8 ms·

> I really wish we'd stop using the word "poach". It's intentional language used by employers because it has preconceived notions and they succinctly communica

> I really wish we'd stop using the word "poach". It's intentional language used by employers because it has preconceived notions and they succinctly communicate a story that benefits the employer. When you hear poached, you think illegal and victims. It makes you think that the employer has been wronged in some way and that the employee was both participatory in something illegal or at least underhanded and at the same time being taking advantage of. The reality is that the employee was being taken advantage of by the employer and received an offer more closely aligned with their actual value. But that's the nature of the employer/employee relationship, it's never truly balanced and one party is always benefiting more than the other.

thomascgalvin 6y ago
> The reality is that the employee was being taken advantage of by the employer and received an offer more closely aligned with their actual value. In the vast majority of cases, I agree. If someone is working at CompuTech for $100K per year, and gets an offer from TechuComp for $110K per year, that's market forces working in favor of the developer. This is a good thing. But there is the possibility for entities the size of Google to ignore market forces entirely in order to better position themselves. For example, a guy working on self-driving cars might command a salary of $400K in most cases, but Google or Tesla or someone might offer them $600K just to prevent competitors from having access to them. Most companies couldn't afford to do that, but FAANG are so vastly wealthy that they can hire entire engineering teams as a loss leader. This is still good for the developers involved, at least in the short term, but it isn't so great for the market, or society, overall.
- wry_discontent 6y ago
  Isn't this still exactly market forces, though? In your example, Google is just driving up the market price for somebody who works on self-driving cars. In what way is it a deviation from market principles?
  - Bootvis 6y ago
    In the same way as offering products below costs would be to drive out competition and become a monopolist. I'm not sure I think this is bad but I believe this is the argument.
    - JoshTriplett 6y ago
      Equating the two creates a perception that employees shouldn't be paid as much as they're worth. An employee being paid $500k/year is probably producing even more value to their employer than that, and if anything, the goal should be to close the gap between value and compensation, not widen it.
      - Cederfjard 6y ago
        I think the point is that very wealthy companies can temporarily pay employees more than the value they provide, and willingly eat that cost until the competition has been stifled, at which point they can lower compensation again.
        jefftk 6y ago
        On the other hand, offering extremely high salaries makes a lot of people consider becoming programmers who wouldn't otherwise think of it. You can't buy your way out of having your competitors having access to skilled labor, outside of perhaps the very short-term.
        saalweachter 6y ago
        Yeah, this is the housing problem all over again. If the price to buy (well, rent) an engineer is too high, build more engineers.
      - thesuitonym 6y ago
        >is probably producing even more value to their employer than that That's the crux of the argument, though. Google can afford to take a loss on the employee's salary for years, just to keep them from a competitor. We're not talking about Google arbitrarily paying a developer more than their competitors, we're talking about Google diverting funds from other business units to cover costs.
- benburleson 6y ago
  It really depends on the perspective. If we're considering this a zero-sum situation, we have to conclude that your situation is good for developers in general because it will cause all developer/engineer salaries to rise to meet the (possibly inflated) salaries that the market has deemed required to recruit talent. On the other hand, does it mean that some employers won't have money to hire talent? And will that result in some businesses failing? And is that ultimately bad for developers? I don't know, but it feels like it's such a big system that it will balance itself if that is the case.
  - thomascgalvin 6y ago
