Comment by parasubvert | Hacker News Reader

Comment by parasubvert | Hacker News Reader

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I don't find this email exchange appalling at all. What's appalling is the naive idealistic reaction here, that reeks of blindness to how business is practiced at scale.

I've been involved in this sort of anti-poaching discussion at senior levels before. It happens all the time, in many industries - particularly in jurisdictions non-competes are enforceable. When an executive leaves one place and goes to another (say a CIO or VP), they bring people with them. Often in violation of non-solicitation and non-compete agreements, which are a pain in the ass for everyone to enforce. So you do what you can to Stop. The. Practice.

In the case of California, Jobs didnt have a direct legal avenue to stop this so he wanted to use other threats to stop a competitor. That seems normal. If it was not legal, then his lawyers did him no favors. Immoral? Not at all. It's business.

The reaction here reminds me of Slashdot circa 98, clucking over leaked Microsoft memos. The hacker/open source idealism here seems way stronger than that of entrepreneurs or business people. Makes sense I guess.

Perhaps people love early stage companies here because they can ignore the dirtier parts of business after you have a product/market fit... like, competition.

Competition is dirty and messy. It's not a kid gloves "lets out innovate each other!" like you're toddlers in a sandbox not allowed to hit each other. It's about marketing negatively (see Samsung's anti Apple ads), aggressive sales and pricing (see the Nexus 7 sold at cost), stopping poaching (Apple above), and removing supply lines by buying them up (Apple with displays and flash memory).

Sure, business isn't JUST those things. It also is innovation. Preferably lots of it. But people here are a rather naive if they think most companies aren't spending over 50% of their time on the former. Apple is actually unique for their size in how much time it spends innovating rather than, to paraphrase Ray Kroc, "sticking a live hose in your competitor's mouth".

When two giants agree not to hire each other's employees in a particular industry (mobile) and a particular location (Silicon Valley), they do serious damage to those employees' wages and career paths. They've also violated antitrust law. See this example from Google and Apple, for example, which shows communication less outrageous than Jobs' email to Palm. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18563_162-57367924/google-apple-...

Exactly - see my comment below on this. Indeed, the more technically advanced / niche / specific the industry, the more disastrous these sorts of handshake no-poach agreements have on the salary and employment prospects of those that work in the industry.

I don't disagree with your point. I view this as a conflict of interest between managers and labour.

In this particular case we are talking less about general poaching and more about the poaching activities of an individual (Rubie) soliciting others out of personal relationships. I can see why many jurisdictions actually enforce anti-soliciting agreements, because this practice is very damaging.

On the other hand, broad based poaching collusion hurts labour, who should be protected by Uncle Sam.

The point is that, such a conflict is natural, and I'm observing that the HN crowd in these threads seems to be surprisingly supportive of government intervention. Maybe the libertarians are avoiding Apple threads.

I prefer to think of myself as a pragmatist. In certain situations, the business environment should be trusted to pursue their self-motivated interests because they are also the interests of consumers and the citizenry. In these cases, the government should not meddle.

However, in other situations, the business self-motivated interests are contradictory to those interests of their customers, employees, and their citizen neighbors. In these cases, the government needs to make sure that these businesses don't run amok and totally ruin the environment, the economy, and the market as a whole.

Those who take one extreme (no government intervention in either scenario -- what you call Libertarians) are no more virtuous that take the other extreme (the government must be involved in all forms of business activity). I hope we see more pragmatists and less dogma(tists) on HN. From what I can see -- these HN conversations do look balanced on the whole.

> However, in other situations, the business self-motivated interests are contradictory to those interests of their customers, employees, and their citizen neighbors. In these cases, the government needs to make sure that these businesses don't run amok and totally ruin the environment, the economy, and the market as a whole.

I dont think that's how many on HN view it and also to the point:

The bargaining chips Jobs is using to promote these anti-competitive practices only exist because of government intervention. If the government is going to provide companies with an effective monopoly (patents), under the argument that it (allegedly) promotes innovation, then they should be held accountable for balancing those forces when they are abused (in this case, abusing workers). I dont think that's contradictory in a "Pro when it helps me, anti when it hurts me way". Take out the Patents, and the problem (arguably) goes away entirely.

Anti trust, unenforceable anti-compete and anti-solicitation agreements also only exist because of government intervention.

I agree with your take, overall, thank you. Much more eloquently stated than my OP, but I had not seen the pro-owner view stated so I went a bit strong in my advocacy for that POV.

