
Stop calling it poaching - mikeyanderson
https://medium.com/@mikeyanderson/stop-calling-it-poaching-especially-for-devs-7c4223ed431f
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lacker
I hate these "submarine ads" where an author starts off talking about some
problem in the world, you think it's just some interesting reading, and then
surprise! - they are actually trying to sell you a product.

~~~
legohead
How much karma do you need to downvote threads?

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vonmoltke
You can't downvote submissions.

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thedevil
It's strange that there's substantial value to "ownership" of developers, such
that you buy and sell them like herds of cattle ("acquihires") and hiring them
without consent from their current employer is "poaching".

I suspect this means that as a group we're not negotiating hard enough on
salaries.

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gooseus
Yeah, I've definitely felt like cattle at times... especially when I realize
that my development team (and what we've built) is a big part of what adds
value to a potential acquisition, yet no one on the current development team
was here early enough to get any kind of substantial equity/options.

So it really does seem like there is this expectation that we're supposed to
be as happy as the investors/executives with any eventual sale, even though we
will profit minimally (if at all) and have no choice in who our eventual
overlords will be.

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greggman
I know no one likes to hear this but rewards are generally about risk.
Someone, investors, risked their money. If their investment failed they'd be
out $$$$$$$. Employees rarely risk anything. They get paid $$$$$$ a year. If
the company fails they made $$$$ a month for the time they were employed.

Now of course the response will be the employee took a risk by joining risky
company A instead of stable company B or by risking a lower salary for
potentially higher rewards but those risks are far far lower than the
investors risks and hence get far far lower rewards.

If you want the bigger return you have to take the bigger risk (in general)

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st3v3r
"I know no one likes to hear this but rewards are generally about risk"

No, they're not. They're about value. If you're the one actually doing the
work to make the company money, why shouldn't you be getting the bulk of the
reward?

The idea that people should be rewarded more just for simply having money is
stupid.

~~~
arca_vorago
This. It infuriates me when people casually dismiss workers claims of value by
saying they didnt put any money in, so they deserve little.

To me, my time is more valuable than you will ever be able to pay me for, but
Im willing to take what I consider a huge paycut to work on something I enjoy
and believe I can bring value to.

To give a good example of this disparity in value eatimates, I have in the
past done a lot of consulting work for law firms. In the process, I made
friends with quite a few paralegals and secretaries. At least two I know
locally are bringing in over 1mil a year by their own work product, mostly
seperate from their bosses. neither of them have gotten a bonus or raise for
it. Why? Because all the partners thing they have most of the risk (somewhat
true) and therefor they should get it all. In reality though, while the risk
itself is largely the partners, the value is not, and by failing to properly
reward value contributions, they create a really fucked up employment
atmosphere where people arent nearly as motivated to do all that work for so
little reward. So for all the ones I know who do produce a lot of value and
fail to get compensated, I know more who could bring that level but chose not
to because they simply have no incentive.

As a side note, I also recently found out that the office managers of various
firms will call around and discuss salaries so that they can all keep position
x at roughly the same pay in the entire city, so that people dont jump ship to
other firms. When I said it seemed illegal, the secretaries said yeah, but
what are you going to do, sue all the people in town who do it when they are
the ones who are "upstanding members of the community, know all the judges,
and have all the money?".

This disparity of power is the problem, and I see it constantly.

What annoys me the most is all the people who tell people to just be happy
they even have a job, as if the oppressed should be happy and thankful for
their wage slavery.

Class warfare is real, ongoing, and the rich are winning.

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pqhwan
This article feels disjointed and forced; how is a group of people who feel
"underutilized and mistreated" leaving their current place of work to build a
new company considered "poaching"? Who is the one poaching in this scenario?
Not only that, towards the end, the article turns into blunt advertisement for
a service that does exactly that: poaching, but in teams. I suspect that this
is a crude attempt at "hacking" for views at medium; start with empathetic
call-out on some term or expression that nobody _actually_ has any problem
with, and lightly transition to whatever the hell you want to talk about.

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npongratz
While we're at it, let's please stop referring to people as mere _resources_.
We are fellow human beings, people with feelings and needs and desires.
Degrading people as "resources" goes hand-in-hand with referring to them as
being "poached".

I hear this from managers and project coordinator types, not from fellow
hackers, so I'm probably preaching to the choir. It might help to prudently
point out dehumanizing language when we hear it.

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notalaser
I noticed this, too. Referring to people as "people", not "resources", is my
favourite way of trolling managers during meetings.

I don't do it just because calling people "resources" is dehumanizing, I also
do it because I think this attempt of reducing complexity is naive. You can
treat people the way you treat other items on a timesheet, sure, and you might
even get a great deal of satisfaction from it, because you're so cold-hearted
and professional that a drop of blood just harvested from your aorta could
turn the global warming problem into a neverending winter problem if it's
dropped over the North Atlantic. That doesn't make it a smart thing to do
though. People aren't resources in the classical sense. They aren't
predictable and "budgeting reserve time" is not the correct approach to deal
with that. Encouraging and nurturing the kind of behaviour that a project
depends on is a far better approach.

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mchahn
I liked the good 'ole 1970's in Silicon Valley. The saying was that if you
didn't like your job then just turn into a different parking lot on your
commute and get a new one for more money. It was pretty much true.

