Hacker News Reader

Comment by jcampbell1 | Hacker News Reader

I think you are being the PC police. There is a difference.

1) Google employee applies to Facebook on their own.

2) Facebook employee tells a Facebook recruiter, who the best Google engineers are based on his experience at Google.

3) Facebook hires a popular and charismatic Google manager, and their first assignment is to bring over the best engineers in the group.

What terms do you use to describe these situations? I am happy to adopt a more PC term, but there is a difference between being "hired" and being "poached". When you are hired, you do a shit load of interviews, when you are poached, you get a bunch more money and don't have to do a bunch of interviews.

View on HN

Free market competition.

The distinction you're trying to make is not real, as these no-poaching aggrements are many times also about rejecting candidates that apply out of their own will. Sometimes this involves notifying their employer too.

Salaries in other industries have been dropping due to market forces - supply bigger than demand, etc... but the free market cuts both ways, as can be seen in the software industry and no-poaching aggreements should be illegal.

"Poaching" is offensive because it suggests that the employees are chattel and powerless to resist another company's offer.

The irony is that while "poaching" traditionally referred to illegal activities, the opposite is true in the business world: preventing the "poaching" of employees is illegal.

>What terms do you use to describe these situations?

Recruiting fits very well.

No. "Recruiting" doesn't create any differentiation at all between the two modes: 1. Typical hiring processes and 2. Collusion among tech giants.

For 2) and 3), I think "headhunt" is more flattering term.

I agree, headhunt is nicer. I find both equally flattering. Being targeted for you brain, or being targeted as a special rhino are both nice terms.

In this specific context, no-headhunting would be ambiguous.

Why wouldn't you call it recruiting?

It is recruiting, but it isn't just recruiting because it's explicitly targeting employees of another company, often a competitor.

That is too generic. That would mean no-hire, no-poach.

I agree and disagree. I agree that there's something out of kilter here: Items 2 and 3 are possible breaches of the employee's non disclosure agreement with Google. And "poaching" is the widely used term for this kind of activity.

On the other hand I see nothing fundamentally wrong with getting a job and a salary bump without an interview, based on a personal recommendation, if it's information that can be freely disclosed. I got my first job out of school with only a cursory interview.

It's all called "competing for talent". So instead of "poaching" you can say "loosing/challenging in/to the competition for talent".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com