Apple was in a patent dispute over this feature with Massimo. Their workaround is to calculate blood oxygen on the iPhone, using the sensors from Apple Watch.
The Apple Watch hardware is otherwise the same. The back of the watch shines light of a specific wavelength into your skin and measures the reflected light. Heart rate sensing uses green (525 nm) and infrared (850–940 nm) light; blood oxygen sensing added a red light at 660 nm in 2020.
The iPhone will now calculate the ratio of absorbed red to infrared light, then apply calibration constants from experimental data to estimate blood oxygen saturation.
25 employees including the CTO, and then bought a building nearby to Masimo's office for them to work in. At least according to the CEO of Masimo in public statements. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RR1o8EoW-Eg
If Masimo wanted to, they'd have offered them the same or more to keep them, but they didn't. I don't believe an employer has any right to expect other companies not to offer positions to their employees. Employees should not be kept in the dark on opportunities for better pay and conditions because you can't or don't want to fight that offer.
Absolutely. But if the new company pays them to just recreate the IP the developed in the previous company - now much faster because they‘ve done it before - that‘s an issue. And patents protect against that.
That said, a patent whose primary claim seems to be (based on the workaround) _where_ the processing takes place (ant not _how_) seems like exactly the kinda thing that shouldn‘t be patentable.
Giving a pass to trillion dollars companies for them to just come next to something they are interested in, poach employees, steal IP and not give a dim to actual innovators sure will be a great incentive towards companies doing more R&D.
Employees are not game. They cannot be “poached.” That phrasing implies that they are property of the company that employs them. What you call “poaching” is just giving an offer to a person, and that person accepting the offer of their own free will. The idea that this is bad is absurd, and only serves to hurt regular people in favor of companies.
I’m not saying that the act of hiring people away from another company doesn’t happen. I’m saying that “poaching” is a horrible term for that action, because it implies that employees are property than can be stolen, rather than free persons who can be enticed to change employment.
> because it implies that employees are property than can be stolen
What makes you believe this? The definition of “poach” is not intrinsically linked to the notion of ownership/property.
The word has several definitions, one of which describes a method of preparing eggs (and others that clearly distinguish between things like illegally killing animals, hiring practices, etc).
It doesn’t make sense to me to take the definition that has nothing to do with employment and attach the weight/meaning of that unrelated definition to hiring practices.
Put another way, it would be silly to say “poaching is a horrible term to use for this because it implies that employees are eggs that can be cooked and eaten”. I find the consternation about hiring terminology here to be about the same.
It would be silly to say it implies that employees are eggs because “poach” as in eggs and “poach” as in employees clearly don’t mean the same thing. But “poach” as in employees is clearly derived from “poach” as in game.
My quibble isn’t really with the terminology. It’s with the idea that hiring another company’s employees is somehow bad. It’s perfectly fine. It’s good for employees. It’s only bad for employers who want to suppress wages. The fact that it’s called “poaching” is just a reflection of the idea that it’s bad.
> But “poach” as in employees is clearly derived from “poach” as in game.
This is not obvious to me at all, nor have I ever conflated the two in my mind. Hell, the literal dictionary disagrees with you.
But beyond this, language evolves. There are many examples of words used today that bear very little resemblance to their original roots.
The thing I find curious is that you recognize immediately that eggs are unrelated to hiring employees, but refuse to acknowledge that shooting animals is also entirely unrelated to hiring employees.
> My quibble isn’t really with the terminology.
That’s not what you said above: “I’m saying that “poaching” is a horrible term for that action”.
> It’s with the idea that hiring another company’s employees is somehow bad. It’s perfectly fine.
Sometimes it’s fine, sometimes it’s not. I’ve been poached. It worked out well for me.
But hopefully you can recognize that not all scenarios are equal.
> It’s only bad for employers who want to suppress wages.
When a massive conglomerate poaches entire teams to crush competition, those wages aren’t gonna be around very long. In some (not all) circumstances, it’s anti-competitive and when examined in the context of the whole, is not guaranteed to be good for employees in the long run.
> The fact that it’s called “poaching” is just a reflection of the idea that it’s bad.
Again, this is the weight you are attaching to the word. The word holds no such weight in my mind nor have I ever encountered a person in my 20+ year career prior to this thread who was upset by it. This is a you thing.
Language evolves, sure, but not aimlessly. “Poach” for employees didn’t arise independently, it’s a metaphor using the hunting term. If you never realized that, that’s a you thing.
It should be pretty obvious. “Poaching” employees has negative connotations. It’s seen as something illicit. If you do a search for the term, just about every single result will be some page discussing whether or not it’s illegal, and the ethics around it. It is directly analogous to poaching animals and people clearly think there are potential ethical problems with it, to the extent that people think it might even be against the law.
> “Poach” for employees didn’t arise independently
This is missing the point. No business person is using the word “poach” in the context of hiring is conflating it with hunting animals. People describing the act of poaching employees are not somehow contributing to the idea that employees are property.
These are imaginary concerns being projected. Words only have the meaning we collectively assign them, and again, if you’re assigning some kind of “employees are animals to be hunted” association, that is something you are doing, not something that is broadly accepted.
Humorously, you’re doing more to attach harmful connotations in this thread than 20 years of interacting with thousands of people in the corporate world, and I can honestly say that this thread is the first time in my 40 years of living that I’ve encountered someone who seems to conflate these entirely unrelated things. If you are concerned about people making this conflation, one of the most effective ways of preventing that would be to stop spreading the idea that the two things are related - an idea that I guarantee has not occurred to many people until they found this discussion.