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pervycreeper
A sense provided by Google for "poaching": >take or acquire in an unfair or
clandestine way

Which fits this use perfectly. Mindless thought policing of this type seldom
produces any good; please employ with great caution.

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aidenn0
Firstly: Are you saying that it is unfair or clandestine to offer someone a
job?

Secondly: Connotation matters. Poaching is clearly a pejorative term.

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pervycreeper
Clandestine, very often, certainly. Admittedly this use principally reflects
the employers' perspective, and maybe a better (more accurate, more neutral)
term could be used, but this is a separate issue from any association with
hunting.

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tedmiston
I agree with the position, even if the post feels sponsored content-y, perhap
piggybacking on what is becoming a common argument for engineers.

The idea of Elevator itself is interesting though: getting hired in groups
with friends that you already work well together with. As the author points
out, this is a common way to meet cofounders and start a company. I wonder if
it'll work by putting that same group in an established company.

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palakchokshi
It is kind of like an acqui-hire where the buyer is paying for the team and
maybe some tech. However I can see many challenges implementing this for a
team of more experienced candidates. Not everyone on a team has the same
motivations for a job. e.g. I might work at a certain place because I like the
work, I like the people I work with, I like the salary/perks I have and it is
5 miles from where I live. Another person on the team might be more motivated
by a high salary and might want to be paired with a different company, yet
another might be motivated by challenging work, etc. How do you align the
motivations of multiple individuals that work on a team so that everyone will
want to be swept up by another company? This becomes even more problematic
with mixed age teams, > 3 person teams, mixed experience teams that work great
together at Company X working on Problems Y/Z but might not be that great
working on Problems A/B/C

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mikeyanderson
The beautiful thing is that a team is non-discrete. If you have a set of 20
people you've worked with in the past that you'd love to work with again we
can find the permutations that make the most sense for a given opportunity and
let the team see that.

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VT_Drew
Ugh....this article totally misrepresents hunting. Cecil was NOT poached. The
hunter paid $50,000 for a LEGAL HUNTING TAG. This is the exact opposite of
poaching. Poaching happens when you don't have a tag and hunt anyway. Hunting,
especially in poorer countries, actually helps protect the species. The
government body issuing tags wants to continue to issue tags in future as it
is a revenue stream. The last thing they they want is to bring the population
of a species below sustainable levels. The revenue from the tags employ park
rangers and people that stop poachers. When you don't have park rangers or
anyone to enforce legal hunting that is when poaching becomes a big problem
and animals are hunted to extinction.

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GFK_of_xmaspast
I don't see how the labor market and the investment market are comparable (for
example, bonds are auctioned off all the time, but if you try to auction off
labor you'll find out that's been mostly illegal since 1865).

I also don't see how higher liquidity would at all be beneficial to capital,
either as a class or as individual actors

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erroneousfunk
Exactly. "Promoting liquidity in the labor market" sounds like a great thing,
until you realize that, with increased "liquidity" comes a tremendous amount
of increased non-productive costs and inefficiencies.

When recruiters get 30% of an employee's yearly salary as a finder's fee,
higher liquidity tends to decrease the pool of money available to employees
(while increasing recruiter commissions) which results in all sorts of things
that aren't good for the employees, in the end. High turnover also allocates
more resources for training and other startup costs, rather than focusing on
production.

While, yes, changing jobs for you personally might be good in some situations,
promoting "labor liquidity" is a bad thing as a whole, for both employers and
employees, in a sort of "tragedy of the commons" way.

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st3v3r
"When recruiters get 30% of an employee's yearly salary as a finder's fee,
higher liquidity tends to decrease the pool of money available to employees"

Be honest, it's not like that money would have gone to the employees anyway.

"While, yes, changing jobs for you personally might be good in some
situations, promoting "labor liquidity" is a bad thing as a whole, for both
employers and employees, in a sort of "tragedy of the commons" way."

No it's not. Promoting that liquidity also means that, when one is mistreated
at a job, they can easily find another.

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mchahn
My wife was the head of recruitment at a high-tech company in SV. I started a
new company and she quit and stole about a dozen or so of the best from her
old company.

Is that poaching? She wasn't allowed near the old company again.

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harryh
It was almost certainly a violation of her employment contract and she could
possibly be subject to liability.

Though the actual changes of the tech company in question suing are likely
fairly small.

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mchahn
This was 40 years ago. Paper hadn't been invented yet to write contracts on.

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harryh
Hah! You made it sound like it was a more recent thing.

What did high tech mean back then? Banging some rocks together to make fire?

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B_Howe
Poaching or not its still very heartless to take away the life of an innocent
animal

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SteveNuts
Was Cecil the lion actually poached?

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mikeyanderson
The guy walked away without being charged, but both of the guides were
arrested for poaching.

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cynical_sheet
You are an animal >... mammal >... species- homo sapiens sapiens-

Why do you think that being a member of a particular species somehow excludes
you from a set of objects that can be poached, mainly animals? If lions are
poached, then humans can be poached as well. Why would a bio-chemical process
known as homo sapiens be more important(or sacred, if you want) than a bio-
chemical process known as a lion and be excluded from something that can be
applied to all animals?

