Poaching Etiquette: The Right Way To Take Tech Talent | Hacker News Reader

Poaching Etiquette: The Right Way To Take Tech Talent

betabeat.com

71 pointsjeremyhfisher35 comments

These articles frustrate me because nobody asks why the engineers are 'willing' to get poached. It always boils down to a few reasons:

- The company's prospects and projects are limited. Shopping comparison was cool in 2003, but it's 2011, and you have an aging flagship product with limited growth and a bunch of half-assed initiatives that never go anywhere because there's too much red tape to actually produce code and the executives are too busy getting fired every six months have any consistency with strategy.

But if you're getting tech talent "poached" in that case, you're probably getting all your talent poached, so let's talk about the other scenario.

- The engineer's prospects are limited. So few technology companies have any sort of individual contributor advancement path. A star performing sales guy goes from junior sales associate, sales associate, senior sales associate, junior manager, senior manager, etc every 6-12 months, with commissions and bonuses for strong performance.

The star engineer goes from "software engineer" to "senior software engineer" after like, 3-5 years, and then what? Either you figure out a way to get kicked into some sort of manager role or you just kind of hang around getting a pat on the back and a 6% raise every year until some company swoops in and "poaches" you with a 20% raise, which naturally seems astronomical by perspective.

Almost every manager I've had, I've had some conversation like this: "You have to give Joe a raise, and a BIG one. I know he started here out of college, but he's been here 3 years now. Because of his talent and domain expertise, he is easily more productive than any theoretical 'senior engineer' we could hire. Even if he's relatively happy, if you don't give him a raise, it's going to be way too easy for some recruiter to throw out salary numbers that will at least pique his interest."

And instead of bumping Joe's pay by 30% (which would still probably be less than market rates), he gets "poached," and now we have to hire some "senior engineer" at 200% the salary who tries to convince us to rewrite everything in Java for six months until he gets fired.

There's also Joe's impression of how much his employer values him: If Joe is perfectly happy working at 10k/year, but you're paying new people just out of college 20k/year it can cause Joe to start looking for ways to get poached.(for example)

This happens surprisingly more often than you think.

I'm in a similar situation to this at the moment. I have specialized domain knowledge and - I hate to say this, because it sounds so arrogant - I am the best engineer in my company. And I hate that; in my previous job I was the worst, and I learned something every day from the skilled, generous colleagues I had.

My prospects are limited here because my company won't commit to building a development team in SF. London (our other office) is a cheaper place to find developers, and it's been made clear that the preference is to hire people there. So if I stay I'm likely to be on my lonesome here for some time.

I have some loyalty to my company because they sponsored my H1B and got me into the Bay Area (although they paid me about $30k under the market rate until I found out what it really was) but it only goes so far; today for the first time I replied to an email from a recruiter - we're talking tomorrow...

Anti-poaching sentiment is an attempt by executives to drive down the status, pay, and perks of talent.

Programmers' and technicians' status and benefits are already artificially low due to lack of a professional licensing or guild system (thank goodness) and poor negotiating skills rampent in the profession (bad). Execs who pretend to value programmers and participate in anti-poaching schemes are stabbing their workers in the back.

Anti-poaching agreements, formal or implicit, are also illegal everywhere in the USA and most developed countries. They violate the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and its successors. These interviewees who brag on about how they're respecting their investors, partners, and friends by not poaching are admitting to a federal crime. The US Attorney from New York should be investigating.

Of course, the execs and our culture have succeeded in driving down the status of programmers enough that nobody much cares about crimes committed against them. Maybe they do need a guild.

I don't like losing good employees, but when one tells me he's thinking of going somewhere, whether it's a competitor, school. different industry, whatever, I don't take it all personally. Sooner or later, I do the same thing. And that's the reason my people will tell me when they're considering something else. P.S. My rule of girlfriends and bosses: You learn more about them when you leave than at any other time.

"You learn more about them when you leave than at any other time."

How so? (honestly, I'm dense)

At the end of the relationship, people stop doing things to keep the relationship afloat. They start to act like they would around anybody else. It's a learning experience.

It's funny, "poaching" in this context refers to hiring away talent from one company to the next. As if the talent is the property of the company.

I prefer to think of "poaching" in more appropriate terms -- supply and demand. Limited supply, demand increasing, and the market bears what it will.

Anyone who complains about this environment needs to consider another line of work.

> "I prefer to think of "poaching" in more appropriate terms -- supply and demand."

Exactly. It isn't poaching, it's competing. I wouldn't want to work at a place that thought of talent as property to be "poached".

It's just a metaphorical term of art. Most people wouldn't want to work with "garbage collection" every day, but of course many programmers do.

It's a metaphorical term of art, but also a sentiment among companies. They do treat talent as property, surprisingly often.

And there's often a fair bit of tit-for-tat and specific arrangements about poaching and when it's okay. Which is understandable in such a small, chummy industry (think Silicon Valley venture-backed startups, which are all about networking).

But it's also illegal, and devalues programmers, both monetarily and metaphorically.