> people clearly think there are potential ethical problems with it, to the extent that people think it might even be against the law
Yes. Emphasis on the word potential. Poaching employees may be unethical, but to your point, is controversial because that’s not always true.
You still have not articulated why you believe it’s appropriate to act as if those present ethical concerns (or lack thereof) have anything to do with hunting animals or the definition of a word that does not apply to this context.
The English language is filled with words that have similarly evolved, and people use those words daily without causing harm. If you can demonstrate (with evidence) why you believe this word causes appreciable real world harm, I’m willing to consider it.
Thus far, your argument can be summed up as “I find it offensive”. And that is simply not compelling.
Of course nobody in business is conflating this with hunting animals. Do you not understand what a metaphor is? I find this comment very confusing.
> Thus far, your argument can be summed up as “I find it offensive”. And that is simply not compelling.
Do not confuse your lack of understanding or agreement for a lack of substance. You don’t have to see things my way, but my argument is not even remotely accurately summarized that way.
Here is an actually accurate summary: there’s nothing wrong with hiring other companies’ employees, commonly referred to as “poaching.” It’s commonly frowned upon (see multiple examples in these comments) but it’s just free association, and the idea that it’s bad is ridiculous. All that idea does is help to suppress wages by reducing competition among employers. And this ridiculous notion that “poaching” employees is bad is reflected in the common term used to describe it.
You’re focusing on entirely the wrong thing here. The meaning of the word “poaching” is merely illustrative of the problem I have, it’s not the problem itself. The actual problem is the attitude that employees somehow belong to their employers such that it might be improper to entice them away.
> there’s nothing wrong with hiring other companies’ employees, commonly referred to as “poaching.”
I find it interesting that you used the language "other companies' employees". Isn't this even more problematic than referring to such a practice as poaching? You went from "the word poaching is bad because it implies X" to something that directly indicates ownership (possessive form). I'm not trying to
More to the point: no, hiring people who currently work for other companies is not commonly referred to as "poaching". This is a one-dimensional framing at best (most hiring is organic), and disingenuous at worst (I can't imagine you believe that sentence to be true). I think you probably agree from the context here that a specific kind of hiring is referred to as poaching.
We can agree or disagree about whether that specific kind of hiring is good or bad, but it exists, and generally has characteristics that are not like "normal" hiring. People call it "poaching" to distinguish it from other non-controversial scenarios. What you're arguing here implies we should pretend such controversy doesn't exist.
For sake of argument, you could call this "schmoogling" employees (or whatever you want) if you hate the word "poach", at which point it would still be just as controversial because the underlying behavior is still occurring regardless of the language used.
People would still disagree on whether such behavior is good or bad, and absolutely nothing was gained by not saying they were "poached".
I can accept that we disagree on the universal "goodness" of the hiring practice known as poaching. What makes zero sense to me is arguing that the terminology we use to describe such practices is somehow part of the problem. And if your goal is to change how people view hiring practices, getting people to use different words doesn't change their underlying views. Bottom line: the line of argument you're using doesn't move the conversation in the direction you want it to because it's disconnected from the underlying reality. Policing speech is not the way to change people's minds.
We'll have to agree to disagree and I'm done here (not much else to say). But I hope you have a good Saturday.
It’s not the terminology. It’s the whole idea that this is something different. Schmoogling employees is no different than any other hiring. A company makes an offer, the candidate accepts, and they change employers. The only reason some of this gets categorized as schmoogling is because some companies want it to be frowned upon because it suppresses wages to do so.
The terminology isn’t the problem, the terminology is a result of the problem, which is disturbingly widespread acceptance of some degree of conceptual ownership of employees. If we called it schmoogling I obviously couldn’t point out the unfortunate implication of the term but that wouldn’t materially change my point. You are FAR too focused on the specific word.
I know I was pointing out the implication of the term, but it’s more about the existence of any term for this.
I know I said I was done, but I wanted to say that this comment is the most coherent representation of your position so far, and I appreciate that.
To be clear, I'm very against any kind of implied "ownership" and believe employees should have autonomy/freedom to work where they want. My primary contention is with the idea that all types of hiring are equal. There are clear and obvious differences between different hiring scenarios whether we want them to exist or not. This isn't up for debate; it is the underlying reality playing out whether we acknowledge and label it or not (this is separate from whether such a thing should exist, i.e. I'm pointing out an is, not an ought).
> You are FAR too focused on the specific word.
To be fair (and you acknowledged this), you started the conversation about that word. The substance of my argument is that the word is not something we should be concerned about. Turning this back around on me being too focused on the word is...an interesting choice.
I do find it frustrating and puzzling that once I shared a strong argument for why the focus on terminology at the beginning of this thread was misplaced, you clarified that this isn't what you're actually talking about.
> What makes you believe this? The definition of “poach” is not intrinsically linked to the notion of ownership/property.
My dictionary gives this definition for "poaching":
1. to trespass for the purpose of stealing game
2. to appropriate (something) as one's own
You cannot "steal" or "appropriate" something which is not property or which cannot be owned. You are being very disingenuous to say that the word is not intrinsically linked to ownership or property.
Your dictionary is either not exhaustive, or it’s out of date. The word is not limited to the notions of “stealing” or “appropriation”, nor has it been for decades.
> You are being very disingenuous to say that the word is not intrinsically linked to ownership or property.
Are you claiming that other definitions of “poach” do not exist? If you are, you are misinformed. If you are not, you are misunderstanding the word “intrinsic”.
Better hope that Apple pays you really well for your sevices. In six months they won't need you anymore and your former employer will have been sure to burn all the bridges you thought were left.
