Stop calling it poaching | Hacker News Reader

Stop calling it poaching

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63 pointsmikeyanderson50 comments

I hate these "submarine ads" where an author starts off talking about some problem in the world, you think it's just some interesting reading, and then surprise! - they are actually trying to sell you a product.

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People working on a product spend a lot of time thinking about the challenges and issues related to it. They are well equipped to write about these problems because of that hard work. If they also include something self-promotional in the piece, it doesn't diminish the value of the other points they make. And I'd say if they've taken the time to write and share their specialized knowledge (which you find interesting), it's not unreasonable to also include a message promoting a relevant product.

"Writing about a problem" might be more accurately described as "declaring a problem"

Of course you've got a hiring problem, when they guy on the other end is selling a hiring solution. In other news, corn syrup is the good for you, says the corn industry.

It's strange that there's substantial value to "ownership" of developers, such that you buy and sell them like herds of cattle ("acquihires") and hiring them without consent from their current employer is "poaching".

I suspect this means that as a group we're not negotiating hard enough on salaries.

Yeah, I've definitely felt like cattle at times... especially when I realize that my development team (and what we've built) is a big part of what adds value to a potential acquisition, yet no one on the current development team was here early enough to get any kind of substantial equity/options.

So it really does seem like there is this expectation that we're supposed to be as happy as the investors/executives with any eventual sale, even though we will profit minimally (if at all) and have no choice in who our eventual overlords will be.

I know no one likes to hear this but rewards are generally about risk. Someone, investors, risked their money. If their investment failed they'd be out $$$$$$$. Employees rarely risk anything. They get paid $$$$$$ a year. If the company fails they made $$$$ a month for the time they were employed.

Now of course the response will be the employee took a risk by joining risky company A instead of stable company B or by risking a lower salary for potentially higher rewards but those risks are far far lower than the investors risks and hence get far far lower rewards.

If you want the bigger return you have to take the bigger risk (in general)

"I know no one likes to hear this but rewards are generally about risk"

No, they're not. They're about value. If you're the one actually doing the work to make the company money, why shouldn't you be getting the bulk of the reward?

The idea that people should be rewarded more just for simply having money is stupid.

This. It infuriates me when people casually dismiss workers claims of value by saying they didnt put any money in, so they deserve little.

To me, my time is more valuable than you will ever be able to pay me for, but Im willing to take what I consider a huge paycut to work on something I enjoy and believe I can bring value to.

To give a good example of this disparity in value eatimates, I have in the past done a lot of consulting work for law firms. In the process, I made friends with quite a few paralegals and secretaries. At least two I know locally are bringing in over 1mil a year by their own work product, mostly seperate from their bosses. neither of them have gotten a bonus or raise for it. Why? Because all the partners thing they have most of the risk (somewhat true) and therefor they should get it all. In reality though, while the risk itself is largely the partners, the value is not, and by failing to properly reward value contributions, they create a really fucked up employment atmosphere where people arent nearly as motivated to do all that work for so little reward. So for all the ones I know who do produce a lot of value and fail to get compensated, I know more who could bring that level but chose not to because they simply have no incentive.

As a side note, I also recently found out that the office managers of various firms will call around and discuss salaries so that they can all keep position x at roughly the same pay in the entire city, so that people dont jump ship to other firms. When I said it seemed illegal, the secretaries said yeah, but what are you going to do, sue all the people in town who do it when they are the ones who are "upstanding members of the community, know all the judges, and have all the money?".

This disparity of power is the problem, and I see it constantly.

What annoys me the most is all the people who tell people to just be happy they even have a job, as if the oppressed should be happy and thankful for their wage slavery.

Class warfare is real, ongoing, and the rich are winning.

The workers got paid. You said you'd do the job for $XX. Someone else took your work and sold it for $XXXX. You don't therefore deserve some cut of that sale. You sold your work for $XX. No one forced you into that. If you wanted a bigger cut you shouldn't have negotiated with someone to do the work for a fee.

If you ask for a bigger cut of the sale you'll most likely have to give up some or most of the up front fee because otherwise you aren't taking any risk the sale won't happen.

But also remember that risk isn't just about actual money, it's also about opportunity costs.