    Short term, yes. Having a company with deep pockets driving up salaries is great for the people working for those salaries. I've definitely benefited from having a bunch of tech companies a short walk down the road. Long term, however, there's a risk of a monopoly forming, which isn't good for developers or society. FAANG are willing to pay big salaries because they are competing. If they use their power to destroy the competition, that market force goes away.
    - stale2002 6y ago
      > Long term, however, there's a risk of a monopoly forming, which isn't good for developers or society. FAANG are willing to pay big salaries because they are competing. If they use their power to destroy the competition, that market force goes away. Big companies have been overpaying developers for almost a decade now. It is not going away. It is not some short term thing. Instead, that is what these elite tech companies pay. It is not some singular company, that is buying up all of the tech talent. Instead, it is a whole bunch of elite tech companies, paying lots of developers lots of money. The idea that there is one singular company, that is a monopoly on developer talent, that is false, given that there are a whole bunch of them doing it.
      - ghaff 6y ago
        Yes. To oversimplify the model, there are n<10(?) companies that have first dibs on developers who can pass their interview process and want the best comp (and/or want to work at one of those companies for other reasons). But there is competition among those companies even if "everyone" else pretty much doesn't even try to compete with them based on comp. (Which makes talking market price a bit odd in this case. I imagine an economist has some term for it. I guess there's a market price for developers who can get a FAANG offer and then there's a market price for everyone else.)
- sjburt 6y ago
  I really fail to see the distinction. If someone is willing to pay 600k for something, then the value of that thing on the market is 600k. That is what a market is.
  - benrbray 6y ago
    If Google is willing to pay 200k above market rate to hire an employee from a competitor, chances are part of the "value" of that employee is that they will no longer be working for someone else. Yes, literally speaking, it's "worth it" to Google, or they wouldn't do it. Being so large, Google can throw advertising money on their self-driving car division, no problem. They can take a loss for 5-10 years, no problem. However, it's extremely anti-competitive, which is the problem others are pointing out here.
    - FartyMcFarter 6y ago
      > If Google is willing to pay 200k above market rate This is not possible according to the usual definition of "market rate". If Google is willing to pay X, that is the market rate.
      - benrbray 6y ago
        I disagree with your definition of "market rate", but let's suppose you're right: Do you not see it as a problem that Google alone decides the cost of entry to an entire market?
        FartyMcFarter 6y ago
        Why do you think that Google alone can afford to hire software engineers? edit - I see how my post was misleading. I should have said X is a "lower bound" for the market rate.
        benrbray 6y ago
        Do you mean upper bound?
- pietrovismara 6y ago
  >someone might offer them $600K just to prevent competitors from having access to them. Those are still market forces. They aren't paying the worker value, but the damage they will cause to competitors. Welcome to capitalism.
- fragmede 6y ago
  Facebook's stock price will keep going up (hopefully, for people holding them), but they're never going to appreciate in value in the same way an early state startup is going to. 100x returns between strike and exercise price exist. CompuTech can give the programmer more options to make up the difference, and while there's advice to value those options at $0, that's harder for an engineer to ignore once a salary threshold is met. After the first $100k or so in salary - enough for living expenses, soft things like culture fit, are able to become more important to employees, and by offering services like on-site massages directly, employers are able to offer more value than employees could capture themselves. (On-site massages are also used to keep employees on campus longer, but once you start getting "free" massages, they're hard to give up!)
- dakna 6y ago
  > to ignore market forces entirely in order to better position themselves > just to prevent competitors from having access to them They don't ignore the market, they use their resources earned from participating in that market to keep and/or improve their current market positioning. Which is exactly what their shareholders want, and is fair game until treated as a monopolist.