Though I'm not sure I agree that HNers are particularly consistent on when they want government intervention. It seems driven from self-interest (intervene when it helps me, go away when it helps me).

Labour doesn't need protecting by Uncle Sam if there are no laws preventing cross soliciting and fair market value for their services.

And speaking of government intervention, are patents not a form of that? In particular, a form of government intervention being used here to try to prevent competition for employees?

Would the libertarian position not be to abolish both patents and also enforcement of any kind of non-solicit provisions, thus promoting a completely free market for workers and companies?

I'm not a libertarian, but I would think that anti-solicitation and non-competes are contractual matters. If you contractually agree to them, that's not coersion.

In practice, every jurisdiction is different in terms of enforcing non-competes. It's all about government intervention to prevent collusion among business owners.

What "stopping poaching" really means is that you don't want to pay your valuable employees what they're really worth. If a competitor needs your employees and offers them more than you're paying them, you have one legal option: make a more appealing counteroffer. Of course this costs money, and the Apple chose the illegal option of colluding with a competitor rather than the more costly (but legal and appropriate) option of making the counter-offer. What 'stopping poaching' really means is robbing your employees of the fair value for their labor.

Except this wasn't about illegal collusion to stop all cross-company hiring. It was (at worst) a potential antitrust issue related to anti-solicitation.

What you're describing is a conflict of interest that exists at the heart of capitalism. Owners want to pay less, employees want to make more. I don't disagree with labour fighting for their interests. But I don't think this was particularly appalling or immoral from the owner's POV.

I really can't grasp how there's any nuance here. It's really straightforward.

"What you're describing is a conflict of interest that exists at the heart of capitalism. Owners want to pay less, employees want to make more."

Sure, and if workers conspired to illegally appropriate the profits from the company for themselves they'd go to prison. Plain and simple, rightfully so. Somehow if the company conspires to steal higher-paying job offers from their employees that's not particularly appalling or immoral to you? It's one step away from taking the money straight out of their wallets.

I see quite a bit of nuance here.

This was about about limiting active solicitation based on insider knowledge of who works there and your past relationships. This is a COMPLETELY LEGAL contract clause in most jurisdictions in the USA and Canada, just not enforceable in California.

So, instead, these companies had gentlemen's agreements, which I've seen in almost every industry everywhere across four countries. Note it wasn't just Apple and Palm - Adobe, Google, eBay, Intel, Intuit all were in on mutual verbal executive-level non-solicitation agreements.

Does that STEAL higher-paying job offers? Not at all. Employees were still free to apply to any publicly posted job offer at any company. This was about dissuading recruiters (and former executives!) from calling former colleagues to recruit them.

And no, none of this is appalling, immoral, in my opinion. It is debatably illegal under antitrust law, as the DOJ complaints in the past have stated. But antitrust law is rather controversial, (by far) not universally supported and is often enforced on purely political grounds. You'll recall Microsoft's (non) punishment after the last Republican administration was elected, for example.

Of course, the former employees trying to seek class action status have every right to argue that they lost wages as a result of these practices, which might hold water... mainly because it's California.

I don't understand this jaded perspective. If we accept "business reality" as a default baseline, the measure of acceptable standard just gets shifted that much further. It's important to denounce this behavior, if for no other reason than we as a community need to make our ethical compass clear.

>When an executive leaves one place and goes to another (say a CIO or VP), they bring people with them.

Well, see, you treat people like property that can be "brought with them" rather than have their own mind, and you endorse collusion to restrict people's ability to move around. You should not be appalled that people object to being treated like that. We don't like sociopaths very much.

Uh, what? Jon Rubenstein was poaching people from Apple to Palm. He is a sociopath for doing so?

People follow individual leaders from company to company a lot. Sometimes the source company wants to stop that, and can in some jurisdictions.

Could be wrong but I think you've got his argument backwards; I think he's saying that by allowing a company (by law or coercion) to prevent an executive from 'poaching' employees, you're treating those employees like property, rather than rational beings.

I think he's arguing that people should be completely free of coercion to choose where they work.

Seemed to me he was claiming both the poacher and preventer of poaching are treating people as property. But I can see my mistake.

In any case , I don't see either action as sociopathic. It's normal for people with power to want to use it.

The sociopath is one willing restrict to someone else's choice for his own gain, or one who is willing to condone such behavior. Yes, that's what many businessmen or people in power do. No, it does not mean we have to like them or let them be. Mosquitos bite people too, and it doesn't mean we should like them or avoid making it harder for them to act on their predatory instincts.