I mean, get that money, but don't expect that you can make a career out of being poached repeatedly. If you're really that good, you probably could have done better working for yourself.
Honor among thieves is an expression from before there was a group that treated honor as a fiduciary crime. If you are not one of the smaller number of engineers needed once the product is developed your best value in the market is to a series of competitors establishing the same features.
Regardless of whether it’s a bad idea, it’s a free choice of the person accepting or rejecting the offer. Describing it as “poaching” denies their agency and portrays employees as property of their employer.
That’s not what poaching means. Poaching describes the comportement of one company towards another. Employees are entirely accessory to what is being described here.
What’s meaningful is that Apple was hiring them because of the work they did for Massimo and doing so en masse at a single point of time.
If they had just hired experts on blood monitoring to staff a team and some of them happened to be working for Massimo before, it would just be hiring as usual and not described as poaching.
What’s wrong with that? Those employees took the offer of their own volition. There’s nothing wrong with offering someone a job because of their relevant experience.
“Employees are entirely accessory” is exactly the shit I’m arguing against here. The whole idea of “poaching” implies that the employees are property, to be guarded by their owners and stolen by others. How can the people who actually do the work and are the entire reason for this so-called “poaching” not be central to it?
Once again, poaching describes the comportment of a company towards another. It’s not a statement regarding the morality of accepting of rejecting the offer from the point of view of the employee. It doesn’t in any way implies that employees are the property of a company.
The issue is not about whether or not employees are central to work. That much is obvious. The issue is that building a talented team and putting in place the condition for it to properly work is a significant cost. That’s why it’s generally illegal for another company to just come and rehire everyone wholesale.
The issue is not even hiring talents from another company. The issue is that it’s targeted. They are not hired because they are extremely talented. They are hired because they work for Massimo and will bring trade secrets with them.
I’m sure the Apple of this world would like it being completely legal a lot. It would basically put a damper on any small companies trying to compete with them if they could just come and buy out the team of any potential threat to their hegemony.
The hiring in itself is technically okay but if you do it too much - which is what I implied by wholesale - it makes it hard to defend against allegations that you are not misappropriating trade secrets which is illegal. That’s part of the dispute between Apple and Masimo.
You don’t have to believe me. You can do a quick search on the jurisprudence surrounding trade secrets and employee poaching. There are plenty of cases in high value industries - mostly banking and software.
If a company lift a whole team in a short span of time, it gets really hard to argue there is no misappropriation.
Are there any examples where mass “poaching” was the only evidence? I found plenty of examples where it was part of what happened, but they all have other evidence of theft of trade secrets or whatever else the lawbreaking behavior was.
And I’m sure they did this out of the kindness of their hearts, while not being paid and with equipment they purchased themselves and stored in their garage.
Abuse of the patent system can be deeply problematic. This is not one of them. This is one of the richest company in the world stealing the work paid by another.
> They made a better offer — in other words competed — in the labor market.
And when this is done for the sole purpose of acquiring a specific kind of talent - especially to build exactly the same thing - it’s called poaching.
The word “poach” is used in numerous ways and describes many things that have nothing to do with hunting for sport [0]. I think it’s a bit problematic to hold on to a singular definition here that clearly does not apply to the situation.
If you actively go out of your way to hire people from company X on a priority bases rather than skills (and no, trade secrets are not "skills"), then you're poaching and it is not same as paying market rate.
I think it’s a bit disingenuous to frame this as a situation no different than “paying market rate”.
Whether you like this or not, the practice of hiring employees specifically to work on the same thing elsewhere or to drain a company of its talent - is called poaching.
It’s often legal, but can be controversial especially when it’s a behemoth raiding smaller shops.
You seem to be offended by the word itself, but it’s just a useful descriptor to differentiate between different types of hiring scenarios.
I’ve been poached before, and it worked out great for me.
>How HN can support monopolization of markets and killing of [sic] competition is beyond me.
That suggests HN is a monoculture of some sort of united front. It is not. Diversity of opinion is best for this community (and all communities).
And, sorry, what competition was killed off here? I, as the consumer, was never considering Massimo for my blood oxygen measurement needs. I bought an Apple Watch and just want it to be as feature-full as possible. So does Apple.
I wasn’t going to buy a device just for blood monitoring. What they produced is valuable to me as a feature of a product but not as a product in of itself
Yea, so if Apple didn’t copy the other company’s work, they’d have been forced to buy devices from or license the other company’s work. So instead of your money for the blood oxygen sensor going to that company, it went to Apple.
I bought a cheap pulse oximeter during the pandemic and what I learned is that when I’m feeling light-headed, blood oxygen is low. So I decided that my body’s built-in blood oximeter is probably good enough most of the time.
It’s sort of like having your watch tell you whether you slept well or not. Didn’t you already know? If you think you slept well and your watch disagrees, are you going to trust its opinion over your own?
Even people with sleep apnea don't know they are waking up multiple times an hour all night. You really have no clue how you're sleeping until you put it to the test.
Also, I don't think most people are in a position where they feel like they have amazing sleep every night. Yeah, maybe those people have nothing to gain from gadgets kind of like a person at ideal weight doesn't gain anything from counting calories: but what about the rest of us?
My wrist device was critical in helping me realize how few hours I was sleeping despite being in bed with my eyes closed for 8 hours.
1. The heart rate line graph during my sleep made me realize just how bad exercise within 6 hours of bed is. My resting heart rate is 43bpm, yet if I exercise, I'll try to sleep at 60bpm that slowly decreases to 45bpm over 4-6 hours. And it always coincides with worse sleep.
