25 employees including the CTO, and then bought a building nearby to Masimo's office for them to work in. At least according to the CEO of Masimo in public statements. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RR1o8EoW-Eg
If Masimo wanted to, they'd have offered them the same or more to keep them, but they didn't. I don't believe an employer has any right to expect other companies not to offer positions to their employees. Employees should not be kept in the dark on opportunities for better pay and conditions because you can't or don't want to fight that offer.
That said, a patent whose primary claim seems to be (based on the workaround) _where_ the processing takes place (ant not _how_) seems like exactly the kinda thing that shouldn‘t be patentable.
How people on HN can support monopolization of markets and killing of competition is beyond me, since in the end it always bites them in the ass (see recent mass layoffs in the industry), yet this lesson seems to be quickly forgotten.
Licensed Mac clones were only available for two years (1995-1997), and discontinuing the program drove many other companies out of business, so it's hard to see how the change was a ploy to acquire a single company's assets. It seems more likely that Jobs discontinued licensing because it caused Apple to lose money.
And it looks like much of the Exponential Technologies team continued under a different name, then was bought by Apple in 2010 for $121 million.[1]
If there are other examples, can you provide one that is more recent and/or more blatant?
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/28/technology/28apple.html
Then used them to negotiate a better price with Motorola, dumped their purchase contract for 'reasons' and bankrupted the company.
Exponential sued.. and won $500 million... for breach contract but were destroyed by that point. Apple gobbled up their IP for around $20 mil later on.
> This matter was settled during the fourth quarter of 1999 for an amount not material to the Company's financial position or results of operations.
If Apple did pay $500 million, I think that would have been material to the company's financial position, as their profit that year was $601M.
Again, are there any examples that are less debatable and/or more recent? I don't have a dog in this fight. But if Apple is infamous for this behavior, it seems like there would be stronger examples.
1. See page 59: https://www.annualreports.com/HostedData/AnnualReportArchive...
The original team ended up founding Intrinsity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrinsity) and being involed with the Samsung A8 and Apple A4 designs. Apple ended up buying the company and many of those people are the ones designing their current chips. (https://touchreviews.net/apple-intrinsity-implications/)
It’s mindblowing how big of a gap this is for these non-tech companies. I work for a company that sold to PE. The owners walked away with the vast majority of a 1.5 billion deal.
I asked if employees were given anything. “Sure. Some got as much as 50k!” I was told.
Using some standard equity math for early engineers, I back of napkined that the 25 year tenure engineers, if they were at big tech, should have gotten low 7 figures. Nope. They got 50k out of 1.5 billion.
(No, PE had no say on how that 1.5 billion was divided up for those of you quick to blame PE.)
Massimo is 400x smaller than Apple. WTF are you talking about like they're in the same weight class?
Their (limited) levels.fyi data does not indicate this is one of their goals.
I would bet Apple, and the other large publicly listed tech companies, have lifted far more employees into financial independence from employers than any other business in history.
They've also destroyed financial independence. They've engaged in anti-competitive and anti-poaching practices before. There's several famous examples.
Anyways, are you saying it's Apple's goal to lift employees in this way, or does it just happen to be incidental to whatever their CEO wants at the moment?
Also all the people actually _making_ those devices, surely the largest labor pool supporting their business, have zero financial independence. That's the typical western blind spot.
> from employers than any other business in history
I think that'd be the US Government and it's GI Bill. Okay, technically not a business, but if the virtue is independence, then it shouldn't matter who provided it.
So doing monopolistic and illegal things is OK because it makes some people rich?
Massimo still owns the core IP. Apple owns some other IP.
> How people on HN can support monopolization of markets
There was one niche (note: still massive) provider of this technology. Now there are two, one of which is mass. Even if that collapses to one mass, that’s objectively better. More competitors and more consumer surplus is not a monopoly condition.
There is a difference between being reflexively anti-Apple regardless of the circumstances and being pro-monopoly.
>How HN can support monopolization of markets and killing of [sic] competition is beyond me.
That suggests HN is a monoculture of some sort of united front. It is not. Diversity of opinion is best for this community (and all communities).
And, sorry, what competition was killed off here? I, as the consumer, was never considering Massimo for my blood oxygen measurement needs. I bought an Apple Watch and just want it to be as feature-full as possible. So does Apple.
I wasn’t going to buy a device just for blood monitoring. What they produced is valuable to me as a feature of a product but not as a product in of itself
And I know this isn't your argument, but that's a VERY narrow market for the purposes of a US inquiry into monopolies. Like, the normal market definition fights are about whether you should be considering "premium smartphones" or "smartphones" as a whole. Or all of the grocery stores in a given region, and whether that should include convenience stores that also sell groceries.
I'd be hard pressed to imagine a court really contemplating an argument that a company has a monopoly in a very small slice of a market. It would be like saying that Rolex has a monopoly in luxury sport watches with headquarters in Geneva.
