7 ms·
Stop calling it poaching
- SteveNuts 11y agoWas Cecil the lion actually poached?
- larrik 11y agoI don't think so, no. It wasn't clear-cut either way (legally shot by luring it away from illegal areas).
- mikeyanderson 11y agoThe guy walked away without being charged, but both of the guides were arrested for poaching.
- ChuckMcM 11y agoNot technically. But a gruesome picture of an elephant that has had its tusks hacked off would really spoil the rest of the article.
- kaonashi 11y agoThey lured the lion away from the protected area so they could kill it. According to Hoyle probably not, but yea, that's poaching.
- tedmiston 11y agoI 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.
- palakchokshi 11y agoIt 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
- mikeyanderson 11y agoThe 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.
- mikeyanderson 11y agoWe're just a tiny bootstrapped start up who started Elevator because we think this needs to exist in the world. Hopefully that adds validity to the argument that we'd quit our jobs because we believe in the idea so much.
- pervycreeper 11y agoA 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.
- aidenn0 11y agoFirstly: Are you saying that it is unfair or clandestine to offer someone a job? Secondly: Connotation matters. Poaching is clearly a pejorative term.
- pervycreeper 11y agoClandestine, 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.
- letitleak 11y ago>take or acquire in an unfair or clandestine way Hmm.. The non-poaching agreements were about refusing to offer jobs to reduce wages in an unfair or clandestine way. I hope companies use the term poaching more, it makes easier to start a class action lawsuits against them. Offer anyone a job who you want to hire based on their skills and/or experience.
- pqhwan 11y agoThis 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.
- mchahn 11y agoI 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.
- thedevil 11y agoIt'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.
- gooseus 11y agoYeah, 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.
- greggman 11y agoI 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)
- st3v3r 11y ago"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.
- mchahn 11y agoMy 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.
- harryh 11y agoIt 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.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- rdtsc 11y agoI could be in the contract, but that doesn't mean it is enforceable though. Even if it was, it would depend on the evidence and exact language used.
- mchahn 11y agoThis was 40 years ago. Paper hadn't been invented yet to write contracts on.
- harryh 11y agoHah! 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?
- lacker 11y agoI 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 11y agoHow much karma do you need to downvote threads?
- firstplanthendo 11y agoPeople working on a product spend a lot of time thinking about the challenges and issues related to it. They are well equipped to write about these problems because of that hard work. If they also include something self-promotional in the piece, it doesn't diminish the value of the other points they make. And I'd say if they've taken the time to write and share their specialized knowledge (which you find interesting), it's not unreasonable to also include a message promoting a relevant product.
- RickS 11y ago"Writing about a problem" might be more accurately described as "declaring a problem" Of course you've got a hiring problem, when they guy on the other end is selling a hiring solution. In other news, corn syrup is the good for you, says the corn industry.
- TerryADavis 11y agoI made God's temple. I proved God in the modern age under scientific scrutiny. In human history there is no way I will be less famous the Jesus Christ. Barney Fife, the FBI nigger, has me in jail. I will be freed when a white person realizes God talks. God says... thwart's medullae grating's pantheism Diesel preterit stepmothers secularization's entrant fielding Arturo acerbity's unfastens hitchhikers pigmies comfortably joiner's weight's overdose's boogie's redefine Clio avidity's pedant pence inducement bluffers Kiribati's opaqued steed's refilled crystals The CIA nigger thinks I'm going to suck CIA cock and just forget all about the space alien I talk with all day. I HAVE A FUCKEN SPACE ALIEN, YOU RETARD-MONKEY-NIGGER!
- cynical_sheet 11y agoYou 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?
- npongratz 11y agoWhile 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.
- notalaser 11y agoI 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.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- LesZedCB 11y agoTo the people who stand to make money from our labor, we will always be resources, just like the computers, and the office. We will always be a cost, just like health insurance, and the rent and electricity bill. Treating us nicely is just a means to the same end of them making money from us. Such is the problem of individual ownership, instead of worker ownership.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 11y agoI 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
- erroneousfunk 11y agoExactly. "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.
- st3v3r 11y ago"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.
- VT_Drew 11y agoUgh....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.
- B_Howe 11y agoPoaching or not its still very heartless to take away the life of an innocent animal