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Comment by noonenowhere | Hacker News Reader

Here is Ben 3 years previously recommending that executives break the law to preserve their standing with each other:

"It is important to note that just about all of these kinds of policies violate the Right to Work laws in California. Specifically, if you block a hire based on this kind of policy and the employee loses their job and cannot find work, your company is liable for his wages. As a result, the business relationship with the other company must be extremely important for you to employ any kind of “hands off” policy."

https://a16z.com/2011/02/23/is-it-ok-to-hire-people-from-you...

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Yikes.

> With that in mind, the best way to deal with these situations is openly and transparently. Once the you become aware of the conflict between hiring the superstar employee and double-crossing your valued friend, you should get the issue onto the table by informing the employee that you have an important business relationship with his existing company and you will have to complete a reference check with the CEO prior to extending the offer. Let him know that if he does not want that to happen, then you will stop the process now and keep the process to date confidential. By speaking with your friend before making the hire, you will be able to better judge the relationship impact of hiring her employee. In addition, you may avoid making a bad hire as often candidates who do well in interviews turn out to be bad employees.

I'm not sure "open and transparent" is how I'd describe that.

Straightforward and discreet, maybe.

Illegal, another word.

Legally "suboptimal", in that you're confessing to the future victim of a crime that you're about to inflict a crime on him. Not only do you become liable, we've just established conspiracy to commit, rather than just the crime itself. This generally doubles the penalty. Bonus idiot points for doing it over email.

Thanks for finding that. I remember reading this in the book, and immediately thought of the anti-poaching deal Google, Apple, Intel, Adobe, etc had with each other. It's identical to the activity they were found guilty of... He actually recommends you do this.

When he suggested collusion with other companies, I realized the book may have some bad advice in it.

I read the book and this was one position I found indefensible. Employees must have the ability to move companies, and any attempt to block it is bad and immoral. If an employee of any of my friends applied we would absolutely consider them and give them an offer, over any objections their old boss had.

There is a difference between "this is criminal" and "this might make you civilly liable to pay someone's wages."

Referring to the latter as "break[ing] the law" in the context of discussing criminal activity is misleading.

> A good rule of thumb is the reflexive principle of employee raiding which states: “if you would be shocked and horrified if company X hired several of your employees, then you should not hire any of theirs.”

This seems really childish. I would only be shocked if friendly/partner companies /actively recruited/ staff from me. I would never be shocked if they hired a current employee who felt the new job was a better fit. In fact I would be happy for everyone involved.

Frankly, the proprietary "your" or "my" employees is already the wrong way to think.

I don't belong to my CEO - my CEO needs to give a reason to want to offer them my time. And while it is unlikely I'd find out, if I did find that management at my company made slimy deals with other firms to hurt my career, I'd be out the door immediately, loudly explaining to my coworkers and extended network of technical types why.

The superhero-CEO myth in the valley needs to go. It isn't even healthy for them.

Violating California labor law is unlikely to land you in jail-- most of the penalties are financial.

I mean, given the tone of this post and the talk of how important it is to run everything by the counsel, "not committing a crime that literally leads to the executives being jailed" is a pretty low bar.

...albeit a higher bar than many of his peers could clear.

Advocating the violation of labor laws is generally considered a bad look irregardless of the punishment be it jail or fines.

Thats because

> your company is liable for his wages

doesn't cross his threshold of

> In this business .... we will not go to jail

its consequentialism 101. do the consequences deter you.

A criminal charge from the US FEDERAL GOVERNMENT WITH INFINITE RESOURCES vs a civil charge from a bankrupt state against the most capitalized entities on the planet

HMMM TOUGH CHOICE

you may have been indoctrinated to respect due process of all laws as written from any united state and from the national republic itself, thats not the same game that everyone is playing.

The game he was playing was "become a billionaire." I was a member of the protected class in the Apple-Pixar-Google etc case. When I left, I got a 50% raise. I estimate that that collusion cost O(10,000) people between $50,000 and $500,000 each (my settlement was less than $10K, and my personal loss was ~$40,000/yr * 5 years).

Given that Ben is discussing executives here, let's say: O(1,000) people what, $100,000 to $1,000,000 each?

Thats insightful

why are you using big O notation?

You shouldn't have been downvoted for that, it's a perfectly reasonable question. I had the same question myself.

Here's the funny part: there is no such thing as O(10,000) in big O notation. Big O doesn't concern itself with constant factors, it's about how performance changes with the size of the dataset. If two algorithms run in constant time but one takes twice as long as the other (maybe it's a debug build), they aren't O(1) and O(2), they are both O(1).

So it's not surprising that anyone would be confused by O(10,000). In big O, this would be an impossible value. It just wouldn't make sense.

The best solution, as always, is to use plain English. You will never go wrong by saying "about 10,000".

Formally, the Landeau notation allows for O(10,000)... But 1 = O(10,000) and 10,000 = O(1), so there is relatively little use for writing anything other than O(1).

It's because the notation is pronounced "order of", which is also the vocabulary used when you do Fermi estimation: you don't care about exact numbers, but you want to guess the order of magnitude / power of ten correctly. It's linguistic overloading if you want.

I often see this used informally as shorthand for "on the order of", which is another way people say "approximately".

"on the order of" is not synonymous with "approximately"

"on the order of" 1000000 means any number from 1000001 through 9999999

I would expect "approximately" to mean accurate to within the next order of magnitude down. e.g. I would expect "approximately 500000" to mean a range of 400000 to 600000; maybe 350000 to 650000 if you're stretching it.

> "on the order of" 1000000 means any number from 1000001 through 9999999

Not exactly. It can also mean anything from 500,000 to 4,999,999, or 316,228 to 3,162,277...

See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_magnitude

But yeah, it doesn't mean approximately

People, please stop downvoting this reasonable question

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