8 ms·

As soon as any company sues someone for 'poaching employees' I don't need to think more about the merits of their case because they clearly have none. The idea

by harry8 10y ago

As soon as any company sues someone for 'poaching employees' I don't need to think more about the merits of their case because they clearly have none. The idea that such a claim doesn't just get your case thrown out with extreme prejudice is baffling. It's a market. You don't own your employees and if someone can take them from you you're underpaying them and or treating them less well than you should. Probably both. This restraint of trade bullshit treating employees like goods is just disgusting and totally unacceptable in any civilized society. It goes way beyond what is or isn't "legal"

zubie7a 10y ago
Yet we consistently agree to "non solicitation" in our contracts. Even if people came over by their own desire, its hard to prove, and a pissed off company with more resources may be more willing to pursue that on the offensive side than one on the defensive one.
- WalterBright 10y ago
  Agreeing to non solicitation, and doing it anyway while still employed on company time with company resources, is not an honorable thing to do. If you don't intend to abide by the terms of a contract, then don't agree to it. Nobody is making you work for Tesla. Besides, all contracts can be negotiated. Negotiate for the contract you want.
  - harry8 10y ago
    if you don't agree with the laws and social norms of a country, do all your business elsewhere. Treating such clauses with utter contempt seems morally just fine to me.
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      If you don't agree with the laws and social norms of a country, you're free to break them in protest and suffer the consequences. People nowadays seem to think that civil disobedience should not involve any sacrifices for the disobedient.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - rwallace 10y ago
    An "agreement" made under duress is not actually an agreement, therefore not morally binding. A clause in your employment contract is only actually an agreement if: 1. Society defines having a job as an optional luxury. 2. The employer is willing to strike out that clause, and the candidate employee can reasonably know this. 3. Other employers are offering better terms. Were any of those true in this case?
    - mattmanser 10y ago
      What employer is willing to strike "Must perform assigned duties"? Or any of the many other clauses which are essential to an employment contract? There are always things in contracts which can't be struck out. You can always ask to strike it out, and declare your intention to find future employees at their company. From their point of view, you'd be saying that when you left you'd potentially take millions of $s of other employees with you and disrupt their operations. Why would they employ you? Not poaching your employer's employees within a certain timeframe is a perfectly normal and reasonable clause. You've got confidential information on their employees, namely which ones are good, which work well with you, etc., things you'd normally spend a lot of time + money finding out. And they spent a lot of money advertising, vetting, hiring, training and integrating those employees.
      - rwallace 10y ago
        > What employer is willing to strike "Must perform assigned duties"? Indeed, and many employees have found themselves assigned duties that were not at all what they expected, and damaging to their health or otherwise harmful, but hey, they "agreed" to perform assigned duties, right? Looks like my position isn't a popular one here. So be it but, if you live in a developed country, have you ever wondered why, for the last few decades, almost everyone has been getting poorer and more miserable every time the GDP goes up? Sometimes, astonishingly enough, beliefs do actually have real-world consequences.
        WalterBright 10y ago
        > they "agreed" to perform assigned duties, right? They aren't slaves. They can quit any time. No employer can force you to do anything - but they don't have to pay you if you don't do the assigned duties. Sounds fair to me.
  - yrro 10y ago
    If a contract contains unlawful terms then as far as the law is concerned, the contract does not contain the terms in the first place. So you are well within your rights to ignore such terms. Put differently, my employer pays me to write code, not to review the validity of terms in their contract. If their legal department is incompetent then that's their problem not mine. If they expect me to perform (or not perform) actions on their behalf when I am not at work, and especially once my employment ends, then they are free to offer a consideration in exchange.
geofft 10y ago
Apparently he recruited them while working for Tesla, which is immoral whether or not it's illegal: if you're in senior management, people feel like their job is on the line when they say no to you. That's why you're not allowed to ask them things unrelated to the company's interest where they might want to say no, such as asking them on a date. The same power dynamics are at play when asking someone to jump ship to your new venture - while you remain employed at the old one, you have power over their reviews and their working relationship with the rest of the company.
johncolanduoni 10y ago
Really? Legally obligating your employees to not try to hire their coworkers at a competing business on company time while using company resources is treating employees like goods? That's a pretty bold statement, though I suspect you simply "didn't think about the merits of their case".
- alexandercrohde 10y ago