- nickpeterson 6y ago
  People want to work on their interests more than take more money after a certain amount is met. The real power of someone like Google isn’t just paying more money, it’s the variety of projects under its umbrella. They can entice curious cats better.
- robocat 6y ago
  > but Google or Tesla or someone might offer them $600K just to prevent competitors from having access to them This arguments fails on so many dimensions that it must just be a meme. I’ll use Google as the example. For it to work Google has to be able to monopolise the buying of talent. Most damning, the premise itself is self defeating. Somehow Google is picking the most talented people (delivering far in excess of say $1M marginal returns), yet somehow it is paying well below that to steal that talent and furthermore Google is then wasting that talent (employee delivering value below their pay+overhead). To assume Google chooses to waste talent merely to achieve some low value outcome (damaging a competitor by $1 doesn’t magically enhance Google’s returns by $1 so the factors are way out here) seems to assume the Google is somehow acting against their best financial interests. I don’t think Google is as poorly run as that. Also: 1. Occam’s razor: Could it be that a Google is actually getting good value by paying very high salaries? Yes. The average revenue per person for Google is about 160G$ / 115kiloemployees = 1M4 per employee. I do note that using an average is silly because the value distribution is not flat, but neither is the employee salary distribution flat. But the figure is so large, average does say something useful for back-of-envelope calcs. 2. Can Google monopolise by buying power alone? No. Other companies have similarly high returns per employee (Apple is 260G$/160kiloemployees, Netflix is 20G$/20kiloemployees) so for Google to outbid them, it needs to outbid above the marginal revenue per employee, which clearly is well above a 600k$ salary. 3. Can Google corner the market for talent by restricting supply? No. We know that there are plenty of talented developers because Google isn’t the only company making over $1M revenue per employee. Google employs about 115000 people. Let’s say 50000 of those were “overpaid“ to remove them from the competitors. If the total pool of equivalent talent were as small as 250000, then Google couldn’t monopolise talent. Yet other companies with high revenues per employee have a sum total of employees higher than 250000. Furthermore Google’s returns per effective employee become ~$2.8M/employee, so Google can obviously afford to pay $1M for talent it really wants!
- throwawaygh 6y ago
  By the same argument, Computech's sky-high $100K salaries deny k12 access to good stem teachers whose districts can only afford $40K/yr...
cactus2093 6y ago
You learn a lot about people (managers, founders, etc.) by how they handle their employees leaving the company. Looking over my career up to this point, the conversations I've had when leaving a company are ones that I still remember vividly, whereas I've forgotten a lot of other details about these places I worked for years. I think back fondly about the managers that genuinely wished me well at those exciting but scary junctions, even if I had my frustrations with them while I worked there. And if I'm being honest I still hold grudges against the ones that tried to make me feel bad and acted like I was betraying them for taking another job that I felt was the right decision for me at the time. Even from a purely self-interest perspective, it seems to me that it's in every manager's interest not to try to guilt employees that are leaving or talk negatively about them. It's the last chance you have to leave a good impression, it costs you nothing at that point, and you never know when you may cross paths again, or the employee that left may be friends with someone you want to hire in the future and warn them not to join you, etc.
bananaface 6y ago
Oh come on. It's just succinct and communicates what's happening effectively. There's no grand conspiracy to create some underhanded psychological shift in the workforce at large... God, it's so ridiculous. Business slang like this comes from managers bored out of their minds trying to be concise and make corporate interaction marginally interesting. What other word would you recommend? Lured? Hired? They're not as precise.
- ZeroGravitas 6y ago
  They should call it something neutral like "BigCorp unilaterally downsized my team for me".
