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Comment by azdle | Hacker News Reader

> Apple, for its part, appears to hold no hard feelings toward Pearl, despite the steady poaching of employees.

This has made me wonder, why does offering people a better option for employment than what they currently have get described with the word for illegally killing/stealing animals? Was there some concerted effort years ago to associate the two, to make leaving one company for another seem like a bad thing?

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Because it's viewed as a breach of loyalty. It used to be that employees were expected to be loyal to their company, and in return the company would take care of them. Things have changed now so companies don't take care of their employees anymore, but they still want to push the narrative that their employees should be loyal to the company.

I can't speak to the history of the term, unfortunately, but the term poaching in a hunting context means more than just killing an animal illegally; it has a connotation of trespassing to gain something otherwise inaccessible. Employee poaching has the same connotation because the former employee uses their familiarity with the old company to hire employees that other companies can't access as easily.

I see your definition and that of the first definition I saw from the internet, and coming from a family of hunters/fishers, it surprised me a bit. I associate poaching almost entirely with killing of animals illegally. I think that is because in my home state, there were fewer problems with people trespassing to hunt than with those hunting with no regard for licenses/hunting laws. The Wikipedia article on poaching in the USA[0] is more what I associate with poaching.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poaching#Poaching_in_the_USA

Yes: http://www.hightechemployeelawsuit.com/

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