  Does it really matter whether it's on "company resources," in any sense other than the outmoded legal sense? Or company time? Perhaps for termination, but it's not against the law to hurt your employer, nor should it be. Perhaps you may want to refresh your perspective by remembering some of the times managers have colluded to keep wages down. "Poaching" is such a ridiculous term for "offering somebody better rewards for their work and them accepting." Stealing proprietary information is another story though, let's not make this whole thing binary.
  - johncolanduoni 10y ago
    > Does it really matter whether it's on "company resources," in any sense other than the outmoded legal sense? Or company time? Perhaps for termination, but it's not against the law to hurt your employer, nor should it be. As was mentioned elsewhere in this thread, even California's Labor Code contains such a provision: “An employee who has any business to transact on his own account, similar to that entrusted to him by his employer, shall always give the preference to the business of the employer.” > Perhaps you may want to refresh your perspective by remembering some of the times managers have colluded to keep wages down. How exactly does a senior manager using his position to recruit his subordinates fight that? In fact, it seems like a great way to put employees in precisely that position.
    - alexandercrohde 10y ago
      > even California's Labor Code contains such a provision Again "Any sense other than the outmoded legal sense." I hope you aren't arguing that something not being illegal in California is evidence that the thing is morally good? > "Using his position to recruit his subordinates" What's your implication? That somehow Anderson threatened their careers? Because I don't see anything suggesting that in the article. And frankly, it's disingenous to promote that kind of theory with no evidence and a clear knowledge that such a threat would never fly (I.E. any employee could go to HR and say "he's firing me because I won't join his company with that google guy" and they'd get rehired and potentially win a whistle-blower lawsuit). If you're not implying that some threat was involved, then I have no pity on the people he so maliciously offered superior jobs to.
parennoob 10y ago
I suspect (correct me if I'm wrong) that a large part of your opinion is based on the fairly offensive word "poach" that implies that employees are the employer's property in some way. If that were taken out of the article, perhaps it would make more sense? I think that as 'geofft points out, the fact that this person was trying-to-recruit (not "poach") employees for a future startup while on the job is one of the reasons for Tesla's suit. I think the other reason they give (allegedly stealing data) is far more compelling if true.
- AstralStorm 10y ago
  Former is easy due to california employees loyalty paragraph and it's a civil suit. Latter is a criminal suit.
devwastaken 10y ago
Being in a leadership role and saying to your team(s) "Hey, lets all take the knowledge we have that this company has paid massive amounts of money in prototypes and testing and overall business, and go start a new business selling the product." Thats why anti-poaching is a thing. When you're investing into researching and creating products, you are investing in the people who do it, along with all the materials and contracting and such. Being able to take the experience of the results of all that and go sell a competing product is stealing and is a major blow to R&D. I don't know the extent of the poaching, or whether its the same thing here, but in this case it was on company time, which is pretty bad.
- leereeves 10y ago
  If someone takes R&D that the company paid massive amounts of money for, then the company can sue for theft of intellectual property, but people should be free to leave to start other ventures with any knowledge they have that isn't covered by IP laws. Even in groups, as they have right to freedom of association. "Investing in the people who do [R&D]", then suing when they leave, is far too close to owning people.
  - AstralStorm 10y ago
    Not when he left. You can sue an ex employee for breach of contract when he was working there. For quite a few years.
    - leereeves 10y ago
      I was just discussing the general principle (in response to the preceding comment) and my opinion about what the law should be, not the merits of this specific case given current law.
- solatic 10y ago
  And those products are intellectual property. The laboratories, prototypes, documentation, data, and parents are all proprietary and belong to the company, not the individual. All the individual can take with him is his experience and a sense of which direction he could pursue in the future. That's not nothing, of course. But real products require all of the above in order to proceed to market, and all of the above takes a fairly long time for a company to build up, regardless of the experience of the people it hires, because the most those people can do is reduplicate their efforts without the mistakes, and even then pure reduplication is illegal because of parents etc.
Sembiance 10y ago
Sigh. Get off your high horse and actually read the article and the suit. This ex employee is said to have actually stolen gigabytes of data from Tesla and taken it with them to use at their next job. That is clearly wrong.
jusq2 10y ago
It serves another purpose usually. Anyone else planning to leave and poach people will have to do "a little more covering their bases". It really comes down to what top level leaders within the org think the longterm payoff is.

by harry8 10y ago

zubie7a 10y ago

Yet we consistently agree to "non solicitation" in our contracts. Even if people came over by their own desire, its hard to prove, and a pissed off company with more resources may be more willing to pursue that on the offensive side than one on the defensive one.