- liability 6y ago
  The only sense in which 'hired' is less precise is that it doesn't communicate that the former employer is bitter about the situation. Otherwise "they hired people who worked for me" and "they poached my employees" describe the same thing. If the bitter attitude is important to express, then it could be phrased as: "They hired people who worked for me and I have a stick up my ass about it."
  - bananaface 6y ago
    "Hired" does not communicate that the other employer was the instigator. "Did the employee reach out, or was he poached?" I just do not think it's worth getting anal about the terminology. Who gives a shit if your old employer says "poached" when you just got a $50k pay rise?
    - liability 6y ago
      "Contacted and hired" 'Poached' is inherently and deliberately demeaning terminology. There's no reason to not criticize it's use.
chrisco255 6y ago
"taken advantage of" Uh, no. There's no such thing as perfect information in the marketplace. And besides, money is only one vector for a job. There's many other factors that go into deciding who to work for and where to work. Work-life balance, perks, location, team or mission, family responsibilities, etc. You actually can have win-win relationships. They exist.
- pietrovismara 6y ago
  > There's no such thing as perfect information in the marketplace And why not? Are you saying that a market of free and voluntary exchange where every part has access to equal information cannot exist? An exchange where a part is better informed than the other and thus gains profit, is the exact definition of "taking advantage". Wait, isn't that how all exchanges work in the capitalist's workplace?
  - oblio 6y ago
    > And why not? Are you saying that a market of free and voluntary exchange where every part has access to equal information cannot exist? Outside of very limited circumstances, how could it? Only for the simplest of products can you really grok them as well as the people making them.
    - pietrovismara 6y ago
      But the information is available in that case. Independent experts and other customers can (and do) review products. For the workplace there has been some failed attempt like Glassdoor but you generally don't have access to that information while being hired.
crispyambulance 6y ago
> The reality is that the employee was being taken advantage of by the employer and received an offer more closely aligned with their actual value. It is also possible that the "poacher" has such a ridiculous amount of money at their disposal that they're able to suck a talent pool dry with "so-much-money-you-can't-refuse" offers. I think, however, that enough employees are getting wise to the fact that a FAANG offer isn't an automatic "yes". People do turn down offers even if the money is crazy high, especially older folks who have gained some control over their career path, have job-satisfaction, and don't want to stage-dive into a competitive hellscape of Type-A 20-somethings.
- jefftk 6y ago
  For what it's worth, I've been at a FAANG since 2012, and "competitive hellscape of Type-A 20-somethings" sounds completely alien to me. My coworkers and I generally work about 40 hours a week, and don't feel like we are in competition with each other.
s1artibartfast 6y ago
>The reality is that the employee was being taken advantage of by the employer and received an offer more closely aligned with their actual value. Employee value generation isn't fixed. It is entirely possible that the employee can generate more value in the same role at a different company. For example, if the product is more valuable, so is the work.
Angostura 6y ago
I've ben poached, in the past. It was nice. It simply suggests the employee is a scarce, valuable resource, actively sought out.
SNosTrAnDbLe 6y ago
On the same note, what is the difference between a company being acquired by Netflix vs the employee being poached by Netflix. Why is the first one a positive and the second one a negative.
- zhengyi13 6y ago
  Perspective. The employer sees employees as resources. Property. Property doesn't have agency. Someone else is taking the employer's property, but the employer isn't being compensated for the loss of their property. But buying a whole company? That's paying the shareholders for their property. Therefore that's good.
  - SNosTrAnDbLe 6y ago
    The leap from resources to property is a slippery slope. Also, why should shareholders expect compensation for an employee who leaves as long as the he or she was doing whatever his or her function was till their employment ended.