Of course in Apple's case this Masimo story is not the only monopolistic practice.
The correct analogy would be a watch market dominated by Casio and Swatch with no independent smaller brands.
Because every smaller brand that becomes somewhat successful is bought out by the Big Two. Or never gets that far because new IP somehow ends up being the sole property of the Big Two through various other means.
(Technically an oligopoly, but still maintained by monopolistic lock-ins and actions.)
I disagree with this framing where offering more money to employees is described with the same words used to describe stealing property
> smaller company
I mean, ok yea that’s technically true, but Masimo makes billions a year in revenue. They are not a smol bean company
It’s sort of like having your watch tell you whether you slept well or not. Didn’t you already know? If you think you slept well and your watch disagrees, are you going to trust its opinion over your own?
Also, I don't think most people are in a position where they feel like they have amazing sleep every night. Yeah, maybe those people have nothing to gain from gadgets kind of like a person at ideal weight doesn't gain anything from counting calories: but what about the rest of us?
My wrist device was critical in helping me realize how few hours I was sleeping despite being in bed with my eyes closed for 8 hours.
These apps can detect that you are moving around a lot and also detect that you are snoring (another sign of sleep apnea).
Even if you know that you snore without using a sleeping app, that doesn't really give you a picture of how bad it could be. I apparently stop breathing and sometimes start choking in my sleep.
Now that I have a diagnosis of sleep apnea sleep apps are still really helpful. If I'm still snoring, it means I probably need to adjust the pressure on my CPAP machine. If the app for my CPAP machine tells me that I'm having a lot of episodes over the course of the night, I might need to adjust the pressure or the fit of the mask.
sleep apps have probably literally saved lives.
1. The heart rate line graph during my sleep made me realize just how bad exercise within 6 hours of bed is. My resting heart rate is 43bpm, yet if I exercise, I'll try to sleep at 60bpm that slowly decreases to 45bpm over 4-6 hours. And it always coincides with worse sleep.
2. I realized how often my HR jumps during sleep. Turns out I have a deviated septum that got bad enough in my 30s to regularly block breathing. I thought I had sleep apnea that would require a CPAP but it turns out I just need nasal strips. No more problems.
3. If you see you have bad sleep, you can now ask the question "how do I improve my sleep?" If you don't know you have bad sleep because you think you're sleeping 8 hours, then you don't realize you have levers to pull.
If in their world view "best developer salary is not always the best thing" one could have better reasoning for supporting little guy Massimo getting crushed by Apple.
The employees made out better - good for them. That's a lot easier to do when you have a market cap 400 times higher than that of the company you made all these promises to, and then left holding the bag.
I thought I was pretty clear that I felt the outcome for the employees was positive and that Apple's actions were actively deceptive. It was clear in the trial that Apple had zero intention of collaboration, licensing, or patent sharing and just used that as a pretense to "get in the room" and see who showed up on Masimo's side so they knew who to target with competing offers.
One of the biggest pain points I have had with the 'smartphone revolution' post Android/iOS is that almost every wearable/pocketable is a watch. nobody's trying new formats that could be useful!
There are smart rings and smart glasses on the market. Some fitness trackers have a necklace mode or can be put on shoe laces.
Watches are most popular likely because they are probably the most widespread accessory people already use.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US10912502B2/
They were hired for their expertise. Do you want to start enforcing non competes in California?
Probably a net-negative.
So good for the employees, but I wouldn't be applauding Apple for their outright deceptions here.
Whether you like this or not, the practice of hiring employees specifically to work on the same thing elsewhere or to drain a company of its talent - is called poaching.
It’s often legal, but can be controversial especially when it’s a behemoth raiding smaller shops.
You seem to be offended by the word itself, but it’s just a useful descriptor to differentiate between different types of hiring scenarios.
I’ve been poached before, and it worked out great for me.
if your IP is just lines on a patent you dont really have much moat in the first place.
Tomorrow's innovations in consumer electronics won't get funding as investors balk at the risk of getting Massimo'd.
I mean, get that money, but don't expect that you can make a career out of being poached repeatedly. If you're really that good, you probably could have done better working for yourself.
What’s meaningful is that Apple was hiring them because of the work they did for Massimo and doing so en masse at a single point of time.
If they had just hired experts on blood monitoring to staff a team and some of them happened to be working for Massimo before, it would just be hiring as usual and not described as poaching.
“Employees are entirely accessory” is exactly the shit I’m arguing against here. The whole idea of “poaching” implies that the employees are property, to be guarded by their owners and stolen by others. How can the people who actually do the work and are the entire reason for this so-called “poaching” not be central to it?
Once again, poaching describes the comportment of a company towards another. It’s not a statement regarding the morality of accepting of rejecting the offer from the point of view of the employee. It doesn’t in any way implies that employees are the property of a company.