Condoning coercion is not what a sociopath is, nor is it necessarily indicative of sociopathic behaviour, by any psychological standard.

Coercion is a pretty normal human activity, throughout history. You can't get rid of it (not even the utopian libertarian society would). The coerced usually don't like it, but that's to be expected.

Mainly the question is how a society limits the power to coerce. In this case, I'm not against Uncle Sam stepping in to prevent collusion. I just don't see it as immoral. A conflict of interest, yes. But I see this specific incident more about anti-solicitation, which is a legal and enforceable contract clause in much of the USA. In California, you have to try harder. Hardly sociopathic.

Exactly right, cloverich.

It seems rather fallacious to suggest that anything legal is moral when it comes to business.

Something illegal isn't necessarily immoral either (see Pot legislation).

Morality is a mix of individual belief, faith, and community norms. My point is that what people find immoral here is pretty specious and of a rather isolated community.

You will just have to accept that a great many people will not respect the dirty side business, and rightly so. I understand that you've done what you have to do, and that's fine, I'd do the same in your shoes.

But there is nothing about petty human infighting that deserves praise. It's a huge (and unavoidable) waste of time. In an ideal world, employee poaching would be prevented by providing a better working environment and compensation. We don't live in an ideal world, sadly.

I do accept a great many dont respect the dirty side of business. I just find it fascinating they do so on a board that is in part dedicated to entrepreneurship and building scalable businesses that will almost certainly conduct such practices once they have scaled.

Morality is a science, tasked with answering the question: what ought I do in order to live the longest, best life I can live, given the facts of reality?

Appalling is that you would equate negative marketing with threatening a patent lawsuit extortion to force a probably illegal agreement to fix wages.

This had nothing to do with wage fixing.

A patent lawsuit is just a tool they had available. Patents as they stand have defects for the broader economy but I don't believe they are immoral. Though some do, highlighting another grey line between legality (encouraged by the government too!) and morality.

You're right on the one hand that an agreement not to poach each other's employees is not wage fixing per se. But I think you miss the implication -- if none of my employees are enabled to work at another major employer in the same industry, you can in effect compel them to stay employed with you, and thus not have to compete against other employers for increased salary.

Think of it this way -- if you were a high level management that had specific and highly valuable expertise in the Mobile industry, but you were unable to seek employment at any competing mobile employer, you would not have any leverage to negotiate your salary. Hence while this is primarily a non-solicit / non-poach in specifics, it has an effect of depressing wage competition.

On to the note on patents, I think if US Government policy makers were aware of the fact that patents are NOT being used to guarantee innovation and competiton, and instead are being used as blunt instruments to PREVENT innovation by depressing the movement of expertise from one firm to the other, and are being used as huge bags of IP with which to threaten litigation... for reasons totally unrelated to the IP on which they are based... then the whole structure of patents are called into question.

Think of it this way: if Palm was truly infringing on Apple patents and causing true impediments to their business (the real reason for patents, no?), then Apple would sue them. But if instead they're being used as negotiation pawns to leverage decisions that have nothing to do with the IP. This would imply that the patents are really only useful as extortion-type negotiation leverage and not as intellectual property.

Basically, the IP behind the patent is only useful in that if you have enough of it, you can threaten another firm to do what you want them to regardless of whether the IP is truly useful to the firm in the first place.

I guess it depends if you view this as a general case of anti trust non-poaching or a specific case one of Jobs' inner circle soliciting his former colleagues. In California it's allowed, but not everywhere. Jobs was trying to use what he had available to dissuade the practice.

Might be anti trust, might not. I don't think it was immoral or appalling to try, assuming Apple's lawyers weighed the risk.

Maybe you didn't mean it that way, but defining an action as immoral based on a risk evaluation from lawyers seems to miss the point of the word entirely.

You're right. I originally had "nor a bad business decision" before that last bit, but somehow that didn't come across.

Risk evaluation has nothing to do with morality (Exhibit A, GM and cost/benefit analysis on seatbelts).

the that's how "business is practiced" argument and "competition is dirty and messy" doesn't mean that's the way it has to be or that its the best way.

What's appalling is the fact that people in power are attempting to take power away from individual contributors who need these types of checks and balances; that is to be able to leave one company and join another for better working conditions/wage/purpose if the market is to work effectively.

As Commodore's Jack Tramiel once said, "Business is war."

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