thomascgalvin 6y ago

> The reality is that the employee was being taken advantage of by the employer and received an offer more closely aligned with their actual value. In the vast majority of cases, I agree. If someone is working at CompuTech for $100K per year, and gets an offer from TechuComp for $110K per year, that's market forces working in favor of the developer. This is a good thing. But there is the possibility for entities the size of Google to ignore market forces entirely in order to better position themselves. For example, a guy working on self-driving cars might command a salary of $400K in most cases, but Google or Tesla or someone might offer them $600K just to prevent competitors from having access to them. Most companies couldn't afford to do that, but FAANG are so vastly wealthy that they can hire entire engineering teams as a loss leader. This is still good for the developers involved, at least in the short term, but it isn't so great for the market, or society, overall.

wry_discontent 6y ago
Isn't this still exactly market forces, though? In your example, Google is just driving up the market price for somebody who works on self-driving cars. In what way is it a deviation from market principles?
- Bootvis 6y ago
  In the same way as offering products below costs would be to drive out competition and become a monopolist. I'm not sure I think this is bad but I believe this is the argument.
  - JoshTriplett 6y ago
    Equating the two creates a perception that employees shouldn't be paid as much as they're worth. An employee being paid $500k/year is probably producing even more value to their employer than that, and if anything, the goal should be to close the gap between value and compensation, not widen it.
    - Cederfjard 6y ago
      I think the point is that very wealthy companies can temporarily pay employees more than the value they provide, and willingly eat that cost until the competition has been stifled, at which point they can lower compensation again.
      - jefftk 6y ago
        On the other hand, offering extremely high salaries makes a lot of people consider becoming programmers who wouldn't otherwise think of it. You can't buy your way out of having your competitors having access to skilled labor, outside of perhaps the very short-term.
        saalweachter 6y ago
        Yeah, this is the housing problem all over again. If the price to buy (well, rent) an engineer is too high, build more engineers.
    - thesuitonym 6y ago
      >is probably producing even more value to their employer than that That's the crux of the argument, though. Google can afford to take a loss on the employee's salary for years, just to keep them from a competitor. We're not talking about Google arbitrarily paying a developer more than their competitors, we're talking about Google diverting funds from other business units to cover costs.
benburleson 6y ago
It really depends on the perspective. If we're considering this a zero-sum situation, we have to conclude that your situation is good for developers in general because it will cause all developer/engineer salaries to rise to meet the (possibly inflated) salaries that the market has deemed required to recruit talent. On the other hand, does it mean that some employers won't have money to hire talent? And will that result in some businesses failing? And is that ultimately bad for developers? I don't know, but it feels like it's such a big system that it will balance itself if that is the case.
- thomascgalvin 6y ago
  Short term, yes. Having a company with deep pockets driving up salaries is great for the people working for those salaries. I've definitely benefited from having a bunch of tech companies a short walk down the road. Long term, however, there's a risk of a monopoly forming, which isn't good for developers or society. FAANG are willing to pay big salaries because they are competing. If they use their power to destroy the competition, that market force goes away.
  - stale2002 6y ago
    > Long term, however, there's a risk of a monopoly forming, which isn't good for developers or society. FAANG are willing to pay big salaries because they are competing. If they use their power to destroy the competition, that market force goes away. Big companies have been overpaying developers for almost a decade now. It is not going away. It is not some short term thing. Instead, that is what these elite tech companies pay. It is not some singular company, that is buying up all of the tech talent. Instead, it is a whole bunch of elite tech companies, paying lots of developers lots of money. The idea that there is one singular company, that is a monopoly on developer talent, that is false, given that there are a whole bunch of them doing it.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      Yes. To oversimplify the model, there are n<10(?) companies that have first dibs on developers who can pass their interview process and want the best comp (and/or want to work at one of those companies for other reasons). But there is competition among those companies even if "everyone" else pretty much doesn't even try to compete with them based on comp. (Which makes talking market price a bit odd in this case. I imagine an economist has some term for it. I guess there's a market price for developers who can get a FAANG offer and then there's a market price for everyone else.)
sjburt 6y ago
I really fail to see the distinction. If someone is willing to pay 600k for something, then the value of that thing on the market is 600k. That is what a market is.