The issue is not about whether or not employees are central to work. That much is obvious. The issue is that building a talented team and putting in place the condition for it to properly work is a significant cost. That’s why it’s generally illegal for another company to just come and rehire everyone wholesale.
The issue is not even hiring talents from another company. The issue is that it’s targeted. They are not hired because they are extremely talented. They are hired because they work for Massimo and will bring trade secrets with them.
I’m sure the Apple of this world would like it being completely legal a lot. It would basically put a damper on any small companies trying to compete with them if they could just come and buy out the team of any potential threat to their hegemony.
Er, what? Can you elaborate on what makes this illegal?
If a company lift a whole team in a short span of time, it gets really hard to argue there is no misappropriation.
Didn't Apple settle an anti-poaching lawsuit?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
What makes you believe this? The definition of “poach” is not intrinsically linked to the notion of ownership/property.
The word has several definitions, one of which describes a method of preparing eggs (and others that clearly distinguish between things like illegally killing animals, hiring practices, etc).
It doesn’t make sense to me to take the definition that has nothing to do with employment and attach the weight/meaning of that unrelated definition to hiring practices.
Put another way, it would be silly to say “poaching is a horrible term to use for this because it implies that employees are eggs that can be cooked and eaten”. I find the consternation about hiring terminology here to be about the same.
My quibble isn’t really with the terminology. It’s with the idea that hiring another company’s employees is somehow bad. It’s perfectly fine. It’s good for employees. It’s only bad for employers who want to suppress wages. The fact that it’s called “poaching” is just a reflection of the idea that it’s bad.
This is not obvious to me at all, nor have I ever conflated the two in my mind. Hell, the literal dictionary disagrees with you.
But beyond this, language evolves. There are many examples of words used today that bear very little resemblance to their original roots.
The thing I find curious is that you recognize immediately that eggs are unrelated to hiring employees, but refuse to acknowledge that shooting animals is also entirely unrelated to hiring employees.
> My quibble isn’t really with the terminology.
That’s not what you said above: “I’m saying that “poaching” is a horrible term for that action”.
> It’s with the idea that hiring another company’s employees is somehow bad. It’s perfectly fine.
Sometimes it’s fine, sometimes it’s not. I’ve been poached. It worked out well for me.
But hopefully you can recognize that not all scenarios are equal.
> It’s only bad for employers who want to suppress wages.
When a massive conglomerate poaches entire teams to crush competition, those wages aren’t gonna be around very long. In some (not all) circumstances, it’s anti-competitive and when examined in the context of the whole, is not guaranteed to be good for employees in the long run.
> The fact that it’s called “poaching” is just a reflection of the idea that it’s bad.
Again, this is the weight you are attaching to the word. The word holds no such weight in my mind nor have I ever encountered a person in my 20+ year career prior to this thread who was upset by it. This is a you thing.
It should be pretty obvious. “Poaching” employees has negative connotations. It’s seen as something illicit. If you do a search for the term, just about every single result will be some page discussing whether or not it’s illegal, and the ethics around it. It is directly analogous to poaching animals and people clearly think there are potential ethical problems with it, to the extent that people think it might even be against the law.
This is missing the point. No business person is using the word “poach” in the context of hiring is conflating it with hunting animals. People describing the act of poaching employees are not somehow contributing to the idea that employees are property.
These are imaginary concerns being projected. Words only have the meaning we collectively assign them, and again, if you’re assigning some kind of “employees are animals to be hunted” association, that is something you are doing, not something that is broadly accepted.
Humorously, you’re doing more to attach harmful connotations in this thread than 20 years of interacting with thousands of people in the corporate world, and I can honestly say that this thread is the first time in my 40 years of living that I’ve encountered someone who seems to conflate these entirely unrelated things. If you are concerned about people making this conflation, one of the most effective ways of preventing that would be to stop spreading the idea that the two things are related - an idea that I guarantee has not occurred to many people until they found this discussion.
> people clearly think there are potential ethical problems with it, to the extent that people think it might even be against the law
Yes. Emphasis on the word potential. Poaching employees may be unethical, but to your point, is controversial because that’s not always true.
You still have not articulated why you believe it’s appropriate to act as if those present ethical concerns (or lack thereof) have anything to do with hunting animals or the definition of a word that does not apply to this context.
The English language is filled with words that have similarly evolved, and people use those words daily without causing harm. If you can demonstrate (with evidence) why you believe this word causes appreciable real world harm, I’m willing to consider it.
Thus far, your argument can be summed up as “I find it offensive”. And that is simply not compelling.
> Thus far, your argument can be summed up as “I find it offensive”. And that is simply not compelling.
Do not confuse your lack of understanding or agreement for a lack of substance. You don’t have to see things my way, but my argument is not even remotely accurately summarized that way.