If you join a startup that gets acquired but before your shares vest (or with preferences that kill the value of your shares), it's true that you still got paid well above an average non-programmer salary. But it's also true that you could have spent those years working for a much bigger salary at a big company. Or worked 35 hours a week and had a lot more fun with a significant other or friends. Or started your own company that might have turned into something you totally owned.

There are certainly startups where the net dollar value that the engineering team turned down by not working at Google is as much risk as all the investors put in as cash.

I think some of it is relative.

If someone is risking 500k on an idea, then I'm impressed... but that's because my net worth is negative. Some of these investors, and especially investor groups, have hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars and have access to lawyers and analysts who know how to hedge their risks.

So to say that they're taking more of a risk with their investment based just on numbers ignores the fact that the risk to their actual well-being and wealth is actually quite low.

For the generic employee of these startups, few people have the resources to evaluate the companies financials and the reputations of the owners/investors, etc. You're essentially given the same pitches that all other investors get and yet don't have the same resources to evaluate the credibility.

Now you said it, employee risks joining eventual-failure company A instead of eventual-unicorn company B or risks giving up years of a higher salary for the potential of windfall stock options.

Looking at just the numbers, losing 20-30k/yr in salary over 2-5 years is 40-150k loss, nowhere near the 500k single investment... yet comparing the net worth of these individuals you realize the investor risks a small percentage of their net worth, while the employee risks a much more significant portion. This isn't even taking into account the emotional investments that employees make, which are almost always higher than those of investors.

The main point being (and I hope I'm making it decently) is that how you have compared risks between individual employees and investor groups is not exactly fair.

Your last sentence is absolutely true. If you think about the combined value added to a company per developer vs. the wages it's probably the most out of wack of any industry of all time.

> the most out of wack of any industry of all time.

While I cautiously agree, the pedant in me feels the need to remind everyone of the number of industries that have built on the backs of slavery where each individual may not have added much measurable value to the prospective company's bottom line, the fact that the wages were 0 means they were still infinitely worse off than any of us.

Considering there are large industries around the world that still operate based on this model (search Thailand fishing slavery), I need not have even used the past tense.

Just a little perspective before we all return to complaining about our first world injustices.

This comment adds nothing of value to the discussion. While it's terrible that slavery happened/is happening, it has absolutely no bearing on our situation today. Just because other people might have it worse is NO REASON why we should not try to better our situation. Not doing that is not going to fix the problem of slavery.

And calling this a "first world problem" is you admitting you have no idea what you're talking about.

I think taking a step back to consider the bigger picture and your place in it is a valuable thing that more people should do when carrying on online discussions. While you may not have gotten any value from my comment, it doesn't mean other people did not.

Also your claim that my comment AT ALL implies that we should not try to better our own situation is a false inference that seems to me to indicate that your own comment is merely a knee-jerk defensive reaction to a perceived attack on your position.

And if the plight of web developers who can't negotiate higher salaries than 80-160k/yr isn't a "first world problem", then pardon me, you're right, I must not know what I'm talking about.

The only reason you would have made your comment is to try and stop people from bettering themselves, out of some feeling that there are others who are worse. It adds no value whatsoever; you are simply trying to guilt people into not fighting for what they deserve.

Wow, I'm curious how often your assumptions about others motivations puts you at odds with people?

Your assumption that I made my comment to make people feel guilty is false. If you felt guilt and took offense, it's because you took it that way.

I made that comment because I wanted people to feel grateful, you may say that as me wanting people to be complacent and just be "grateful they have a job". But that's not it either... we're all extremely lucky to be alive in a time where we can leverage our skills this easily and have all these platforms to coordinate and discuss how we can better our situation. We'll be just fine because we have power and influence, even if it isn't as much as we'd like.

I don't feel guilty for what I have and what others don't, and I wouldn't want anyone else to either because guilt is useless. I have gratitude for all the opportunities and skills I have. I believe that feeling gratitude creates a mindset that is more productive and useful to actually changing things (including bettering our collective situation).

In any case, this thread is probably over, so at this point neither of us are contributing to anything but building our own egos and I'm sure we've both got bigger things to attend to.