2. I realized how often my HR jumps during sleep. Turns out I have a deviated septum that got bad enough in my 30s to regularly block breathing. I thought I had sleep apnea that would require a CPAP but it turns out I just need nasal strips. No more problems.
3. If you see you have bad sleep, you can now ask the question "how do I improve my sleep?" If you don't know you have bad sleep because you think you're sleeping 8 hours, then you don't realize you have levers to pull.
There are lots of ways it can help. Finding out you wake up an abnormal amount of times could be a sign of sleep apnea or something else. One could take that information and get a sleep study.
These apps can detect that you are moving around a lot and also detect that you are snoring (another sign of sleep apnea).
Even if you know that you snore without using a sleeping app, that doesn't really give you a picture of how bad it could be. I apparently stop breathing and sometimes start choking in my sleep.
Now that I have a diagnosis of sleep apnea sleep apps are still really helpful. If I'm still snoring, it means I probably need to adjust the pressure on my CPAP machine. If the app for my CPAP machine tells me that I'm having a lot of episodes over the course of the night, I might need to adjust the pressure or the fit of the mask.
Where did anyone claim that Apple ought to have a monopoly on blood oxygen measurement in a wearable electronic device, let alone "have monopoly power in every industry"?
>monopoly on blood oxygen measurement in a wearable electronic device
And I know this isn't your argument, but that's a VERY narrow market for the purposes of a US inquiry into monopolies. Like, the normal market definition fights are about whether you should be considering "premium smartphones" or "smartphones" as a whole. Or all of the grocery stores in a given region, and whether that should include convenience stores that also sell groceries.
I'd be hard pressed to imagine a court really contemplating an argument that a company has a monopoly in a very small slice of a market. It would be like saying that Rolex has a monopoly in luxury sport watches with headquarters in Geneva.
The definition of a monopoly is that it can engage in monopolistic practices. Poaching IP to destroy a small company is very much a monopolistic practice, and has a chilling effect on the rest of the market.
Of course in Apple's case this Masimo story is not the only monopolistic practice.
The correct analogy would be a watch market dominated by Casio and Swatch with no independent smaller brands.
Because every smaller brand that becomes somewhat successful is bought out by the Big Two. Or never gets that far because new IP somehow ends up being the sole property of the Big Two through various other means.
(Technically an oligopoly, but still maintained by monopolistic lock-ins and actions.)
Because why would I want to destroy the planet by purchasing an additional new watch for each single feature that I wanted to leverage? This seems hugely damaging to the environment just to enrich the lives of < 100 people.
Yes "very good", until Apple decides to mass-layoff them, because now, owning the valuable core IP and having killed their primary competitor in the field, Apple can do whatever they want and get away with it because those employees have nowhere else to go in the area. 200+ IQ move </slow_clap>.
How people on HN can support monopolization of markets and killing of competition is beyond me, since in the end it always bites them in the ass (see recent mass layoffs in the industry), yet this lesson seems to be quickly forgotten.
Lamego only stayed at Apple six months. He was very productive. He filed 12 new patents for Apple. But he apparently had disputes with managers. The details aren't entirely clear. But Lamego ended up resigning. After leaving Apple, he founded his own company, True Wearables, which was also successfully sued by Masimo for trade secret theft.
> owning the valuable core IP and having killed their primary competitor in the field, Apple can do whatever they want
Massimo still owns the core IP. Apple owns some other IP.
> How people on HN can support monopolization of markets
There was one niche (note: still massive) provider of this technology. Now there are two, one of which is mass. Even if that collapses to one mass, that’s objectively better. More competitors and more consumer surplus is not a monopoly condition.
There is a difference between being reflexively anti-Apple regardless of the circumstances and being pro-monopoly.
They will be fine, but maybe they want to be FANG rich. You do not get there if the already big companies play by different rules and can out spend the minute you pose a threat.
They're already in most of the hospitals in America. There was one attached to my daughter's foot for 100+ days. I don't think they care about FAANG at all. They're not a software company. Look them up - this is big companies fighting, not David and Goliath.
Maybe if Masimo had made Lamego a significant shareholder, he wouldn't have left his "CTO" role to become a mere Apple employee. Masimo is an $8b company. They created a spinoff called Cercacor which Lamego got to be CTO of. My best guess is it wasn't a real startup like we're used to in the Silicon Valley sense. There wasn't any real opportunity for him to gain generational wealth there if he was successful. Apple not only hired him, but thirty other of their employees too, because Apple recognized that their talent was worth more than a licensing deal. That's the issue with these non-valley enterprises. They're very feudal in the sense that the owners treat their engineers and scientists like ordinary workers, expect total loyalty, and pull out their legal guns when they don't get their way. Big tech companies like Apple are more meritocratic and generally offer smart people much better deals. A court later found Lamego hadn't made his moves entirely fairly, but I believe if you look at the big picture, Apple's behavior wasn't predatory, but rather liberatory.
> Big tech companies like Apple are more meritocratic and generally offer smart people much better deals.
It’s mindblowing how big of a gap this is for these non-tech companies. I work for a company that sold to PE. The owners walked away with the vast majority of a 1.5 billion deal.
I asked if employees were given anything. “Sure. Some got as much as 50k!” I was told.
Using some standard equity math for early engineers, I back of napkined that the 25 year tenure engineers, if they were at big tech, should have gotten low 7 figures. Nope. They got 50k out of 1.5 billion.
(No, PE had no say on how that 1.5 billion was divided up for those of you quick to blame PE.)