Here is an actually accurate summary: there’s nothing wrong with hiring other companies’ employees, commonly referred to as “poaching.” It’s commonly frowned upon (see multiple examples in these comments) but it’s just free association, and the idea that it’s bad is ridiculous. All that idea does is help to suppress wages by reducing competition among employers. And this ridiculous notion that “poaching” employees is bad is reflected in the common term used to describe it.
You’re focusing on entirely the wrong thing here. The meaning of the word “poaching” is merely illustrative of the problem I have, it’s not the problem itself. The actual problem is the attitude that employees somehow belong to their employers such that it might be improper to entice them away.
I find it interesting that you used the language "other companies' employees". Isn't this even more problematic than referring to such a practice as poaching? You went from "the word poaching is bad because it implies X" to something that directly indicates ownership (possessive form). I'm not trying to
More to the point: no, hiring people who currently work for other companies is not commonly referred to as "poaching". This is a one-dimensional framing at best (most hiring is organic), and disingenuous at worst (I can't imagine you believe that sentence to be true). I think you probably agree from the context here that a specific kind of hiring is referred to as poaching.
We can agree or disagree about whether that specific kind of hiring is good or bad, but it exists, and generally has characteristics that are not like "normal" hiring. People call it "poaching" to distinguish it from other non-controversial scenarios. What you're arguing here implies we should pretend such controversy doesn't exist.
For sake of argument, you could call this "schmoogling" employees (or whatever you want) if you hate the word "poach", at which point it would still be just as controversial because the underlying behavior is still occurring regardless of the language used.
People would still disagree on whether such behavior is good or bad, and absolutely nothing was gained by not saying they were "poached".
I can accept that we disagree on the universal "goodness" of the hiring practice known as poaching. What makes zero sense to me is arguing that the terminology we use to describe such practices is somehow part of the problem. And if your goal is to change how people view hiring practices, getting people to use different words doesn't change their underlying views. Bottom line: the line of argument you're using doesn't move the conversation in the direction you want it to because it's disconnected from the underlying reality. Policing speech is not the way to change people's minds.
We'll have to agree to disagree and I'm done here (not much else to say). But I hope you have a good Saturday.
The terminology isn’t the problem, the terminology is a result of the problem, which is disturbingly widespread acceptance of some degree of conceptual ownership of employees. If we called it schmoogling I obviously couldn’t point out the unfortunate implication of the term but that wouldn’t materially change my point. You are FAR too focused on the specific word.
I know I was pointing out the implication of the term, but it’s more about the existence of any term for this.
To be clear, I'm very against any kind of implied "ownership" and believe employees should have autonomy/freedom to work where they want. My primary contention is with the idea that all types of hiring are equal. There are clear and obvious differences between different hiring scenarios whether we want them to exist or not. This isn't up for debate; it is the underlying reality playing out whether we acknowledge and label it or not (this is separate from whether such a thing should exist, i.e. I'm pointing out an is, not an ought).
> You are FAR too focused on the specific word.
To be fair (and you acknowledged this), you started the conversation about that word. The substance of my argument is that the word is not something we should be concerned about. Turning this back around on me being too focused on the word is...an interesting choice.
I do find it frustrating and puzzling that once I shared a strong argument for why the focus on terminology at the beginning of this thread was misplaced, you clarified that this isn't what you're actually talking about.
C'est la vie.
My dictionary gives this definition for "poaching":
1. to trespass for the purpose of stealing game
2. to appropriate (something) as one's own
You cannot "steal" or "appropriate" something which is not property or which cannot be owned. You are being very disingenuous to say that the word is not intrinsically linked to ownership or property.
Just one example, but current dictionaries cover the business use of the word (among many others), e.g. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/poach
> You are being very disingenuous to say that the word is not intrinsically linked to ownership or property.
Are you claiming that other definitions of “poach” do not exist? If you are, you are misinformed. If you are not, you are misunderstanding the word “intrinsic”.
Abuse of the patent system can be deeply problematic. This is not one of them. This is one of the richest company in the world stealing the work paid by another.
Employees aren't animals in the forest where the king has the sole right to hunt them for sport.
And when this is done for the sole purpose of acquiring a specific kind of talent - especially to build exactly the same thing - it’s called poaching.
The word “poach” is used in numerous ways and describes many things that have nothing to do with hunting for sport [0]. I think it’s a bit problematic to hold on to a singular definition here that clearly does not apply to the situation.
- [0] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/poach
But it was cheaper to Apple to just hire a few key people and screwing over everyone else.
Good or bad depends on how Massimo compare to Apple. Which one of the two offers the most growth potential. If Apple just keep the employees long enough to steal the tech before laying the off, not building on it, then it is terrible for all but Apple shareholders. If Apple "saved" these employees from an exploitative company, providing the with growth potential and further development then it is a good thing.