Yeah, it's a metaphor that analogizes people and property.

I wouldn't have any qualms about working with, say, purchasing managers who talked about "poaching" component orders from one another, because they'd be talking about property as property.

Do you really not see the difference?

I think you're really stretching here. The core issue is whether companies value their employees--that comes through in how the employees actually get treated, not the use of one word vs. another.

I truly value my wild deer. I treat them very well.

What matters is a transparent, efficient, and equitable system.

I submit vast effort spent on political and marketing copy as some evidence that words can matter. "Yes they can".

What evidence do you have that words don't matter?

I think it's pretty hard to truly value and treat someone well if you think and speak of them as property.

Similarly, I tend to consider the presence of "human resources" people/departments to be a red flag.

From your point of view, what you say is true.

From the company's point of view, they've invested in finding you, and getting you up to speed, and now they have to start over. Even if they get someone equally talented at the same pay, the company has lost that initial recruiting cost and investment. So from their point of view, that's what is being "poached."

That is not counting the time it will cost to do these things.

That's a cost of doing business. Any employment relationship is a week to week exchange of services for money. Employees and employers do generally invest their reputations and goodwill in the relationships, but the ultimate distillation of employment is my money for your time.

The fact that some employers have more costly onboarding processes than others is a competitive disadvantage, not a rationale for demand-side collusion in the job market.

If a company wants to avoid that situation, they have plenty of options available. They could offer employees long-term contracts, so the stability goes both ways. They could try to be more proactive in fixing the problems that make people want to leave. They could pull a Google and try to make their work environment so good that it's almost impossible to replicate.

For the most part, companies don't do these things, and then get surprised when employees leave. They want to have their cake and eat it too, and are upset to discover that the labor market works both ways.

I learned at a previous employer that HR's "how big should our raises be this year" numbers were influenced by year over year turnover trends. If too many people quit, raises went up the next year.

Sounds exactly like properly evaluating supply and demand to get the result that they want.

True. It also implies that employees are fungible.

This is a common assumption but employees should nevertheless recognize their artificially constrained career prospects in such a system.

Love the entitlement attitude of some managers, and the weasel words. As if it's some sort of moral failure to get paid market rates.

Employee leaves to get paid their market rate = evil poaching! Management firing everyone to replace with lower cost workers = a necessary market adjustment

It may be my limited understanding, but poaching is when a company actively targets a particular person (say by calling them) rather than putting out a general call for CS grads with 10 years Rails experience.

But, again, I may be wrong.

Yes but if the employee is getting more at the new job then they were by definition underutilized and/or underpaid at the job they were "poached" from. Collusion amongst employers artificially limits employee earning power and cripples the invisible hand of labor economics.

Top flight employees should always be working at the edge of their abilities for commensurate pay. Anything less is an inefficient allocation of capital that hurts the industry as a whole.

Recruiting has become the most sought after skill among founders and one of the things companies look for as extra value a VC can bring.

Not sure there is a good way poach, aside from being a good sport and not rubbing it in. That and following through on the promises you make (looking at you Zynga).

If someone else can offer one of my guys a better deal than what I can (and by deal I don't just mean money), then I send them off with my good wishes.

I realise this comes across as naive, and I certainly don't want to minimize the huge disruption someone leaving a busy small team can cause, but if you start seeing people as property and laying your ego on the line every time you have turnover, you are going to have a miserable life.

[Disclaimer: I don't work in startups but I do work somewhere where it typically takes 9 months to re-hire, so don't think I don't feel the pain]

As an aside, there can be legal consequences to the "no-poaching agreements" mentioned in the OP's article:

http://gigaom.com/2010/09/24/doj-settles-with-apple-adobe-go...

There are downsides to informal "no poaching" agreements. After I left one e-company, I applied at another, and later learned I wouldn't be interviewed because of the previous company on my resume. The first company was major client of the second, and they didn't want to have even the appearance of "poaching."

Did they actually tell you this? I would think this must violate some sort of anti-discrimination law

No, the company's representatives did not formally/explicitly say it. My resume just went into a black hole, where I couldn't get a response from anyone.

Later, some colleagues who worked there mentioned (after I'd found a job elsewhere) that it's something of an unspoken policy between the two companies, and was likely the cause of my experience.

This kind of thing is never explicitly said, but happens often.

Poaching is the modern developers equivalent of "climbing the ladder" or getting a promotion. There is a limited ceiling for someone who is dedicated to their craft. They can go into management and "lose half their brain". They can go out on their own, but being a founder isn't for everyone.

There is no real loyalty. Companies will lay off their employees when money is a concern. Employees will leave their companies when they can make more money elsewhere. This is business. It's not personal, right?

My father used to tell me stories about when he was a manager within a factory (a good 30-40 years ago... he is 70 next year) essentially the employment rate for tradesmen was at maximum and essentially the only way to hire new help was to go out and offer someone who already had a job more cash/perks I don't think its wrong in any way to poach. its just a change of how the employment market will work when there are not enough skilled labor around to fill the needs of everyone.

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