Yeah tech startups are great like that. Big tech companies are even better. With them, you don't have to wait for a successful exit, or even work there that long, to get your low seven figures. No one in America is working harder to restore the middle class than the tech industry. Even the person who cleans my house makes more than 50k. Meanwhile legacy enterprises and private equity are doing everything in their power to destroy it. This is a moral righteous struggle for the heart of America, which makes it such a shame that Lamego was found by the courts to have acted dishonorably, but we mustn't forget who's side we're on.
How is that an example of Apple driving a company into bankruptcy to acquire their assets? Judging from the Wikipedia article, it looks like Exponential Technologies made a good PowerPC CPU, but Motorola promised they'd be able to catch up, and it's safer to bet on a big company that you've been doing business with than to rely on a startup for a critical component.
Licensed Mac clones were only available for two years (1995-1997), and discontinuing the program drove many other companies out of business, so it's hard to see how the change was a ploy to acquire a single company's assets. It seems more likely that Jobs discontinued licensing because it caused Apple to lose money.
And it looks like much of the Exponential Technologies team continued under a different name, then was bought by Apple in 2010 for $121 million.[1]
If there are other examples, can you provide one that is more recent and/or more blatant?
When they started, they were producing for multiple small customers. Apple was frustrated with Motorola and approached them but demanded they massively increase their production capacity (Apple's model for dominating a supplier... put them in debt and beholden to them for orders) and effectively dominated them as a customer...
Then used them to negotiate a better price with Motorola, dumped their purchase contract for 'reasons' and bankrupted the company.
Exponential sued.. and won $500 million... for breach contract but were destroyed by that point. Apple gobbled up their IP for around $20 mil later on.
I can't find any articles about Exponential winning the lawsuit, only that they filed one and sought $500 million in damages. Had they won, I think it would have been in the press. The only thing I could find was Apple's 10K from 1999[1], which says they settled the lawsuit for an undisclosed amount:
> This matter was settled during the fourth quarter of
1999 for an amount not material to the Company's financial position or results of operations.
If Apple did pay $500 million, I think that would have been material to the company's financial position, as their profit that year was $601M.
Again, are there any examples that are less debatable and/or more recent? I don't have a dog in this fight. But if Apple is infamous for this behavior, it seems like there would be stronger examples.
I have not found the records online (a lawyer can probably find it) but I was involved with some of the people in 1997/1998. There were multiple lawsuits going for years as Apple held 5% ownership.
Oh... and I forgot this case also exposed that Apple had embedded proprietary IP into the CPU design which made it impossible to seel the already produced CPUs to anyone else (PowerPC chips were in very high demand at the time and these were the fastest on the market).
>Apple can do whatever they want and get away with it because those employees have nowhere else to go in the area. 200+ IQ move.
I would bet Apple, and the other large publicly listed tech companies, have lifted far more employees into financial independence from employers than any other business in history.
>I would bet Apple, and the other large publicly listed tech companies, have lifted far more employees into financial independence from employers than any other business in history.
So doing monopolistic and illegal things is OK because it makes some people rich?
> have lifted far more employees into financial independence
They've also destroyed financial independence. They've engaged in anti-competitive and anti-poaching practices before. There's several famous examples.
Anyways, are you saying it's Apple's goal to lift employees in this way, or does it just happen to be incidental to whatever their CEO wants at the moment?
Also all the people actually _making_ those devices, surely the largest labor pool supporting their business, have zero financial independence. That's the typical western blind spot.
> from employers than any other business in history
I think that'd be the US Government and it's GI Bill. Okay, technically not a business, but if the virtue is independence, then it shouldn't matter who provided it.
If they couldn't get a patent on the LED setup, just the software, then yes. They should just shrug and compete. The idea of a piece of software should always be open to competition.
Hah, plenty of people have described Masimo, 400 times smaller than Apple, in the threads on this as "bullying Apple unfairly by being a patent troll."
why is 2x the right number for their current employees? how are the employees that left the company, but contributed to the patent/company being compensated with this deal?
I think the good is offset by Apple using its other hand to suppress wages for other employees by engaging in “no poaching” practices with other companies.
Similar to what HNers are so happy to say about restaurant owners who actually have to be profitable and can’t depend on the largess of investors, if Masimo can’t afford to pay market rates to developers, the company doesn’t deserve to exist.
Right. Somehow people here are struggling on how to pin blame on Apple even when developers are better off with Apple's offer. It is a great outcome for anyone who is developer.
If in their world view "best developer salary is not always the best thing" one could have better reasoning for supporting little guy Massimo getting crushed by Apple.
So if Apple came to your company, promising licensing, collaboration and other things, when all along their intention was to "take" "your" employees, you'd be cool with that deception?
The employees made out better - good for them. That's a lot easier to do when you have a market cap 400 times higher than that of the company you made all these promises to, and then left holding the bag.
No. That's why I framed those words. They're not taken, and they're not yours.
I thought I was pretty clear that I felt the outcome for the employees was positive and that Apple's actions were actively deceptive. It was clear in the trial that Apple had zero intention of collaboration, licensing, or patent sharing and just used that as a pretense to "get in the room" and see who showed up on Masimo's side so they knew who to target with competing offers.
One of the biggest pain points I have had with the 'smartphone revolution' post Android/iOS is that almost every wearable/pocketable is a watch. nobody's trying new formats that could be useful!
Had Apple offered a good licensing deal to the company, it would have been good for the company too. Especially if said employees had stocks as part of their compensation package.
But it was cheaper to Apple to just hire a few key people and screwing over everyone else.
