Comment by AJ007 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AJ007 | Hacker News Reader

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And then they will also use that information to help other companies poach your employees, at best. At worst, the data will be purchased for some sales team to identify and target your company to sign some wildly overpriced long term sales contract. They will know employee behavior and who the key prospects are in your organization.

It has happened before.

Even I was shocked how tens of thousands of companies handed over mind blowingly valuable customer data to Facebook. They aggressively promoted their Facebook Page to their customer base: please like us on Facebook!

What did Facebook do? They took that data and sold it to competitors as ad inventory. I never saw a single company owner complain. Companies spent millions of dollars and years of effort building up a customer base, and just handed it right over to Facebook.

To put it in more blunt terms, Facebook stole companies assets through social engineering. I saw friends turn around and build profitable, multi-million dollar businesses through this single data usurpation channel.

Will companies get more savvy about locking down their data? I'm not counting on it.

Just a pet peeve, but please re-consider the casual use of the word "poach" when referring to companies hiring employees. It reduces a worker's agency to that of a farm animal or wild game, as if they were owned by their employer and "stolen" away by some other employer. I think we can all agree that we are not the property of our employers, so the word "poach" is pretty inappropriate and I'd argue moderately offensive.

The rest of your comment is spot on though, so thanks for posting it.

Are you going to suggest a better term?

How about just "hire"

Employees are not taxis! /s

How about "employ"? :)

Use "lure" ... no, that implies that employees are like rodents. Next time try "propositioned"... no that's for whores.

This is tough stuff.

"recruit"

It isn't that hard :)

Implies you're a soldier.

Entice.

I'd argue moderately offensive.

I was deliberately and enthusiastically nodding with the "we are not the property of our employers" bit. Then you dropped the O-word and now, mostly because I'm curious to the point of disaster, I think I actually kind of need to see one argue that 'poach' is carte-blanche "offensive".

"Offensive" was probably a bad choice. "Uncomfortable" maybe?

But how? As another commenter accurately pointed out, it's a perfectly cromulent word to describe the act

Hard to describe. I'm as uncomfortable with the word as I am uncomfortable being referred to as a "resource" which is also used commonly in business. Personal pet peeve, probably not shared by many.

Interesting. I wont belabor the affair. The relationship some have with words is an interesting one to me, more so lately than ever.

If you Google this word, one of the definitions is “take or acquire in an unfair or clandestine way”.

Words are allowed to have more than one contextual meaning in conversation? Get outta here....

/s

Offering someone a job and having them accept it is not unfair or clandestine.

> It reduces a worker's agency to that of a farm animal or wild game

MS certainly treats Windows users like cattle so there is always a possibility that they would do something similar with job seeker or employee data. There is nothing offensive about pointing out unethical practices of such companies or the potential to abuse the data.

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