- benrbray 6y ago
  If Google is willing to pay 200k above market rate to hire an employee from a competitor, chances are part of the "value" of that employee is that they will no longer be working for someone else. Yes, literally speaking, it's "worth it" to Google, or they wouldn't do it. Being so large, Google can throw advertising money on their self-driving car division, no problem. They can take a loss for 5-10 years, no problem. However, it's extremely anti-competitive, which is the problem others are pointing out here.
  - FartyMcFarter 6y ago
    > If Google is willing to pay 200k above market rate This is not possible according to the usual definition of "market rate". If Google is willing to pay X, that is the market rate.
    - benrbray 6y ago
      I disagree with your definition of "market rate", but let's suppose you're right: Do you not see it as a problem that Google alone decides the cost of entry to an entire market?
      - FartyMcFarter 6y ago
        Why do you think that Google alone can afford to hire software engineers? edit - I see how my post was misleading. I should have said X is a "lower bound" for the market rate.
        benrbray 6y ago
        Do you mean upper bound?
pietrovismara 6y ago
>someone might offer them $600K just to prevent competitors from having access to them. Those are still market forces. They aren't paying the worker value, but the damage they will cause to competitors. Welcome to capitalism.
fragmede 6y ago
Facebook's stock price will keep going up (hopefully, for people holding them), but they're never going to appreciate in value in the same way an early state startup is going to. 100x returns between strike and exercise price exist. CompuTech can give the programmer more options to make up the difference, and while there's advice to value those options at $0, that's harder for an engineer to ignore once a salary threshold is met. After the first $100k or so in salary - enough for living expenses, soft things like culture fit, are able to become more important to employees, and by offering services like on-site massages directly, employers are able to offer more value than employees could capture themselves. (On-site massages are also used to keep employees on campus longer, but once you start getting "free" massages, they're hard to give up!)
dakna 6y ago
> to ignore market forces entirely in order to better position themselves > just to prevent competitors from having access to them They don't ignore the market, they use their resources earned from participating in that market to keep and/or improve their current market positioning. Which is exactly what their shareholders want, and is fair game until treated as a monopolist.
nickpeterson 6y ago
People want to work on their interests more than take more money after a certain amount is met. The real power of someone like Google isn’t just paying more money, it’s the variety of projects under its umbrella. They can entice curious cats better.
robocat 6y ago
> but Google or Tesla or someone might offer them $600K just to prevent competitors from having access to them This arguments fails on so many dimensions that it must just be a meme. I’ll use Google as the example. For it to work Google has to be able to monopolise the buying of talent. Most damning, the premise itself is self defeating. Somehow Google is picking the most talented people (delivering far in excess of say $1M marginal returns), yet somehow it is paying well below that to steal that talent and furthermore Google is then wasting that talent (employee delivering value below their pay+overhead). To assume Google chooses to waste talent merely to achieve some low value outcome (damaging a competitor by $1 doesn’t magically enhance Google’s returns by $1 so the factors are way out here) seems to assume the Google is somehow acting against their best financial interests. I don’t think Google is as poorly run as that. Also: 1. Occam’s razor: Could it be that a Google is actually getting good value by paying very high salaries? Yes. The average revenue per person for Google is about 160G$ / 115kiloemployees = 1M4 per employee. I do note that using an average is silly because the value distribution is not flat, but neither is the employee salary distribution flat. But the figure is so large, average does say something useful for back-of-envelope calcs. 2. Can Google monopolise by buying power alone? No. Other companies have similarly high returns per employee (Apple is 260G$/160kiloemployees, Netflix is 20G$/20kiloemployees) so for Google to outbid them, it needs to outbid above the marginal revenue per employee, which clearly is well above a 600k$ salary. 3. Can Google corner the market for talent by restricting supply? No. We know that there are plenty of talented developers because Google isn’t the only company making over $1M revenue per employee. Google employs about 115000 people. Let’s say 50000 of those were “overpaid“ to remove them from the competitors. If the total pool of equivalent talent were as small as 250000, then Google couldn’t monopolise talent. Yet other companies with high revenues per employee have a sum total of employees higher than 250000. Furthermore Google’s returns per effective employee become ~$2.8M/employee, so Google can obviously afford to pay $1M for talent it really wants!
throwawaygh 6y ago
By the same argument, Computech's sky-high $100K salaries deny k12 access to good stem teachers whose districts can only afford $40K/yr...

