Hacker News Reader

Comment by MikeF_323 | Hacker News Reader

Borland. I worked there up until the mid 90s and then was recruited by Microsoft. They picked off all the great talent leaving barely any competent engineers left. I alongside a ton of other engineers were wined and dined and given a hell of an offer we couldn't refuse. It was insane, I should write a book honestly. I miss those days, it was the wild west of tech.

View on HN

I’d enjoy reading more in this very thread, if you don’t feel up to writing the whole book right now :)

Edit: Fan of Borland products in the 90s!

I think that's how Anders Hejlsberg (creator of C# and Typescript) joined Microsoft?

You know someone works in programming if their name is Anders or Tobias

I know of a Tobias who ended up working as an analyst-therapist before switching to a successful acting career.

the world's first...

I know one who got turned into a hawk and couldn’t turn back.

Animorphs huh. I read a few books a long time back, but then recently read about how the series became quite twisted towards the end. Younger me would probably have enjoyed it.

Yeah, the author killed off most of the characters at the end, which was surprisingly realistic. More than one of the heros (and one of the villains) was a programmer too.

He got a new start.

There are dozens of us

He also had a brief foray as a director ...

Didn't he switch to performance art first?

I think he did a few commercials before that - the one about the fire was quite good.

Successful author too. Very supportive, loving wife. Model of a perfect marriage right there, imho.

Don't know a Tobias, but I've heard of a Saibot. He was pretty much a noob.

Very two dimensional person as well. Or at least he was 20 years ago; perhaps he's improved himself since.

He blued himself later on, so...

What

The Spotify office had an Anders of the week.

A quick search in Norway's bureau of statistics shows that Anders had a big bump between about 1975 and 2000, peaking about 1985, when about 1.5% of boys were named Anders. I believe it was a top ten name that entire period. I don't have stats for Denmark where Hejlsberg is from, but I don't think the name is any rarer there.

There are a lot of developers in that generation.

Tobias is a less popular name overall, but had a much sharper spike around 2000. 1.5% of Norwegian boys born in 2003, the peak year, were named Tobias.

Those guys should be the just entering the workforce about now.

Anders joined later as a couple of ex-Borland people kept pinging back on him, he mentions this in a few interviews.

https://behindthetech.libsyn.com/001-anders-hejlsberg-a-craf...

Thanks, that was a great listen

I should write a book honestly.

Please do! Turbo-C 1.5 and Borland C++ were two of my all time favorite programming tools.

I just got done reading Commodore, A Company on the Edge and would love to read about Borland/Microsoft back in the day.

Was the "Microsoft limo parked across the street waiting for people to come out on their breaks" true or just a rumor at the time?

I wonder what makes a company poach like this vs do an aquihire

Cost, surely. Paying for 10 engineers is much cheaper than paying for them and the IP they helped produce over the years, especially if you're not interested in that IP.

Poaching can be done quietly and cheaply, acquihires get everyone publically.

I suspect this would work in a lot of cases if you can find out who the key engineers/strategy people in the company are. But working that out is probably the hard part.

If you have the money an acquihire guarantees you get everything. But then you still have to work out who those key people are after the fact and make sure you keep them happy.

Aquihires can be very destructive.

You end up with either the whole company, or you piss off the people that you wanted when you fire their co-workers. It also pulls in an almost complete graph of employees who are isolated from the new parent company.

Its much better to pull off the people that you want, and get them to join willingly, as they tend to adopt the culture/learn better when in isolation.

Cuts both ways. You also get a fully functioning, self-contained team or 10. That can be attractive.

Aquihires are really only a thing when the target is a start-up with little revenue and limited growth prospects. At the time, Borland was a real company with many products and paying customers.

The majority of Borland products completed directly with Microsoft products at the time. If Microsoft had done an acquisition then they would have sunsetted most Borland products anyway so it would have been a pointless waste of money.

Cisco poached all of the server sales team from HO when they launched UCS. This caused a major problem within Cisco because that HP sales team (and engineers) were so absolutely atrocious that it ruined Cisco internally for almost 10 years.

Buying a company to get 10 key employees is a lot more expensive than just making 10 really lucrative offers. For Microsoft in particular it left a competitor with a storied history rudderless. So it makes Microsoft's offering look even better in comparison.

If you approach people one at a time and make them personal offers that they accept, you can be pretty sure you end up with people who want to work for you and have at least some initial loyalty and desire to stay. If you acquihire then you end up with a lot of people who feel like they've been forced to work for you and will be looking for the quickest possible exit.

