
Apple's auto ambitions sideswipe electric motorcycle startup - doener
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/10/19/apple-motorcycle-idUSL1N12F2JZ20151019
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Jacqued
I really don't get or condone the use of the term "poach" here. Company A has
great employees, can't pay them according to their value. Company B comes
along and does pay them that, they leave. How is this not the best possible
outcome ? Company A was not competitive and disappears, employees are better
paid, Company B gets some great employees. Or are engineers considered
property now ?

> Apple never tried to acquire Mission Motors, Kaufman said.

Well why would they ? There's no need to pay off the investors and executives
when you just want to hire some engineers, unless said executives did their
job well enough that said engineers don't want to leave.

When Musk was talking about engineers Apple was "poaching", it did not reflect
very well on him either in my opinion.

~~~
MatekCopatek
In this case I would agree with you, since this company and its product wasn't
competition for Apple. They simply hired some people and a company failed
because those people left.

But when done to a direct competitor, the intention isn't always just to get a
good employee and pay him what he deserves, it's also to weaken the other
company or to acquire important knowledge/knowhow. In that case, poaching
doesn't sound that bad.

~~~
awakeasleep
The word poaching means to illegally hunt game that is not one's own.

In medieval Europe, the king was the only person allowed to hunt in the king's
forest. The animals in that forest were the king's property.

By using the word "poach" you're saying the engineers are the property of the
company they work for, and someone else is unjustly taking that property.
Employees are not property. They are people with the right to move between
companies as they please.

Even if they were hired to hurt the original company, it wouldn't be taking
that company's property unjustly. You could call that a sabotage hire or a
betrayal, but call it a word that deals with people as free to make choices
using their own agency.

~~~
Consultant32452
Depending on how it's done it could be viewed as anti-competitive. To give an
exaggerated example, imagine if Apple, using its big pile of phone money, came
into your company and offered 10x market rate for every company willing to
leave that day with a guarantee of 3 years of employment at that rate. In my
opinion that should trigger anti-competitive laws. And if that's true, then
we're just talking about to what degree this type of behavior is allowed
before it crosses the line. It doesn't sound like any lines were crossed to me
in this case, I just thought it was an interesting thought experiment.

~~~
ctime
Big fan of capitalism, that is exactly within the boundaries of why the system
works, because in practice this should not happen (shareholders would not
approve), yet if it did, the winners are the engineers either way.

~~~
Consultant32452
I don't understand how having safeguards against anti-competitive behavior is
in any way anti-capitalist. To say the engineers are the winners is very short
sighted. The best scenario for all engineers on the market is to have multiple
competitors competing for the best engineers with good salaries. It's not to
have one of the vendors take a temporary loss in profitability in order to put
everyone else out of business.

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drglitch
> Some close to Mission Motors said it had reached a point of no return by
> last fall, when departures to Apple, and other companies, accelerated after
> a long struggle to find funding and a sound business model.

So is Apple really to blame here, or is this yet another case of 'who needs
revenue strategy anyway?' On the part of Mission? You can't blame the
engineers moving to a much higher paying - and likely just as exciting - job
at a large company which has less risk.

~~~
Shivetya
probably just the last few nails in the coffin. They made a good product but
the motorcycle industry is not that large and new players have a tough time
getting their name out.

Figure the engineers leaving near the end merely saw the writing on the wall.

~~~
patrickyeon
I went and chatted with some people at Mission Motors ~18 months ago. They had
recently split off Mission Motorcycles to do the motorcycle thing
independently. Mission Motors seemed mostly focussed on electrifying
construction and farm equipment by then.

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dmritard96
Its a bit tangential, but I would love to know what the core skill sets of
some of these engineers were and why they were so valuable. I understand
battery chemistry and all of the subtleties associated with them warranting
poaching/hiring away/etc., but fundamentally electric vehicles are pretty
simple. I am sure there is a bit of 'I don't know what I don't know but at the
same time, I have built an electric go cart, and solar powered car in middle
school and high school respectively. And that was spec'ing parts, selecting
system voltages, wiring design, battery configuration, mechanical selection,
chassis design, and physical construction. I would imagine one could hire good
engineers from SAE challenges out of the universities quite easily and its
just hard to understand where the killer skill set is. Perhaps it is
understanding the supplier ecosystem, institutional knowledge to testing and
regulatory rigour? Maybe its industrial design talent? Or maybe that within a
1 hour radius of Apple is a limitted supply of non-strictly-software
engineers? I would love a bit more insight than the article provided and I am
sure someone on HN has a bit of an inside perspective?

~~~
pjc50
Just like in software, it's much easier to hire someone already doing the
exact same job than it is to evaluate candidates by other means.

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runholm
> ... after a long struggle to find funding and a sound business model.

So the company was already doing poorly and engineers switched to a better
paid job in a stable company. Hardly Apples fault that Mission Motors was a
shitty place for an engineer to stay.

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Gigablah
Can you elaborate on how Mission Motors was a "shitty place"?

~~~
richardwhiuk
Apple were able to pay them more? Mission Motors hadn't made any money? Why do
you think they choose to leave?

~~~
Gigablah
Those are valid reasons to leave, but they do not equate "shitty place".