In 2010, I saw a job listing that I found interesting and I applied for it.

The recruiting company reached out to me and said that because I was currently working for one of their clients, they wouldn't consider me for the job. They refused to pass my information along to the other client who was looking for someone with my skill set and experience.

I explained that I had no contractual obligations to remain where I was. I was not bound by a non-compete. They didn't "own" me. I was a fit for the job and I wanted to apply.

In the end, they said that if I ever wasn't working for a client company, they'd happily consider me for placement. I explained to them that when I left this company, I wouldn't need their services any longer.

A couple of months later, another recruiter found placed me at first as a contractor and now as an employee of my current employer and that old contracting company occasionally reaches out to me. Every time, I take great delight in telling that that because of one particular employee, I still remember and use her name, that I will never do business with them. They are persona non grata to me forever.

This article feels disjointed and forced; how is a group of people who feel "underutilized and mistreated" leaving their current place of work to build a new company considered "poaching"? Who is the one poaching in this scenario? Not only that, towards the end, the article turns into blunt advertisement for a service that does exactly that: poaching, but in teams. I suspect that this is a crude attempt at "hacking" for views at medium; start with empathetic call-out on some term or expression that nobody actually has any problem with, and lightly transition to whatever the hell you want to talk about.

While we're at it, let's please stop referring to people as mere resources. We are fellow human beings, people with feelings and needs and desires. Degrading people as "resources" goes hand-in-hand with referring to them as being "poached".

I hear this from managers and project coordinator types, not from fellow hackers, so I'm probably preaching to the choir. It might help to prudently point out dehumanizing language when we hear it.

I noticed this, too. Referring to people as "people", not "resources", is my favourite way of trolling managers during meetings.

I don't do it just because calling people "resources" is dehumanizing, I also do it because I think this attempt of reducing complexity is naive. You can treat people the way you treat other items on a timesheet, sure, and you might even get a great deal of satisfaction from it, because you're so cold-hearted and professional that a drop of blood just harvested from your aorta could turn the global warming problem into a neverending winter problem if it's dropped over the North Atlantic. That doesn't make it a smart thing to do though. People aren't resources in the classical sense. They aren't predictable and "budgeting reserve time" is not the correct approach to deal with that. Encouraging and nurturing the kind of behaviour that a project depends on is a far better approach.

To the people who stand to make money from our labor, we will always be resources, just like the computers, and the office. We will always be a cost, just like health insurance, and the rent and electricity bill.

Treating us nicely is just a means to the same end of them making money from us. Such is the problem of individual ownership, instead of worker ownership.

I liked the good 'ole 1970's in Silicon Valley. The saying was that if you didn't like your job then just turn into a different parking lot on your commute and get a new one for more money. It was pretty much true.

A sense provided by Google for "poaching": >take or acquire in an unfair or clandestine way

Which fits this use perfectly. Mindless thought policing of this type seldom produces any good; please employ with great caution.

Firstly: Are you saying that it is unfair or clandestine to offer someone a job?

Secondly: Connotation matters. Poaching is clearly a pejorative term.

Clandestine, very often, certainly. Admittedly this use principally reflects the employers' perspective, and maybe a better (more accurate, more neutral) term could be used, but this is a separate issue from any association with hunting.

>take or acquire in an unfair or clandestine way

Hmm.. The non-poaching agreements were about refusing to offer jobs to reduce wages in an unfair or clandestine way.

I hope companies use the term poaching more, it makes easier to start a class action lawsuits against them.

Offer anyone a job who you want to hire based on their skills and/or experience.

I agree with the position, even if the post feels sponsored content-y, perhap piggybacking on what is becoming a common argument for engineers.

The idea of Elevator itself is interesting though: getting hired in groups with friends that you already work well together with. As the author points out, this is a common way to meet cofounders and start a company. I wonder if it'll work by putting that same group in an established company.