cactus2093 6y ago

You learn a lot about people (managers, founders, etc.) by how they handle their employees leaving the company. Looking over my career up to this point, the conversations I've had when leaving a company are ones that I still remember vividly, whereas I've forgotten a lot of other details about these places I worked for years. I think back fondly about the managers that genuinely wished me well at those exciting but scary junctions, even if I had my frustrations with them while I worked there. And if I'm being honest I still hold grudges against the ones that tried to make me feel bad and acted like I was betraying them for taking another job that I felt was the right decision for me at the time. Even from a purely self-interest perspective, it seems to me that it's in every manager's interest not to try to guilt employees that are leaving or talk negatively about them. It's the last chance you have to leave a good impression, it costs you nothing at that point, and you never know when you may cross paths again, or the employee that left may be friends with someone you want to hire in the future and warn them not to join you, etc.

bananaface 6y ago

Oh come on. It's just succinct and communicates what's happening effectively. There's no grand conspiracy to create some underhanded psychological shift in the workforce at large... God, it's so ridiculous. Business slang like this comes from managers bored out of their minds trying to be concise and make corporate interaction marginally interesting. What other word would you recommend? Lured? Hired? They're not as precise.

ZeroGravitas 6y ago
They should call it something neutral like "BigCorp unilaterally downsized my team for me".
liability 6y ago
The only sense in which 'hired' is less precise is that it doesn't communicate that the former employer is bitter about the situation. Otherwise "they hired people who worked for me" and "they poached my employees" describe the same thing. If the bitter attitude is important to express, then it could be phrased as: "They hired people who worked for me and I have a stick up my ass about it."
- bananaface 6y ago
  "Hired" does not communicate that the other employer was the instigator. "Did the employee reach out, or was he poached?" I just do not think it's worth getting anal about the terminology. Who gives a shit if your old employer says "poached" when you just got a $50k pay rise?
  - liability 6y ago
    "Contacted and hired" 'Poached' is inherently and deliberately demeaning terminology. There's no reason to not criticize it's use.

chrisco255 6y ago

"taken advantage of" Uh, no. There's no such thing as perfect information in the marketplace. And besides, money is only one vector for a job. There's many other factors that go into deciding who to work for and where to work. Work-life balance, perks, location, team or mission, family responsibilities, etc. You actually can have win-win relationships. They exist.

pietrovismara 6y ago
> There's no such thing as perfect information in the marketplace And why not? Are you saying that a market of free and voluntary exchange where every part has access to equal information cannot exist? An exchange where a part is better informed than the other and thus gains profit, is the exact definition of "taking advantage". Wait, isn't that how all exchanges work in the capitalist's workplace?
- oblio 6y ago
  > And why not? Are you saying that a market of free and voluntary exchange where every part has access to equal information cannot exist? Outside of very limited circumstances, how could it? Only for the simplest of products can you really grok them as well as the people making them.
  - pietrovismara 6y ago
    But the information is available in that case. Independent experts and other customers can (and do) review products. For the workplace there has been some failed attempt like Glassdoor but you generally don't have access to that information while being hired.

crispyambulance 6y ago

> The reality is that the employee was being taken advantage of by the employer and received an offer more closely aligned with their actual value. It is also possible that the "poacher" has such a ridiculous amount of money at their disposal that they're able to suck a talent pool dry with "so-much-money-you-can't-refuse" offers. I think, however, that enough employees are getting wise to the fact that a FAANG offer isn't an automatic "yes". People do turn down offers even if the money is crazy high, especially older folks who have gained some control over their career path, have job-satisfaction, and don't want to stage-dive into a competitive hellscape of Type-A 20-somethings.

jefftk 6y ago
For what it's worth, I've been at a FAANG since 2012, and "competitive hellscape of Type-A 20-somethings" sounds completely alien to me. My coworkers and I generally work about 40 hours a week, and don't feel like we are in competition with each other.

s1artibartfast 6y ago

>The reality is that the employee was being taken advantage of by the employer and received an offer more closely aligned with their actual value. Employee value generation isn't fixed. It is entirely possible that the employee can generate more value in the same role at a different company. For example, if the product is more valuable, so is the work.

Angostura 6y ago

I've ben poached, in the past. It was nice. It simply suggests the employee is a scarce, valuable resource, actively sought out.

SNosTrAnDbLe 6y ago

On the same note, what is the difference between a company being acquired by Netflix vs the employee being poached by Netflix. Why is the first one a positive and the second one a negative.

zhengyi13 6y ago
Perspective. The employer sees employees as resources. Property. Property doesn't have agency. Someone else is taking the employer's property, but the employer isn't being compensated for the loss of their property. But buying a whole company? That's paying the shareholders for their property. Therefore that's good.
- SNosTrAnDbLe 6y ago
  The leap from resources to property is a slippery slope. Also, why should shareholders expect compensation for an employee who leaves as long as the he or she was doing whatever his or her function was till their employment ended.