Good or bad depends on how Massimo compare to Apple. Which one of the two offers the most growth potential. If Apple just keep the employees long enough to steal the tech before laying the off, not building on it, then it is terrible for all but Apple shareholders. If Apple "saved" these employees from an exploitative company, providing the with growth potential and further development then it is a good thing.
What did they steal? CEO destroyed his own company when he bought a bunch of highend speaker brands. WTF is a medical device company doing buying consumer audio companies?
No, it’s that murdering someone doing those things is wrong. Even if the company is clearly circling the drain that doesn’t give apple or anyone else the right to steal their staff and infringe on their ip.
There’s no such thing as stealing staff especially when you severely underpay you employees. $100k for sr devs. Pay them what they’re worth and they won’t leave.
California doesn’t allow employers to conclude with each other to suppress employees salaries. Non solicitation agreements are illegal. Employees are allowed to freely move companies and get market value.
Why would they license something that was invented 50+ years ago? No one else pays a license for it. Not even valid patent as the company couldn't prove it court it was a valid patent and the case ended up being hung jury with all but one jury that held out. Only reason they couldn't import it because
Travesty is the ITC is allowed to block imports without going to court. Banning imports shouldn't be done by some government institution and should be handled by the court system.
Wow you must work for a company with incredibly deep pockets. No way can massimo compete on salary with apple. Only people in the game who can do that are google facebook apple chatgpt etc.
As long as a company is turning a profit, they by definition can afford to be paying their employees better. As a company you can choose not to, but it also means you get to suffer the consequences, and lose the right to complain that your employees were "poached" when in reality it was simply a matter of you not paying them enough to stay.
Yea, these employees are not being "poached." They're not zero-agency deer owned by Masimo, grazing on their land, that Apple came in and stole away. They can decide for themselves that someone else is offering a better business arrangement.
There is a market rate for talent, and if you can't afford the market rate, then you don't get the talent.
If you compete with someone who can afford to lose money longer than you, for example because they have some departments with very high margins and can cross-subsidize, you can win.
Profit distribution only makes sense to owners of the company.
A better way to give employees a share of the profits is to give them shares of the company. But then that also comes at the expense of compensation in dollars. You cannot pay for groceries with company shares.
People really like the idea of "When you win, I get money, when you lose, you lose money". Explained like that they agree it's bad, but explained like "Companies should be distributing profits to workers" they fall over themselves about how good of an idea it is.
Running a business is a gamble and like gambling, you need to put skin in the game to get a share of winnings (and lose your skin in the losses). People are just hyper-focused on the winners.
If company X is making a profit and losing employees to a competitor paying more, then company X has effectively chosen to let that happen. They don’t get to complain that they ate their cake and don’t have it anymore.
> People really like the idea of "When you win, I get money, when you lose, you lose money". Explained like that they agree it's bad,
It's not bad, it's a cost.
You obviously wouldn't make a deal like that in isolation. You also wouldn't give someone a salary for nothing. But a cost like that can be worth paying just like a salary is worth paying. (Obviously you'd have limits on the numbers, just like salary is limited.)
People think that profits should be distributed on top of salary. And frankly it already happens to a degree with bonuses. But there is this pervasive idea that any leftover profit is just money that should have gone to workers.
Distributing part of the profits would be a reasonable benefit.
There are hundreds of millions of profits here. Distributing even 10% of that to employees would be a tremendous amount of money. Even a lot less would have a big effect.
A 10% profit share makes plenty of sense. Yes, even while insulating employees from losses, it still makes sense. Owners need to be able to reap profit but they don't need to get all of it forever. Employees owning stock is not the only way profit sharing can work.
I mean, this doesn't tell us whether they can pay them twice as much or $5 more per year. Some companies make no profit, or very little, or very little per employee.
And as a hypothetical sought after employee, how is that my problem? If another company wants to roll a shit ton of money up to my doorstep, why shouldn’t I take it?
Should I be treating my employer “like family” and care about “the mission”?
Acquisitions can be considered anticompetitive. The only thing that appears to differentiate this situation from an acquisition is that the investors didn’t get paid.
Are you suggesting that the FRC should step in when a company offers employment to a large number of employees at another company? How exactly would you propose to put this into law where it doesn’t hurt the employees?
This is almost farcical. This is literally the opposite of anti-competitive. Please take a basic economics course and pass it before spouting off about economics online.
As an employee you shouldn't care, but if you're someone who wants technological progress to continue, you should care whether companies with a slush fund of billions are able to bully those with less money.
Massimo did not appear to respond to Apple by trying to compete on compensation with them. The levels.fyi data is showing that they appear to pay their engineers between 140-180 while they are making hundreds of millions in profit.
It seems like Masimo wasn’t bullied because they had less money. They decided to run to the government to protect them instead of doing actual competition
Masimo was worth ~$16B when this was going down. They are worth $8B today. This is roughly the size of American Airlines. Masimo is not the biggest company, but they are a large publicly-traded company.
The company does $2B in revenue and spends close to $800 million annually in sales, general and admin. This is over 3x their R&D budget. (For reference, Apple's R&D spend is higher than its SG&A spend.)
Per levels.fyi, Masimo is paying senior SDEs in HCOL $150k. They could 10x the comp to these critical employees without it being more than a rounding error in their numbers. (I don't think they would have had to go to 10x. Most people would practically tattoo a brand on themselves for a one-time bonus of $1m.)
Long story short: Masimo does indeed have the money to compete on salary with Apple for this set of employees. They chose to spend the money on attorneys instead.
Some companies don't value engineers. That often works, until they end up in an engineering competition against companies that do value engineers.
