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by fnfjfk 908 days ago
Don’t use the term “poaching” to refer to workers deciding to work somewhere else. Workers aren’t owned by their employers, like the king’s deer.

https://medium.com/42hire-don-t-panic-just-hire/stop-calling...

3 comments

It still seems like a useful metaphor when talking about the interactions of higher level entities like corporations.
If the company whose workers were hired away didn’t want that to happen, they should have paid them more or offered better benefits.

When this happens, it’s because workers are winning. Not just those with a new better-paying job, but everyone in the sector that benefits from rising wages.

In theory that’s fair, but in practice it is just another example of large companies with deep pockets bullying smaller businesses.

Taking the interview at face value, those employees were already in the 98 percentile and Apple still doubled their wages.

You are implying that a company has any ownership whatsoever over its workforce. It does not. The workers are not “theirs”, and they are presumably employed under an “at-will” agreement.

Companies and owners sure do get upset when it’s the workers that take advantage of “at-will”.

> You are implying that a company has any ownership whatsoever over its workforce

No I’m not. I’ve never once commented on “ownership”

I just said Apple have deeper pockets so it’s not exactly a fair fight in response to your comment that Masimo should have offered to pay them more.

> If the company whose workers were hired away didn’t want that to happen, they should have paid them more or offered better benefits.

It’s just like when legal threats are made against smaller companies or individuals. Sure, those smaller entities could in theory fight their case. But in practice they usually cannot afford to go head to head with Apple and co, so instead cave to whatever the big corp demands are.

To me the poaching aspect isn't about the workers rights, which are as you said.

It's about the company, Apple, being where it is not supposed to be, for its own gains.

If Apple had said "Can we come to your offices and have a bunch of meetings with your employees to see which we might be interested in hiring?" do you think that Masimo would have indulged that?

Now Apple came and said "We're really interested in a partnership and agreement and licensing with you and want to understand the tech of this space better". And then said "Actually, thanks for sharing all this, but we never really intended to do anything other than mild corporate espionage, and this was just the cover story."

The King owns the land, not the deer. The deer are free to leave… and if they enter onto someone else’s land they may be hunted by someone else. But this assumes they do leave.

It’s one thing to message someone on LinkedIn. It’s something else to enter into a competitors place of business and make the same offers.

> It’s one thing to message someone on LinkedIn. It’s something else to enter into a competitors place of business and make the same offers.

While pretty aggressive, is it actually wrong to walk up to a worker and offer them a job?

Apple seem to think so because Steve Jobs specifically emailed Google to ask them to stop and a recruiter got fired for it.
And what if the king lures the deer to his lands by making it more attractive?
> And what if the king lures the deer to his lands by making it more attractive?

What if the deer did away with kings and made the lands their own?