I’d read this book!

The color scheme I use for vsc++ still mimics turbopascal/turboc++ from the mid 90s.

The nostalgia I feel for QBasic as my first programming experience as a kid is followed very closely by my nostalgia for Turbo C++ 3.0.

I'm curious if non-competes were a thing at this period of time. I'm not sure if something like this could happen today (although I'm sure it still happens).

Non-competes have been a thing for centuries, but California banned them in 1872.

which is awfully convenient that amzn and microsoft (and uber?) are based in washington state where this doesnt apply

Noncompetes are pretty toothless, even illegal in several jurisdictions. Even then, a company with money and clout to poach talent like that can also stand up for you if your failing ex-employer chooses to lash out.

>Noncompetes are pretty toothless

Not true. They’re illegal in California, but in other US states where they are legal they can be quite toothful. I have seen several ex-employees of my prior company get sued and lose.

It became a silent doctrine to just leave a two year gap on your public LinkedIn after working there. If you put anything in that period (the length of the non-compete), you were at risk of the CTO suing you for fun if he thought any of the scope your prior work overlapped with your new role. Fun stuff.

In texas they must have a geographic nexus in them, so if you move from Austin to Dallas, its often void.

They are also illegal in most European countries.

They're not illegal in Germany, but the legal requirements are so onerous (50% salary paid for the duration of the non-compete) nobody does it. I believe it's similar in France.

They can be done in Germany if they are very limited in scope, basically if they don't make it harder to find your next job. But it's a fine line, and if a court decides you stepped over the line it's as you described. Nobody sane would put it in a standard contract below C-level.

Yep,same in France, and they have to be geographically limited.

Interesting, as given most of my clarification talks with Betriebsrat, I thought it wouldn't be valid in court, unless they can prove you are doing some kind of industrial spionage like working in exactly 1:1 competing product.

I think Massachusetts has similar rules these days (after long-running opposition from some major employers). However, while 50% salary definitely makes a company put skin in the game, it's not a panacea. And, from an employee point of view, how many people will be comfortable with taking 50% salary (with no benefits, bonuses, or RSUs) to hang out for a year? Sure, some younger folks might see it as an opportunity but it may not be such a good deal for someone supporting a family.

> benefits, bonuses, or RSUs

"Benefits" isn't really relevant for Germany but bonuses and RSUs (though again, nobody in Germany gets those) are figured into the 50%.

Pretty much everyone I know would take such a contract; programmers make 1.5x-2x median salary to begin with even in Europe, and it's "don't compete", not "don't work".

In Massachusetts at least I think it's strictly salary which could probably represent 25% or less of your total comp. And yeah, you can work but there's no guarantee you would be able to work for another vaguely related software company, for example. I know people who wanted to go off on their own as consultants and did indeed have to take a year off.

> In Massachusetts at least I think it's strictly salary which could probably represent 25% or less of your total comp.

Then for most people this holds true they're making like $100k/year and $300k/year in RSUs? "Uncomfortable" taking a year with _no work_ for "only" $50k after that? I mean, come on. If you want to top it up, flip burgers a couple days a week.

Do you have a source on this? I am currently looking into the limitations on non-competes.

Not really, other than having discussed this issue several times with the union people throughout the years, and knowing for sure that in countries like Portugal, this is definitly not a thing, given how we jump between companies.

Nope. They're just in legal practice way more limited in scope. It has to be with a company that actually competes with the company you left.

Notice the most.

They are illegal for pretty much all but the board members, and even then the salaries must be paid to enforce it.

They are not illegal in the UK although there are some limits in time and space. You might still end up out of work for 6 months ore more. Worse they are sometime applied to relatively unskilled jobs.

The one in Poland is fun. You can bar someone from working in the same field for quite some time but you must pay them 70-80% (I don't quite remember how much but something like that) of their annual salary during that time. Which means that most of the people proposing this kind of deal are clueless ans greedy businessmen who think they found a perfect leash for their employees but what's actually happening is that they find out far too late that it's binding them and not the employee.

They're not illegal. They're just generally unenforceable.

And, even if you don't end up losing after being sued, many people won't roll the dice if a threatened with a suit because they'll probably be out big bucks even if they win. Better to just take a year off; I've known people who have done so when they've been in a situation where a prior employer was likely to sue.

> >Noncompetes are pretty toothless

> Not true.

Sure, if you delete the "in several jurisdictions". But when you read the entire sentence, then what I said is correct.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com