I disagree with your assertion that Masimo has the money to compete. Apple's upside to employing these folks to build the tech into the Apple Watch is FAR, FAR greater than Masimo's potential sales growth for existing pulse ox devices (or patent licenses). With Apple Watches being licensed as medical devices for ECG & pulse ox, this gives clinicians even more reason to leverage them with patients for convenient 24/7 home monitoring. It's not the same market Masimo is serving, at all.
I specifically did not address any of the corporate competitive dynamics, although it is worth noting that this is more of an existential issue for Masimo than Apple.
My core point is is that Masimo has far more than enough money to pay strategic employees enough money to keep them. Again, I doubt they would have to go as high as $5m/year for each of the relevant engineers. Masimo could spend that without making a major dent in their finances.
Could Apple up the ante and make offers of $5B/yr to each engineer? Sure, but we are likely talking about the difference between Masimo offering $150k and Apple offering $500k. These are numbers any public company can afford.
This product WAS generally marketed to the healthcare field, not to people directly.
It was literally described in the page you referenced: "Arm your patients with continuous measurements in a comfortable, lifestyle-friendly
wearable—helping you deliver a true telemonitoring experience."
> automates the collection of clinically accurate measurements to help support: -Post-surgical recovery -Chronic care -Patient management
I say "was" because it was possible to buy it as a consumer, but there's still no direct competition, as:
"Please note that all Masimo consumer products have been discontinued. These include:
Im not saying they pay them well or not. Theres just not a comparison on comp they could do. That you don't understand the power dynamics between that is something you will hopefully learn about the world as you become more experienced. Apple would just offer more at the end of the day.
I understand, and this is timely in the context of Meta making $100m offers. I have no data on this, but I would be highly surprised if Apple offered anybody more than $5m/year. Masimo has that much money.
Could Apple go higher? Sure, but again most people who like their jobs are not going to leave once their needs are met.
From a competitive standpoint: Masimo has lost $8B in market cap during this kerfuffle. It's entirely possible it would have been rational for Masimo to pay these employees higher than Apple possibly would go in order to not lose those billions in value.
- is what Tim Cook told himself to vanquish the last bit of uneasiness. Then he took of his glasses, set them on the night stand, and slept better than he had in years.
Absolutely. Similarly, I tell parents who keep whining about soaring education costs and employability: Educate them well, and get them high paying jobs.
I generally agree, but the company likely doesn't have those funds. Considering the largest player (Apple) stands to make way more from it than you and just works around your patent.
Not arguing Apple shouldn't poach, just that your suggestion doesn't work.
They were very clearly poached. They were chosen for their specific knowledge of a product Apple wanted to make and Apple (being one of the wealthiest companies in Silicon Valley and ever) was able to throw out whatever number to get what they wanted. They even put them in an office near their old job.
This isn't a case of "they went looking for a better job". Have you done zero reading on this story?
My reading of the claims is that the novelty is having the processor integrated in the sensor protrusion. So processing the data elsewhere (particularly on a different device) would avoid infringement.
To be fair, this is something Apple has been doing since the beginning. "Oh cool tech you have there, would be a shame if we just copied it and made sure you got nothing."
Poaching employees is a good thing and should always be allowed. Companies have the means to prevent this at any time. It's called contract employment. But if they insist on being able to fire me at any time, they can eat the downside of that too.
I hate the word “poaching”. A company offered employees more money in exchange for their labor.
I see no issue. Would you have preferred what happened in the Jobs era where 7 of the largest tech firms colluded not to hire from each other’s company?
Apple has a massive war chest they can leverage to crush competition in several ways. As a nation and as consumers, we should at least be wary of what they're doing and whether it stifles competition or innovation. Even if the actions are legal.
There's a difference between Apple paying more for engineers in general vs Apple specifically targeting a competitor, acquiring all the talent from that competitor, then using the IP that talent brought to roll out substantially the same product.
There was no IP to poach. The IP was in a publicly available patent.
Every company that proactively reaches out to an employed individual is doing so because that employee has demonstrated elsewhere and probably at their current job skills and experience that they find valuable and I assume is willing to make a better offer for them.
Other posters said that Masimo was paying developers $140K - $180k. That’s a nothingburger for good developers. The BigTech company I was working for two years ago was offering returning interns about that much in cash + liquid RSUs
I once worked for a startup where everyone loved the CTO, the startup got acquired after I left by a PE company.
When he left to be the CTO of another company in the same vertical, 10 of the employees followed him within the next six months basically taking all of the developers and sales that he wanted and all of the worthwhile staff from the startup. I assume it was for more money.
If I had still been at the startup when he left, he would have easily “poached” me too?
Should that also have been illegal? Was that unethical?
Apple is able to do what they do now because of the shit they got away with in the Jobs era.
Because they hobbled competitors and innovation then they're able to do it now.
It's really hard to determine how detrimental their actions have been to the job market for software engineers.
It is entirely possible that every software engineer is worse off because Apple severely distorted the market and prevented many competitors from growing to be competitors to Apple and what ever offer Apple made to these people pales to what they could be making if Jobs hadn't done what he did.
You mean they hobbled poor little competitors like Google, Adobe, and the other tech companies that agreed to it? Apple was actually one of the smaller companies at the time.
How is all Apple’s fault? And are you really saying that the iPhone wouldn’t have happened if Apple hadn’t gotten into these agreements?
In your alternate universe would Nokia or Rim (who wasn’t involved in the agreement) still been relevant?
No, they hobbled the competitors that their staff could have formed if they had made more money to do so.
