I think the hiring away is a valuable tool for individual contributors. If you know how to do something that your current employer doesn't value as much as ano

I think the hiring away is a valuable tool for individual contributors. If you know how to do something that your current employer doesn't value as much as another employer, you should be free to go elsewhere. It's a check and balance on your compensation; if your current employer can't make money from your ideas and give you a reasonable cut, and someone else can, then they kind of deserve what they get. In this case, Apple didn't want to buy an entire company just to get an algorithm. So, they found the person that came up with the algorithm and offered them more money to come up with a similar algorithm. Not illegal. Apple has had this happen to them. They had Safari engineers hired away by Google to work on Chrome. They blocked this using back channels and got sued: https://appleinsider.com/articles/14/03/24/steve-jobs-threatened-war-as-google-tried-to-poach-safari-engineers-for-nascent-browser-team https://appleinsider.com/articles/14/03/24/steve-jobs-threat... Basically, Apple wanted to under-compensate software engineers. This is bad for our field in general. It's important that ICs comply with any contracts and applicable law as they are poached, but backroom declarations of "war" or "you can't hire any of my employees unless you buy the entire company" is total horseshit that keeps software engineering compensation low.