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Comment by erex78 | Hacker News Reader

Does this bother you? Aggressively targeting your competitor's employees? Imagine if Google went to your startup and offered everyone 100K signing bonus to leave. Would this be OK, within the bounds of acceptable competition?

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As an employee, I sincerely hope companies are doing this.

As an employee I say it depends. What if they just wait after the competitor dies or just loses the contracts and fire the employees afterwards?

Even if I know that the company making the offer has such plans I'm still in a nasty tragedy of the commons with my coworkers.

Google and Facebook were doing that to eachother for a while, until they reached a gentleman's agreement to stop poaching eachother's employees.

If memory serves HN was very angry, saying it was collusion to keep developer salaries below true market value.

So was the government. They sued these companies, apple also.

Slight correction: the government went after them for anti-solicitation agreements[1], and then they were sued for salary-fixing by former employees[2].

[1] http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2010/September/10-at-1076.html

[2] http://www.macworld.com.au/news/apple-and-google-face-salary...

That's almost exactly what recruiters do...

Yup. I recently got a Google recruiter who emailed me at my work email which is not publicly available anywhere.

As an employer we would be furious. As an employee we would be delighted.

Why wouldn't it be?

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