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Comment by zer00eyz | Hacker News Reader

This isnt about workers.

Let's say tomorrow that you find a better way to do search. It's going to crush google, and MS.

You hire a team, smart people the VC's throw money at you. Everyone is happy. Your growing and the next darling of tech.

Google comes in and offers to buy you out. You decline cause you know that they are blockbuster and your Netflix.

In retaliation google hires all your staff, and sends them to the roof to rest and vest.

Thats great for the dozen people who got a great deal from google. It's bad for the rest of the world.

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>. Google comes in and offers to buy you out. You decline cause you know that they are blockbuster and your Netflix. In retaliation google hires all your staff, and sends them to the roof to rest and vest.

If you know for certain that "they are BlockBuster, you are Netflix", then why are you not cutting them a deal to make it worth them staying?

This is absolutely about workers -- specifically, companies not wanting to pay workers anything close to what they are worth.

> why are you not cutting them a deal to make it worth them staying?

It’s a fair question. Workers absolutely deserve a fair cut of the pie in that scenario. Non-competes have been pretty ridiculous lately, and companies had to provide little to no justification.

But the incentives of workers might not be entirely aligned with the “Netflix” or even their coworkers. Blockbuster wouldn’t hire the whole team unless they had to: one or two people who understood the core algorithm is enough, and for 10x their old salary it would be hard to resist. That leaves the startup and everyone else who works there out in the cold.

The second thing is that people aren’t rational expected value maximizers. You can’t pay rent with equity, and a startup may not have the cash to compete on salary.

Finally, it’s possible that allowing the larger incumbent to hire all of a competitor’s employees is actually not in their best interest. After strangling/eliminating the competition, an incumbent has no further need for those employees it poached.

> Finally, it’s possible that allowing the larger incumbent to hire all of a competitor’s employees is actually not in their best interest. After strangling/eliminating the competition, an incumbent has no further need for those employees it poached.

And even if the do, it isnt at the inflated pay rate.

The big incumbent crushed the little guy.

From a benefit perspective:

When apple uses its dominant position to tax everyone 30 percent apple benefits, and the market does not.

When apple uses its dominant position to pay your team 30 percent more and stifle the free market by driving competitors out of business. you benefit, Apple benefits more and the market does not.

Is apple being a giant market dominating force a good thing or a bad thing? Your getting the high salary does not reflect your value, or the market value of your skill. It reflects apples desire to put your former employer out of business.

And importantly, once your old employer is gone, there’s no need to pay you inflated salaries anymore.

There is not a fixed quantity of employers. New employers are founded every day. YC even funds some of them.

> In retaliation google hires all your staff, and sends them to the roof to rest and vest.

That's the choice of your staff and the reality you have to deal with, isn't it? I'm sure you as worker would prefer to have such an option.

>Google comes in and offers to buy you out. You decline cause you know that they are blockbuster and your Netflix.

What percentage of the company did you share with your workers? What is their upside if you really are a blockbuster?

If the workers really had an upside, then they might stick with you.

Besides a lot of other reasons others already commented about: the noncompete wouldn't prevent that, as Google could hire them for any position that isn't connected to search - say, Android tech support - and allow them the roof access.

You would need to ban them from working ENTIRELY, and no sane person would accept that.

Alternatively, you might realize that NDAs and IP ownership is still a thing, Google can't just copy/paste your code, and if these people are truly irreplaceable, they should either be your cofounders or founding engineers with a significant equity stake.

Not slaves.

Imagine a world where employees can’t take a better offer, but a business could have their employees invent the next Google search, and then immediately fire all the workers that made that happen and hire cheaper ones to operate it.

That world sucks.

If you are truly netflix-to-be, you should be able to affordably incentivize your 12 key employees with equity.

An exit for Employee < 50 at a netflix-to be will be in the hundreds of millions.

Sure, if you knew you were getting a $100M exit in 5 years a rational agent would even agree to a $0 salary. A bank would gladly give them a $1 million loan for all of their life expenses until then, given the certainty of being repaid.

Unfortunately, these things aren’t certain and are contingent on many things including those that have nothing to do with technology.

It’s unfortunate because people have a bias towards guaranteed present value (cash) over expected future value (equity) which gives incumbents a natural advantage.

I feel like if you're working at a startup, you value some things more than just straight cash. Hour for hour, I'm fairly certain FAANG pays more than all but a few startups.

If a dozen people worked hard enough to gain the knowledge that gets them “rest and vest” at Google, they deserve it. Monetary reward is the reason we’re working at all. It’s not for the greater good. You’re certainly not going to convince anyone to give the government power to deny them their right to take the money and run

It's not about the workers. It's not about the market.

Hiring all the staff at an inflated rate to put a competitor out of business is good for the staff that got hired.

Without competition the dominant player makes more, without other places to work dominant player pays less.

> It’s not for the greater good.

Your not getting paid because your valuable your getting paid out because its anti-competitive. Paying you more to bankrupt a competitor is no different than dumping product to put them out of business ... Secure your market position and then jack up the prices and lower the salary.

You’re absolutely getting paid because you’re valuable, otherwise Google wouldn’t need to buy you out to enact their anti-competitive behavior. You wouldn’t be a threat in the first place.

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