[cookiecaper]

I don't see anything exceptionally dirty about that mail. I went to the article to get the full context and still don't see it. The intimation of the article and, in fact, everything I've heard on this stuff, is that all anti-poaching agreements exist solely for the purpose of depressing employee wages, but I don't think that holds true. It may be technically illegal, but the potential moral implications of a no-poaching agreement are non-obvious and I think decent people can forge these agreements with good intentions.

Reporting on staff movements isn't necessarily selfish or evil. It's important to understand what's going on with your workforce: know where they're going and why. Catmull's email seems totally fine to me -- he's reporting on a poached employee to Jobs, explaining that Sony is aggressively pursuing Pixar personnel, and that they were already taking a certain employee of moderate value particularly. Catmull reiterates that there is no extant no-poach arrangement with Sony. That's useful information for a CEO, right?

I think some people are trying to make this a bigger deal than it has to be. If there's an email that shows direct evidence of conspiracy to fix wages, I'd be interested in seeing that, but I don't think the no-poach agreements need to be assumed to have been a bad-faith arrangement.

EDIT: Woops, HN has decided I'm not allowed to talk anymore. Usually when this happens it lasts a pretty long time (at least several hours, I suspect something like 12-24). I'd like to continue discussing with you all, but that'll have to be it for me in this thread.

[wpietri]

Prices arise through market forces: the competition of buyers for the same goods. If the largest purchasers of a given good agree not to compete, then prices are absolutely harmed.

Understanding where staff is going is reasonable. Making it so that your staff doesn't have opportunities to go anywhere? That's a criminal conspiracy to rig a market.

[cookiecaper]

As a tangent, one could also argue that there's nothing wrong with these compacts, and that market forces would make them untenable if there were truly a dearth of the needed specialized labor to complete the product. Again, that doesn't mean this practice was legal, but the illegality is non-obvious. It's not something that has to strike the average person as fundamentally immoral and socially harmful. If you cast it as an evil plot to steal money from hard-working middle-class Americans, you'll get people fired up, but again, I don't think that's a self-evident conclusion.

[sanderjd]

Do you agree that this is an accurate framing of the issue: a few rich and powerful people were in cahoots in opposition to the best interests of a bunch of far less rich and far less powerful people. If not, in what ways do you view it as being incorrect?

[gojomo]

That's an awful framing. Here's a less-prejudicial, more-correct framing:

Leaders at some major tech companies, responsible for their teams' productivity and often-recognized by their employees as effective and inspirational, turn out to have used reciprocal non-solicitation agreements, now considered illegal, to avoid talent turnover and bidding wars.

This likely reduced some employees' compensation, especially for a few superstar performers, but also may have been a key component to the magical product results their teams achieved, ultimately rewarding everyone involved in those companies (including their satisfied customers). The net effects on employee welfare and total social welfare are unclear, as they've not been carefully studied.

[sanderjd]

I think it's lame that your comment was downvoted, and you're right to question my assertion that these policies were definitively opposed to employee interests, but none of your adjectives debates the existence of a major wealth and power disparity between the two sides. Any exploitation of that sort of disparity is pretty suspicious, regardless of the outcome.

[JackC]

> one could also argue that ... market forces would make them untenable if there were truly a dearth of the needed specialized labor to complete the product.

It's not a good argument.

There are markets where these agreements work and markets where they don't -- it depends on the cost of entry. But this is probably a market where they work, because, well, they exist. Smart people entered into them despite being on notice that they were probably illegal.

To clarify cost of entry: let's say the employees here are wheat farmers. There are hundreds of wheat farmers and five companies that buy wheat to make bread. Those companies compete to buy as much wheat as possible so they can enter as many markets as possible while still making a profit. So they drive up the price, and end up paying roughly as much for the wheat as the value it contributes to the bread-making enterprise. Those are market forces, and the capitalist notion is that they fairly distribute profits among all the people involved -- but they reduce the profits of the five companies.

So let's say the five companies get together and agree to split up the wheat and only pay 80% of the market price. All of their profits go up, all the wheat farmers' profits go down, market forces are no longer operating -- and therefore the agreement is illegal. It's cool if that isn't obvious to everyone, since it's not exactly relevant in most of our lives -- but anyone who's allowed to run a market-leading company has probably had the concept mentioned to them at some point.

