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Comment by carlosdp | Hacker News Reader

Wow, that was unexpected. Great hire by Tesla. Interesting move from compiler development to driving AI, though I guess for the VP position, his experience in managing those teams is much more important.

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> Wow, that was unexpected. Great poach by Tesla.

Tangential, but I really hate the term "poach" when referring to recruiting employees.

We shouldn't think of hiring people as "poaching", because employees are not property. You can't "poach" an employee because there's no ownership, and employees should be free to make their own decisions regarding their employment opportunities.

I'm not sure why OP was down-voted, you may disagree but his post was credible and merits a response.

I downvoted most of the subthread as it was completely off-topic. I didn't come here to read this garbage.

Yea, I mean that's a good point, it is kinda a weird term. I don't mind changing it I guess.

I agree, it's a distasteful term. People choose jobs according to what's best for them and "poaching" implies the employer's interests should matter more than that.

i.e. it's an business management term.

Looking at the definition of poach, as it relates to this context, the subtext seems to be of the case where an employee leaves without warning or discussion of why they no longer want to remain at their place of employment. Like you cannot save an elephant after it has been poached, but maybe you could have if you know that there was a problem. The poach is the realization that you didn't see it coming.

Of course, the employee is free to just up and walk away at any time, but if you feel it is courtesy to discuss the relationship before parting, and it wasn't discussed, then poach does not seem completely inappropriate.

Having said that, in this case, we don't know many details about the parting. He and Apple may have had a good discussion about the future and came to a realization that the relationship wasn't going to work anymore, for whatever reason, and parted amicably.

From another perspective, perhaps we should not even think of employer/employee agreements to be relationships in this day in age?

I hope you similarly dislike the term 'head-hunt' on the grounds that no-one's head is severed. 'Poach' is a useful metaphor that suggests that one company actively tried to lure an employee from another. It is a metaphor, it doesn't imply that the employee is a chattel. I think one can get a bit too precious about these things.

Language shapes perception shapes language, so it's absolutely worthwhile to be vigilant and critical about the idioms we endorse by adopting, especially for engineered phrases (e.g., "right to work").

I absolutely agree about the power of language to shape thought. But consider, whenever you've heard of company A poaching employee Y from company B, has it really subtly made you think of Y as a helpless object?

Whenever, I see it, I think of the two companies plying Y with enticements, with Y manipulating them until (s)he finally gets rich rewards with the new company.

It doesn't make me think of Y as a helpless object. But it does make me think of A as doing something wrong. I strongly object to the term because it implies that companies shouldn't compete for employees, which pushes our salaries down.

I think that's fair. After all, poach has literal meanings that apply to acts that are clearly wrong or illegal. In fact, if I look at the dictionary, you see words like trespass, steal, etc.

You do hear poach used colloquially or even somewhat jokingly when it's not intended to imply anything nefarious but the word does imply something underhanded.

> whenever you've heard of company A poaching employee Y from company B, has it really subtly made you think of Y as a helpless object?

Yes. If that wasn't what someone was trying to convey, why did they pick the word "poach" in the first place? The whole point of using that word is to evoke a metaphor where the hired employee is mere game animal ensnared by the company.

> I think of the two companies plying Y with enticements, with Y manipulating them until (s)he finally gets rich rewards with the new company.

"Hire" is a good verb for that.

Yeah, they both sound kind of annoying.

"Poaching" doesn't refer to targeted hunting, though; it refers to hunting where one has no right to hunt. Of course, if this were just the etymology and nobody used it that way in the context of hiring, that wouldn't matter — but people do sometimes use it derogatorily, to suggest that one company has wronged the other. So I can see why somebody might prefer a less proprietary word.

It is a metaphor, but it does imply that the employee is a chattel - perhaps tongue-in-cheek, but nonetheless.

It's always worth thinking about the language we use to describe things, because that language does have an effect on our modes of thought.

OK, I'll make another attempt at conveying my point, perhaps I wasn't clear enough.

I believe it's a mistake to treat words as though they were nothing more than abstract parse tokens, devoid of any cultural, historical or etymological baggage and conveying only the precise meaning that we intend to convey. Language is more complex than that, and the baggage that comes along with words does sometimes imply things that may be entirely unintended by the speaker, and often slip easily below the level of conscious awareness. Entire fields of propaganda (and advertising!) are based on this.

I am unsure why even the idea of thinking about the words we use is apparently so controversial - is critical self-examination really so scary?

> I hope you similarly dislike the term 'head-hunt' on the grounds that no-one's head is severed.

this comparison really seems to miss the mark.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headhunting

the comparison not being apt isn't due to some qualitative assessment of original meaning/usage. thus linking to a headhunting wiki page seems like a reductive nonsequitur.

When large powerful companies conspire to keep wages down by illegally entering "anti-poaching" agreements to prevent employees from having freedom to make career choices because it would also give them leverage to capture a larger percentage of the value they provide, I think it then becomes warranted to question terminology that makes this sound acceptable.

what a whiny, irrelevant comment

No.

Yes. It is language policing nonsense. Quit trying to tell people how to talk because of imagined slights.

as Freud said, sometimes a poach is just a poach

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