Apple's auto ambitions sideswipe electric motorcycle startup | Hacker News Reader

Apple's auto ambitions sideswipe electric motorcycle startup

reuters.com

16 pointsdoener18 comments

I really don't get or condone the use of the term "poach" here. Company A has great employees, can't pay them according to their value. Company B comes along and does pay them that, they leave. How is this not the best possible outcome ? Company A was not competitive and disappears, employees are better paid, Company B gets some great employees. Or are engineers considered property now ?

> Apple never tried to acquire Mission Motors, Kaufman said.

Well why would they ? There's no need to pay off the investors and executives when you just want to hire some engineers, unless said executives did their job well enough that said engineers don't want to leave.

When Musk was talking about engineers Apple was "poaching", it did not reflect very well on him either in my opinion.

In this case I would agree with you, since this company and its product wasn't competition for Apple. They simply hired some people and a company failed because those people left.

But when done to a direct competitor, the intention isn't always just to get a good employee and pay him what he deserves, it's also to weaken the other company or to acquire important knowledge/knowhow. In that case, poaching doesn't sound that bad.

Why does that matter? Humans are free to choose where they work. If somebody makes a better offer why should we condemn it just because they want to cause trouble for your current employer too?

This language around "poaching" is just another way that companies try to protect each other at our expense. Us engineers should be rejoicing when companies want to make great offers to hire us away, not condemning it.

The word poaching means to illegally hunt game that is not one's own.

In medieval Europe, the king was the only person allowed to hunt in the king's forest. The animals in that forest were the king's property.

By using the word "poach" you're saying the engineers are the property of the company they work for, and someone else is unjustly taking that property. Employees are not property. They are people with the right to move between companies as they please.

Even if they were hired to hurt the original company, it wouldn't be taking that company's property unjustly. You could call that a sabotage hire or a betrayal, but call it a word that deals with people as free to make choices using their own agency.

Depending on how it's done it could be viewed as anti-competitive. To give an exaggerated example, imagine if Apple, using its big pile of phone money, came into your company and offered 10x market rate for every company willing to leave that day with a guarantee of 3 years of employment at that rate. In my opinion that should trigger anti-competitive laws. And if that's true, then we're just talking about to what degree this type of behavior is allowed before it crosses the line. It doesn't sound like any lines were crossed to me in this case, I just thought it was an interesting thought experiment.

Big fan of capitalism, that is exactly within the boundaries of why the system works, because in practice this should not happen (shareholders would not approve), yet if it did, the winners are the engineers either way.

I don't understand how having safeguards against anti-competitive behavior is in any way anti-capitalist. To say the engineers are the winners is very short sighted. The best scenario for all engineers on the market is to have multiple competitors competing for the best engineers with good salaries. It's not to have one of the vendors take a temporary loss in profitability in order to put everyone else out of business.

If the company currently employing the employee is weakened more by that person leaving than they would've been by paying them enough to stay, it's just bad business to have paid any less. You don't own your employees: they're free to leave for better offers at any time. Giving a better offer is just part of running a business and making deals, not "poaching."

I can't feel sorry for companies that underpay and then get harmed for it; it's dumb and they deserve to lose.

> Some close to Mission Motors said it had reached a point of no return by last fall, when departures to Apple, and other companies, accelerated after a long struggle to find funding and a sound business model.

So is Apple really to blame here, or is this yet another case of 'who needs revenue strategy anyway?' On the part of Mission? You can't blame the engineers moving to a much higher paying - and likely just as exciting - job at a large company which has less risk.

probably just the last few nails in the coffin. They made a good product but the motorcycle industry is not that large and new players have a tough time getting their name out.

Figure the engineers leaving near the end merely saw the writing on the wall.

I went and chatted with some people at Mission Motors ~18 months ago. They had recently split off Mission Motorcycles to do the motorcycle thing independently. Mission Motors seemed mostly focussed on electrifying construction and farm equipment by then.

Can't help but feel perhaps the reporter is anti-Apple as there is some severe bias there.... or maybe just audience-pandering, link-bait?

Its a bit tangential, but I would love to know what the core skill sets of some of these engineers were and why they were so valuable. I understand battery chemistry and all of the subtleties associated with them warranting poaching/hiring away/etc., but fundamentally electric vehicles are pretty simple. I am sure there is a bit of 'I don't know what I don't know but at the same time, I have built an electric go cart, and solar powered car in middle school and high school respectively. And that was spec'ing parts, selecting system voltages, wiring design, battery configuration, mechanical selection, chassis design, and physical construction. I would imagine one could hire good engineers from SAE challenges out of the universities quite easily and its just hard to understand where the killer skill set is. Perhaps it is understanding the supplier ecosystem, institutional knowledge to testing and regulatory rigour? Maybe its industrial design talent? Or maybe that within a 1 hour radius of Apple is a limitted supply of non-strictly-software engineers? I would love a bit more insight than the article provided and I am sure someone on HN has a bit of an inside perspective?

Just like in software, it's much easier to hire someone already doing the exact same job than it is to evaluate candidates by other means.

> ... after a long struggle to find funding and a sound business model.

So the company was already doing poorly and engineers switched to a better paid job in a stable company. Hardly Apples fault that Mission Motors was a shitty place for an engineer to stay.

Can you elaborate on how Mission Motors was a "shitty place"?

Apple were able to pay them more? Mission Motors hadn't made any money? Why do you think they choose to leave?

Those are valid reasons to leave, but they do not equate "shitty place".

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