Giving a pass to trillion dollars companies for them to just come next to something they are interested in, poach employees, steal IP and not give a dim to actual innovators sure will be a great incentive towards companies doing more R&D.
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”.
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.
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
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.