It is kind of like an acqui-hire where the buyer is paying for the team and maybe some tech. However I can see many challenges implementing this for a team of more experienced candidates. Not everyone on a team has the same motivations for a job. e.g. I might work at a certain place because I like the work, I like the people I work with, I like the salary/perks I have and it is 5 miles from where I live. Another person on the team might be more motivated by a high salary and might want to be paired with a different company, yet another might be motivated by challenging work, etc. How do you align the motivations of multiple individuals that work on a team so that everyone will want to be swept up by another company? This becomes even more problematic with mixed age teams, > 3 person teams, mixed experience teams that work great together at Company X working on Problems Y/Z but might not be that great working on Problems A/B/C

The beautiful thing is that a team is non-discrete. If you have a set of 20 people you've worked with in the past that you'd love to work with again we can find the permutations that make the most sense for a given opportunity and let the team see that.

We're just a tiny bootstrapped start up who started Elevator because we think this needs to exist in the world. Hopefully that adds validity to the argument that we'd quit our jobs because we believe in the idea so much.

Ugh....this article totally misrepresents hunting. Cecil was NOT poached. The hunter paid $50,000 for a LEGAL HUNTING TAG. This is the exact opposite of poaching. Poaching happens when you don't have a tag and hunt anyway. Hunting, especially in poorer countries, actually helps protect the species. The government body issuing tags wants to continue to issue tags in future as it is a revenue stream. The last thing they they want is to bring the population of a species below sustainable levels. The revenue from the tags employ park rangers and people that stop poachers. When you don't have park rangers or anyone to enforce legal hunting that is when poaching becomes a big problem and animals are hunted to extinction.

I don't see how the labor market and the investment market are comparable (for example, bonds are auctioned off all the time, but if you try to auction off labor you'll find out that's been mostly illegal since 1865).

I also don't see how higher liquidity would at all be beneficial to capital, either as a class or as individual actors

Exactly. "Promoting liquidity in the labor market" sounds like a great thing, until you realize that, with increased "liquidity" comes a tremendous amount of increased non-productive costs and inefficiencies.

When recruiters get 30% of an employee's yearly salary as a finder's fee, higher liquidity tends to decrease the pool of money available to employees (while increasing recruiter commissions) which results in all sorts of things that aren't good for the employees, in the end. High turnover also allocates more resources for training and other startup costs, rather than focusing on production.

While, yes, changing jobs for you personally might be good in some situations, promoting "labor liquidity" is a bad thing as a whole, for both employers and employees, in a sort of "tragedy of the commons" way.

"When recruiters get 30% of an employee's yearly salary as a finder's fee, higher liquidity tends to decrease the pool of money available to employees"

Be honest, it's not like that money would have gone to the employees anyway.

"While, yes, changing jobs for you personally might be good in some situations, promoting "labor liquidity" is a bad thing as a whole, for both employers and employees, in a sort of "tragedy of the commons" way."

No it's not. Promoting that liquidity also means that, when one is mistreated at a job, they can easily find another.

My wife was the head of recruitment at a high-tech company in SV. I started a new company and she quit and stole about a dozen or so of the best from her old company.

Is that poaching? She wasn't allowed near the old company again.

It was almost certainly a violation of her employment contract and she could possibly be subject to liability.

Though the actual changes of the tech company in question suing are likely fairly small.

I could be in the contract, but that doesn't mean it is enforceable though. Even if it was, it would depend on the evidence and exact language used.

This was 40 years ago. Paper hadn't been invented yet to write contracts on.

Hah! You made it sound like it was a more recent thing.

What did high tech mean back then? Banging some rocks together to make fire?

Poaching or not its still very heartless to take away the life of an innocent animal

Was Cecil the lion actually poached?

I don't think so, no. It wasn't clear-cut either way (legally shot by luring it away from illegal areas).

The guy walked away without being charged, but both of the guides were arrested for poaching.

Not technically. But a gruesome picture of an elephant that has had its tusks hacked off would really spoil the rest of the article.

They lured the lion away from the protected area so they could kill it. According to Hoyle probably not, but yea, that's poaching.

You are an animal >... mammal >... species- homo sapiens sapiens-

Why do you think that being a member of a particular species somehow excludes you from a set of objects that can be poached, mainly animals? If lions are poached, then humans can be poached as well. Why would a bio-chemical process known as homo sapiens be more important(or sacred, if you want) than a bio-chemical process known as a lion and be excluded from something that can be applied to all animals?

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