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Comment by brewdad | Hacker News Reader

Better hope that Apple pays you really well for your sevices. In six months they won't need you anymore and your former employer will have been sure to burn all the bridges you thought were left.

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.

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Honor among thieves is an expression from before there was a group that treated honor as a fiduciary crime. If you are not one of the smaller number of engineers needed once the product is developed your best value in the market is to a series of competitors establishing the same features.

Regardless of whether it’s a bad idea, it’s a free choice of the person accepting or rejecting the offer. Describing it as “poaching” denies their agency and portrays employees as property of their employer.

If employees have agency, why do they have so little collective control over employment trends?

Because “agency” means making choices and taking actions, not controlling things a million times bigger than yourself.

That’s not what poaching means. Poaching describes the comportement of one company towards another. Employees are entirely accessory to what is being described here.

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.

What’s wrong with that? Those employees took the offer of their own volition. There’s nothing wrong with offering someone a job because of their relevant experience.

“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?

You are arguing in the void I’m afraid.

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.

“That’s why it’s generally illegal for another company to just come and rehire everyone wholesale.”

Er, what? Can you elaborate on what makes this illegal?

The hiring in itself is technically okay but if you do it too much - which is what I implied by wholesale - it makes it hard to defend against allegations that you are not misappropriating trade secrets which is illegal. That’s part of the dispute between Apple and Masimo.

In other words, it’s not at all illegal for another company to come in and hire all of a company’s employees. It is illegal to steal trade secrets.

Aggressively hiring all of a company’s employees will get you condemned for stealing trade secrets so, in other worlds, it’s de facto illegal.

I don’t believe you.

You don’t have to believe me. You can do a quick search on the jurisprudence surrounding trade secrets and employee poaching. There are plenty of cases in high value industries - mostly banking and software.

If a company lift a whole team in a short span of time, it gets really hard to argue there is no misappropriation.

Are there any examples where mass “poaching” was the only evidence? I found plenty of examples where it was part of what happened, but they all have other evidence of theft of trade secrets or whatever else the lawbreaking behavior was.

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