But so now the other market forces you're referring to come into play: the five companies have created an opportunity. If some sixth player (like Sony Bread Co.) is willing to come into the market and pay 90%, they can get all the wheat at below market price. This is great for Sony because they get cheap labor without even having to break the law, but it doesn't solve the problem for the wheat farmers. Only if a lot of other players have the same idea will they drive the price back up to the free-market level.

But that assumes the 20% entry bonus created by the illegal cartel is enough to overcome their competitive advantage from already being in the market. Becoming Disney isn't free -- and this kind of cartel is something, pretty much by definition, that you would only go for if you thought you and your compatriots had the market locked down. And you would only drive the price down as far as you thought your competitive advantage could defend.

So, no -- market forces are not a magic wand to make agreements designed to nullify market forces OK.

[cookiecaper]

Your analogy stops short. There's no reason there can't be entrants besides "Sony Bread Co.". As long as the price is below market rates, there is an opportunity waiting to be seized, and someone will come along and seize it, at which point the cartel previously described will be forced to follow suit and pay full market value or lose all of their employees.

It could even be argued that the trust-busters in your analogy are really just anti-entrepreneurial and are attempting to close a rare market opportunity to protect the extant oligopoly. Many laws and regulations actually are written by the dominant powers in a field specifically to heighten the barrier to entry and prevent innovative new services from presenting a threat by burying them in paperwork and compliance expenses.

[cookiecaper]

I agree that a likely effect was artificial depression of employee salaries, but I don't think we've seen it adequately demonstrated that that was the primary intended effect and not just an unintentional or tertiary side effect of the agreement. Frequent poaching is often considered unsportsmanlike competition by business people; I know several of the companies I've been affiliated with have felt that way. It's possible that Pixar et al had the best intentions when establishing this protocol.

It doesn't really leave the employee without somewhere to go, it just makes it harder for them to find employment at a direct competitor while still employed. I would bet that most people who would've been poached would've been hired by a competitor within hours of resigning at their current employer.

That doesn't make it OK, and like I said, it's very possible all of this was illegal from the get-go. I'm just saying there's no need to jump to the conclusion that malice and conspiracy were the primary motives behind these compacts, and there's no need to drag someone's name through the mud when definitive evidence doesn't exist.

[potatolicious]

> " but I don't think we've seen it adequately demonstrated that that was the primary intended effect and not just an unintentional or tertiary side effect of the agreement"

Do we need to demonstrate intention? You brought up mens rea elsewhere in the thread but it hardly seems relevant at the end of the day. Someone with a clear intent to screw his employees certainly is more despicable and villainesque, but the practical impact on the employees is the same even if he did so unintentionally.

And we can frown upon it all the same, because it's not as if he did something innocent with unforeseen side effect - the agreement was illegal, and the fact that it was secret suggests everyone involved knew this.

So yeah, I'm maybe willing to believe that Ed Catmull didn't go out there with the explicit intent of screwing his employees. He may have engaged in this agreement in protection of his company, or of his work, but ultimately he (and every other SV CEO involved) kept it hush-hush because they knew it was illegal and immoral, and that the wider world would cry foul at what they were doing.

Mens rea would make the morality of this more open and shut, but I do not believe it is critical to our ability to judge the impact and legacy of these actions.

> "Frequent poaching is often considered unsportsmanlike competition by business people; I know several of the companies I've been affiliated with have felt that way."

But yet this isn't a game. These are people, not basketballs. It's careers, not the soccer field. It's families, children, vacations, dreams, plans, not points in to be scored against your opponent.

You're being unfairly downvoted IMO and you've brought up some good points, but what you're seeing (some have stated this explicitly) is backlash against business folk who are so concerned about the high-level game being played that they've forgotten that the pieces on the board are people.

The mistake here is the belief that this is somehow unique to Ed Catmull, Eric Schmidt, Steve Jobs, et al. The demonization of him I'm seeing in this thread is disappointing because a large percentage of the people doing the pitchfork-waving would have done the exact same thing in his position. All sufficiently complex systems (the movie industry certainly one of them) evolve complex rules and strategies, and it's remarkably easy to get lost in them and forget that these systems are built on top of people.

