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Sounds like a few engineers found out that Apple was looking into their company and knowing Apple was interested they took a new gig, meanwhile the CEO got upse
by tallgiraffe 6y ago
Sounds like a few engineers found out that Apple was looking into their company and knowing Apple was interested they took a new gig, meanwhile the CEO got upset and decided to fire the last remaining defecting engineer, who out of goodness of heart actually declined Apple, but gratefully took the offer once he got fired. Although it probably hurts to have your team poached, it sounds like potentially it wasn't a great working environment to begin with as the team was happy to jump ship at the first notice.
- batmaniam 6y agoWe should rid of the term 'poaching'. There's no such thing. We're not animals, we are free to accept a better offer it comes along. The CEO should have counter offered with something more substantial, but he couldn't so the engineers went to greener pastures.
- blhack 6y ago>but he couldn't so the engineers went to greener pastures. She.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- m12k 6y agoThey. (I'm assuming you did your research and the CTO is in fact female, but it's better to teach people to use a gender neutral term when they don't know the gender of the person in question, and it is irrelevant to the discussion like it is here)
- bernawil 6y agoWe're not animals so the engineers went to greener pastures ...for grazing?
- yarg 6y agoWe are animals. Why the fuck people insist on claiming otherwise is beyond me.
- cblconfederate 6y agobecause they are animals
- unethical_ban 6y agoYou clearly missed the point with your edge.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- baby 6y agoAt the same time how can smaller companies compete with large companies if they can’t match salaries?
- throwqrm 6y agoHuge equity stakes. Huge. Not "align incentives" level stakes. "Google's chef has $26 million" stakes.
- ed25519FUUU 6y agoHow do you express that as a percentage in equity? Also, it really seems pointless, because as they take on more funding guess whose “huge stake” gets diluted.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- djur 6y agoAnd that's a risk that founders need to take into account -- that by diluting their early engineers' equity, they're risking losing those engineers.
- baby 6y agogot an offer to be the 20th employee or something in a startup as a senior engineer, and they offered me 0.01% of equity or something. I thought that was ridiculously low.
- 4ggr0 6y agoEDIT: Of course my whole calculation was wrong. Well, it first seemed low to me as well. But 0.01% of one million is ten thousand, which doesn't sound that bad. One million also seems low for a successful company. The same offer would give you ten billion at apple. Disclaimer: I am not good at math and I don't understand stocks, equity etc. So maybe I am completely wrong.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- crazygringo 6y agoWhen you're talking about individuals, sure. But when you're talking about a whole team, it's a little different. Original employer A went to a lot of expensive effort to find a very particular set of qualified engineers that could work together at the same time -- where the sum is much more than the parts. If employer B hires the team already put together perfectly qualified for a similar task roughly all at once... they're not just taking advantage of employees' freedom (which is fine) but literally essentially "stealing" the massive work employer A did to assemble the team piece by piece. I'm not saying it should be illegal, because I don't see how you'd write any effective law against it. But when you take a whole team at once, I think the word "poaching" is apt.
- andrewljohnson 6y agoYeah, seems fitting, "Poaching has been defined as the illegal hunting or capturing of wild animals, usually associated with land use rights." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poaching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poaching The "land use rights" part. The analogy works because on some level the company is "your land."
- e_y_ 6y agoThe other scenario where I would find "poaching" somewhat unethical is when the primary purpose is depriving a competing company of talent. In that scenario, in order to entice them you might offer bonuses and salary that are disproportionate to the value those employees would contribute to your company, but the loss of those employees would cripple the competitor (loss of institutional knowledge, schedule delays and cost of finding replacements, morale, etc). The company can counter-offer but that costs them money they wouldn't otherwise have to spend, to protect their "investment" -- the sum of the parts as you mentioned. Ideally a company would be resilient against the loss of employees (e.g. getting hit by a bus) but smaller companies like startups don't often have that luxury, which makes them more vulnerable to poaching and other shenanigans instigated by large companies.
- dbuder 6y agoWe are animals.
- pwdisswordfish4 6y agoYou mean, humans aren’t animals?
- sildur 6y agoIn English, it’s common to use the expression “we are not animals” meaning “we should not be treated like we treat other animals”. In this particular example, the problem was applying the term “poaching” to humans, when it is commonly used for non-human animals. It has been accepted for decades by the scientific community, and the general population at large, that humans are, in fact, animals. But language takes time to react to changes changes. And that’s why “we are not animals” is still being used, even though the meaning today is “we should not be treated like we treat other animals”. Hopefully all of this is clear.
- AmericanChopper 6y agoTo me it sounds like the CEO and the investors neither understood what was valuable about their company, nor who was creating that value. A completely self-inflicted wound from Hooked, with everybody who actually understood the situation ending up better off. I can't imagine why you'd ever feel bad for a company that fails to retain its staff. Employees finding better jobs in other companies is one of the best market outcomes you could want.