It's really easy to avoid your employees being "poached": treat them well, and pay them better.
Should I be treating my employer “like family” and care about “the mission”?
But you are coming awfully close to advocating for non competes which is explicitly not allowed in CA.
And even if you do look at this like an acquisition, acquisitions are almost always not anticompetitive.
We like software patents now?
It seems like Masimo wasn’t bullied because they had less money. They decided to run to the government to protect them instead of doing actual competition
The company does $2B in revenue and spends close to $800 million annually in sales, general and admin. This is over 3x their R&D budget. (For reference, Apple's R&D spend is higher than its SG&A spend.)
Per levels.fyi, Masimo is paying senior SDEs in HCOL $150k. They could 10x the comp to these critical employees without it being more than a rounding error in their numbers. (I don't think they would have had to go to 10x. Most people would practically tattoo a brand on themselves for a one-time bonus of $1m.)
Long story short: Masimo does indeed have the money to compete on salary with Apple for this set of employees. They chose to spend the money on attorneys instead.
Some companies don't value engineers. That often works, until they end up in an engineering competition against companies that do value engineers.
Could Apple go higher? Sure, but again most people who like their jobs are not going to leave once their needs are met.
From a competitive standpoint: Masimo has lost $8B in market cap during this kerfuffle. It's entirely possible it would have been rational for Masimo to pay these employees higher than Apple possibly would go in order to not lose those billions in value.
My core point is is that Masimo has far more than enough money to pay strategic employees enough money to keep them. Again, I doubt they would have to go as high as $5m/year for each of the relevant engineers. Masimo could spend that without making a major dent in their finances.
Could Apple up the ante and make offers of $5B/yr to each engineer? Sure, but we are likely talking about the difference between Masimo offering $150k and Apple offering $500k. These are numbers any public company can afford.
[1]. https://www.masimo.com/products/monitors/masimo-w1-medical-w...
It was literally described in the page you referenced: "Arm your patients with continuous measurements in a comfortable, lifestyle-friendly wearable—helping you deliver a true telemonitoring experience."
> automates the collection of clinically accurate measurements to help support: -Post-surgical recovery -Chronic care -Patient management
I say "was" because it was possible to buy it as a consumer, but there's still no direct competition, as:
"Please note that all Masimo consumer products have been discontinued. These include:
MightySat® Masimo W1® Sport Watch Opioid Halo™ / Masimo SafetyNet Alert™ Radius T°® Continuous Thermometer Masimo Stork® Vitals, Masimo Stork Vitals+, and Masimo Stork Baby Monitor"
A better way to give employees a share of the profits is to give them shares of the company. But then that also comes at the expense of compensation in dollars. You cannot pay for groceries with company shares.
People really like the idea of "When you win, I get money, when you lose, you lose money". Explained like that they agree it's bad, but explained like "Companies should be distributing profits to workers" they fall over themselves about how good of an idea it is.
Running a business is a gamble and like gambling, you need to put skin in the game to get a share of winnings (and lose your skin in the losses). People are just hyper-focused on the winners.
If company X is making a profit and losing employees to a competitor paying more, then company X has effectively chosen to let that happen. They don’t get to complain that they ate their cake and don’t have it anymore.
It's not bad, it's a cost.
You obviously wouldn't make a deal like that in isolation. You also wouldn't give someone a salary for nothing. But a cost like that can be worth paying just like a salary is worth paying. (Obviously you'd have limits on the numbers, just like salary is limited.)
People think that profits should be distributed on top of salary. And frankly it already happens to a degree with bonuses. But there is this pervasive idea that any leftover profit is just money that should have gone to workers.
Distributing part of the profits would be a reasonable benefit.
There are hundreds of millions of profits here. Distributing even 10% of that to employees would be a tremendous amount of money. Even a lot less would have a big effect.
A 10% profit share makes plenty of sense. Yes, even while insulating employees from losses, it still makes sense. Owners need to be able to reap profit but they don't need to get all of it forever. Employees owning stock is not the only way profit sharing can work.
There is a market rate for talent, and if you can't afford the market rate, then you don't get the talent.
the sensible thing would be to license the tech
Not arguing Apple shouldn't poach, just that your suggestion doesn't work.
https://companiesmarketcap.com/masimo/earnings/
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MASI/masimo/net-in...