That collusion between these big companies to deny their employees a wage driven by free markets allowed those companies to accrue wealth and prevent competition from forming.
That's terrible for their employees, that's terrible for the consumer.
How did their collusion stop a new company from offering more money than the depressed wages that the collusion was causing?
Alternatively, if hypothetically without the collusion do you think the upper wage pressure would I have materially affected those companies bottom lines to not create the products that made them profitable?
The hypothetical new companies that I'm talking about would have been formed by their former employees who could afford to do so with the increased money that they would have made if it hadn't been for the criminal collusion to deny them that capital and us as a society a freer market.
And you're right, there's a distinct possibility the savings that they made in breaking the law could have affected their bottom line at the time in a way that prevented them from making certain products, but it could have also fostered creativity and innovation in the companies that colluded, and increased competition between them and the new companies that would have formed in a way that would have benefited innovation.
What's important is that companies don't break the law and that people are paid as much as they're worth so that they can in turn stimulate the economy in ways that they see fit.
So let me get this straight, if there wages would have been 30% more hypothetically they could have invested their own money (which few startup founders do) built phones or search engines that competed with Apple and Google? Something well funded companies like Microsoft and Facebook couldn’t do?
But now are you also saying that Apple did the right thing when they paid Masimo’s employees more so now they can stimulate the economy and in the future start companies?
A charitable interpretation of what I have wrote is that if Apple had followed the law then they would have more competition and the market would be a healthier place that benefits software developers and consumers alike.
Apple broke the law because they felt that it was in their best interest to the detriment of others and they will likely continue to do so if they feel it is in their best interest.
Why focus just on Apple instead of the other companies - Adobe, Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay?
But since when have people making BigTech money been afraid to venture out on their own to found a startup and would 30% more (completely made up number) and that was probably tied up in RSUs and not cash really made a difference?
Shouldn’t the idea that these people were making less than market wages spur them to go to other companies besides those seven or venture off on their own?
Because this is a thread about apple and the other companies are implied with the word 'collusion.'
As to your other points these things are not a binary, they are a gradient with Apple and the companies they colluding with having an incremental effect on the market that accrues over time as they consolidate wealth and restrict competition and the innovation that comes from it.
It is difficult for people to find jobs at other companies that don't exist or that are floundering because apple and others have illegally restricted the flow of capital that would spur their creation.
It seems from your line of questioning that you don't consider the criminal collusion that Apple and others participated in to be detrimental to the software industry and consumers as a whole.
Is that a fair assessment of your opinion? Can you expand on your opinion regarding this matter?
It was detrimental to the employees. And that’s why I’m arguing against the narrative of other commenters that Apple was wrong for offering Masimo employees money to leave.
It’s the same as the Windsurf situation with Google. In other words, I don’t care that Masimo was hurt because employees took a better deal from Apple.
As far as did it hurt the industry, there is really no logical argument that these companies who were already extremely profitable roundly have had the money to invest in their products if they hadn’t suppressed wages, that some new challenger was going to come along and compete with any of them if Microsoft (search and mobile phones) and Facebook (mobile phones couldn’t).
These employees weren’t going to take the extra money they made an invest in some world changing startup (that’s what VCs are for) that would pay more than BigTech. 50-70K wouldn’t be the determining factor to invest in their own startup.
The startup offers I was getting to be a “CTO” [1] (yes it would have been a laughably inflated title) was less than I was making as a mid level employee at AWS at the time (2020-2023) for more work and more risks.
[1] I didn’t go in AWS as a software developer, I went in working in Professional Services. But my previous experience was strategy and architecture at a couple of startups.
Every workaround I've seen for the past 30 years feel like a "Shabbat elevator" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shabbat_elevator) I'm not using the elevator because I'm not pushing the button because it's always moving.
Edit: I've always hated patents too, don't get me wrong.
The whole concept of software patents is a hack; as I understand it algorithms as a rule cannot be patented, so the system running the algorithm is patented instead. This seems to illustrate the absurdity of that workaround.
IMHO, the problem is that if you are wealthy enough then you don't need to worry about patents. I also think these patents are, on the whole, not great. But here the one company legally got the patent and the another, richer company hired away their talent and paid them to find a workaround to avoid licensing. Smaller companies will continue to license the patent.
Few tears will be shed for Massimo (or Qualcomm) but the next victim could be a much smaller company, maybe one that would be more of a competitor. I don't like the current patent regime but I do believe enforcement should apply to everyone, not just players who lack the money to rig the game.
Phenomenal that the patent is only violated by doing it with the watch cpu but not by funneling the data to a separate cpu. The surest sign that it's a bullshit patent.
Someone else linked the patent in question and it seems to be about a wearable device. The iphone is carried on your person and not worn as part of the same device, as I understand it.
I wonder if they could take it one step further. Do the measurements on the watch, do the calculation on the iPhone, send the results back to the watch for display. Technically all the work is done on the iPhone and the watch is just the IO device.
> The iPhone will now calculate the ratio of absorbed red to infrared light, then apply calibration constants from experimental data to estimate blood oxygen saturation.
The Apple Watch hardware is otherwise the same. The back of the watch shines light of a specific wavelength into your skin and measures the reflected light. Heart rate sensing uses green (525 nm) and infrared (850–940 nm) light; blood oxygen sensing added a red light at 660 nm in 2020.
The iPhone will now calculate the ratio of absorbed red to infrared light, then apply calibration constants from experimental data to estimate blood oxygen saturation.
More detailed writeup on how the technology works is here: https://www.empirical.health/metrics/oxygen/