WalterBright 10y ago
Agreeing to non solicitation, and doing it anyway while still employed on company time with company resources, is not an honorable thing to do. If you don't intend to abide by the terms of a contract, then don't agree to it. Nobody is making you work for Tesla. Besides, all contracts can be negotiated. Negotiate for the contract you want.
- harry8 10y ago
  if you don't agree with the laws and social norms of a country, do all your business elsewhere. Treating such clauses with utter contempt seems morally just fine to me.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    If you don't agree with the laws and social norms of a country, you're free to break them in protest and suffer the consequences. People nowadays seem to think that civil disobedience should not involve any sacrifices for the disobedient.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- rwallace 10y ago
  An "agreement" made under duress is not actually an agreement, therefore not morally binding. A clause in your employment contract is only actually an agreement if: 1. Society defines having a job as an optional luxury. 2. The employer is willing to strike out that clause, and the candidate employee can reasonably know this. 3. Other employers are offering better terms. Were any of those true in this case?
  - mattmanser 10y ago
    What employer is willing to strike "Must perform assigned duties"? Or any of the many other clauses which are essential to an employment contract? There are always things in contracts which can't be struck out. You can always ask to strike it out, and declare your intention to find future employees at their company. From their point of view, you'd be saying that when you left you'd potentially take millions of $s of other employees with you and disrupt their operations. Why would they employ you? Not poaching your employer's employees within a certain timeframe is a perfectly normal and reasonable clause. You've got confidential information on their employees, namely which ones are good, which work well with you, etc., things you'd normally spend a lot of time + money finding out. And they spent a lot of money advertising, vetting, hiring, training and integrating those employees.
    - rwallace 10y ago
      > What employer is willing to strike "Must perform assigned duties"? Indeed, and many employees have found themselves assigned duties that were not at all what they expected, and damaging to their health or otherwise harmful, but hey, they "agreed" to perform assigned duties, right? Looks like my position isn't a popular one here. So be it but, if you live in a developed country, have you ever wondered why, for the last few decades, almost everyone has been getting poorer and more miserable every time the GDP goes up? Sometimes, astonishingly enough, beliefs do actually have real-world consequences.
      - WalterBright 10y ago
        > they "agreed" to perform assigned duties, right? They aren't slaves. They can quit any time. No employer can force you to do anything - but they don't have to pay you if you don't do the assigned duties. Sounds fair to me.
- yrro 10y ago
  If a contract contains unlawful terms then as far as the law is concerned, the contract does not contain the terms in the first place. So you are well within your rights to ignore such terms. Put differently, my employer pays me to write code, not to review the validity of terms in their contract. If their legal department is incompetent then that's their problem not mine. If they expect me to perform (or not perform) actions on their behalf when I am not at work, and especially once my employment ends, then they are free to offer a consideration in exchange.

geofft 10y ago

Apparently he recruited them while working for Tesla, which is immoral whether or not it's illegal: if you're in senior management, people feel like their job is on the line when they say no to you. That's why you're not allowed to ask them things unrelated to the company's interest where they might want to say no, such as asking them on a date. The same power dynamics are at play when asking someone to jump ship to your new venture - while you remain employed at the old one, you have power over their reviews and their working relationship with the rest of the company.

johncolanduoni 10y ago

Really? Legally obligating your employees to not try to hire their coworkers at a competing business on company time while using company resources is treating employees like goods? That's a pretty bold statement, though I suspect you simply "didn't think about the merits of their case".

