Comment by EGreg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by EGreg | Hacker News Reader

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Recruiting involves many things and what is considered moral is relative. An HR dept will pay recruiters to advertise in APPROPRIATE places and screen candidates, do background checks, set up a pipeline etc.

If the recruiter is instructed not to advertise the company's openings in strip clubs or porn sites, that isn't illegal or immoral. This is how I view instructing the recruiters not to advertise on their competitor's website or target other company's employees. Perhaps they think the cost of bad reputation or reprisals from those companies was too high. It doesn't have to be a "conspiracy". As I posted, an arxiv article shows that cartels are a natural emergent phenomenon of markets.

As far as marriage - there was a time when people worked decades for a company and earned a pension. These days esp in the tech industry those days are long gone. Poaching is an additional cost of hiring employees. You want to increase this cost - fine, and it will be passed on to the employees and depress their salaries. Your argument that the correlation is the other way is sofar without basis. I am not arguing that it is not illegal - the courts should decide that. I am saying this enforcement goes contrary to the purpse of the law and no one wins.

So you're saying other companies offering tech workers high salaries will lower their salaries? I think you're missing the point.

Yes if we're still talking about poaching, it creates downward pressure on the salaries of everyone else.

There are certain costs associated with hiring someone. Such as:

1) Recruiting 2) Interviewing 3) Onboarding and introducing to team 4) Provisioning equipment, office, etc. 5) Ramping up and getting integrated

Now, if these costs are paid per employee, then the longer this employee works with us, the more valuable they become and the more money they can make.

BUT

Those employees that get poached, or "fail upwards" into other companies, or whatever, actually make that position cost more. Way more. And I am not just talking about the fact that they might leave mid-project or have a moral hazard of screwing up a project knowing they'll have their next job to fail upwards into. But something even more basic.

For example if I have to pay the cost of 1-5 once every 3 years, that's 3 times less than if I have to pay it every year. So will I bear the full cost of 1-5 every time or pass it on to the employees I hire into that position? Of course I would pass it on, and moreover I can justify it by saying that they don't have "seniority within the organization" or that we are a meritocracy.

So you are completely neglecting this side of the phenomena, and blindly claiming that salaries will go up because poaching increases. It's not at all obvious that they would!

You're neglecting the fact that not every "poaching" attempt is successful and the fact that companies like Google have an incentive to keep salaries high in order to prevent poaching.

I didn't neglect that. How do these facts rule out that successful poaching imposes an additional cost per employee on companies? Paying employees a larger salary doesn't prevent poaching if your opponent can do the same. People are more likely to fail upwards and projects are more likely to cost more and be finished later because of successful poaching. Who bears this cost and how?

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