, therefore it is much easier and cheaper to contact employee of a rivaling company and offer a better mutually agreed package. You either agree not to poach and let prospective employees go through your normal hiring process or chain employees with timed contracts.

So just think that no-poaching agreements might be the thing keeping your salaries that high.