alexandercrohde 10y ago
Does it really matter whether it's on "company resources," in any sense other than the outmoded legal sense? Or company time? Perhaps for termination, but it's not against the law to hurt your employer, nor should it be. Perhaps you may want to refresh your perspective by remembering some of the times managers have colluded to keep wages down. "Poaching" is such a ridiculous term for "offering somebody better rewards for their work and them accepting." Stealing proprietary information is another story though, let's not make this whole thing binary.
- johncolanduoni 10y ago
  > Does it really matter whether it's on "company resources," in any sense other than the outmoded legal sense? Or company time? Perhaps for termination, but it's not against the law to hurt your employer, nor should it be. As was mentioned elsewhere in this thread, even California's Labor Code contains such a provision: “An employee who has any business to transact on his own account, similar to that entrusted to him by his employer, shall always give the preference to the business of the employer.” > Perhaps you may want to refresh your perspective by remembering some of the times managers have colluded to keep wages down. How exactly does a senior manager using his position to recruit his subordinates fight that? In fact, it seems like a great way to put employees in precisely that position.
  - alexandercrohde 10y ago
    > even California's Labor Code contains such a provision Again "Any sense other than the outmoded legal sense." I hope you aren't arguing that something not being illegal in California is evidence that the thing is morally good? > "Using his position to recruit his subordinates" What's your implication? That somehow Anderson threatened their careers? Because I don't see anything suggesting that in the article. And frankly, it's disingenous to promote that kind of theory with no evidence and a clear knowledge that such a threat would never fly (I.E. any employee could go to HR and say "he's firing me because I won't join his company with that google guy" and they'd get rehired and potentially win a whistle-blower lawsuit). If you're not implying that some threat was involved, then I have no pity on the people he so maliciously offered superior jobs to.

parennoob 10y ago

I suspect (correct me if I'm wrong) that a large part of your opinion is based on the fairly offensive word "poach" that implies that employees are the employer's property in some way. If that were taken out of the article, perhaps it would make more sense? I think that as 'geofft points out, the fact that this person was trying-to-recruit (not "poach") employees for a future startup while on the job is one of the reasons for Tesla's suit. I think the other reason they give (allegedly stealing data) is far more compelling if true.

AstralStorm 10y ago
Former is easy due to california employees loyalty paragraph and it's a civil suit. Latter is a criminal suit.

devwastaken 10y ago

Being in a leadership role and saying to your team(s) "Hey, lets all take the knowledge we have that this company has paid massive amounts of money in prototypes and testing and overall business, and go start a new business selling the product." Thats why anti-poaching is a thing. When you're investing into researching and creating products, you are investing in the people who do it, along with all the materials and contracting and such. Being able to take the experience of the results of all that and go sell a competing product is stealing and is a major blow to R&D. I don't know the extent of the poaching, or whether its the same thing here, but in this case it was on company time, which is pretty bad.

leereeves 10y ago
If someone takes R&D that the company paid massive amounts of money for, then the company can sue for theft of intellectual property, but people should be free to leave to start other ventures with any knowledge they have that isn't covered by IP laws. Even in groups, as they have right to freedom of association. "Investing in the people who do [R&D]", then suing when they leave, is far too close to owning people.
- AstralStorm 10y ago
  Not when he left. You can sue an ex employee for breach of contract when he was working there. For quite a few years.
  - leereeves 10y ago
    I was just discussing the general principle (in response to the preceding comment) and my opinion about what the law should be, not the merits of this specific case given current law.
solatic 10y ago
And those products are intellectual property. The laboratories, prototypes, documentation, data, and parents are all proprietary and belong to the company, not the individual. All the individual can take with him is his experience and a sense of which direction he could pursue in the future. That's not nothing, of course. But real products require all of the above in order to proceed to market, and all of the above takes a fairly long time for a company to build up, regardless of the experience of the people it hires, because the most those people can do is reduplicate their efforts without the mistakes, and even then pure reduplication is illegal because of parents etc.

Sembiance 10y ago

Sigh. Get off your high horse and actually read the article and the suit. This ex employee is said to have actually stolen gigabytes of data from Tesla and taken it with them to use at their next job. That is clearly wrong.

jusq2 10y ago

It serves another purpose usually. Anyone else planning to leave and poach people will have to do "a little more covering their bases". It really comes down to what top level leaders within the org think the longterm payoff is.