It's tempting to think of people who do bad things as "evil men", because it gives us security: "I'd never do something like that, phew". In reality though there are few evil men, but many men who do evil things. The notion that some people are capable of evil while others are not is hubris, and is a great way to end up on the wrong side of the morality scale without even knowing it. I personally doubt Ed Catmull ever got out of bed in the morning and decided he was going to screw a bunch of animators and inhibit their careers, but yet it happened, and I'd encourage all the pitchfork-wavers in this thread to consider that they themselves can just as easily end up in that position, especially if they approach life with the assumption that they're one of the Good Guys.

[cookiecaper]

>And we can frown upon it all the same, because it's not as if he did something innocent with unforeseen side effect - the agreement was illegal, and the fact that it was secret suggests everyone involved knew this.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't most corporate agreements like this secret by default? It's an internal business mechanic and can be considered proprietary based on that. The press releases only come out when a company thinks something is of low enough tactical value that it can be revealed without harming the company and high enough PR value that it can be used to woo investors or consumers.

I don't think there's any inference that the pacts were considered immoral by the signatories in the fact that they weren't publicly declared. There were obviously many people between all of the participant companies that knew about these pacts, and it doesn't sound like it was considered super-duper-top-secret and could only be mentioned behind the closed doors of the CEO's office.

As I stated elsewhere, we should also consider the DOJ's angle on this. Prosecutors want to make a name for themselves and it's in their interest to portray all of their defendants as scoundrels. They want to blow open a big public scandal. They want to leave a legacy before the next president comes in and restocks the department with his own people. The prosecutor's job is practically to convince everyone that the defendants are evil, but in cases like this, it's rarely true. We need to acknowledge these perverse incentives as we read about this case, too.

>what you're seeing (some have stated this explicitly) is backlash against business folk who are so concerned about the high-level game being played that they've forgotten that the pieces on the board are people.

I don't think that's a fair characterization either. An executive's concern for everyone on his staff causes him to act in the best interest of the company as a whole, and not just the best interest of a specific individual or a specific type of employee that may be in greater demand. If bidding wars and poaching becomes disruptive, it's natural to seek a remedy. Catmull states several times in these articles that poaching is "bad for everyone" and seems sincere in that belief. He believes it's bad for executives, employees, competing studios, etc., and one can see the logic in that belief. He tried to stop a practice that he viewed as parasitic. In Catmull's view, even if an animator got poached with a big raise, this practice is still a net negative, presumably because it destabilizes the industry and potentially decreases the longevity of that career.

Maybe he was wrong and maybe he broke the law. But it doesn't mean that he forgot that his employees were real people.

I appreciate the rest of your post, which acknowledges that Catmull is probably not irredeemably evil.

[mullingitover]

> It doesn't really leave the employee without somewhere to go, it just makes it harder for them to find employment at a direct competitor while still employed.

They stopped being direct competitors the minute they agreed to collude. The term you're looking for is 'fellow cartel member.'

[chrismcb]

Did you miss this part: “…even raiding other studios has very bad long term consequences [i.e., higher benefits for employees, lower profits for companies and executives—M.A.].”

It looks like the primary intended effect was to keep salaries and benefits low

[cookiecaper]

The brackets are editorial from the editor of the post. They're not in the original email. That's the author's opinion on the bad consequences that Catmull is referencing.

[yarrel]

The no-poach agreements were clearly made in good faith between the parties involved.

It's the parties who were not party to the agreement but whose wage-earning potential was affected by it that are the problem.

[mullingitover]

> If there's an email that shows direct evidence of conspiracy to fix wages, I'd be interested in seeing that, but I don't think the no-poach agreements need to be assumed to have been a bad-faith arrangement.

Depressed wages are the whole point. The no-poach collusion is there to prevent the companies involved from being in a position where they need to make a counteroffer to retain their talent.

[gojomo]

That's a simplistic view. What if the 'whole point' was avoiding project-unraveling team turnover, and deterring a corrosive culture of mercenary focus on salary rather than intangible or equity compensation?

Counteroffers once an employee has mentioned a plan to leave are so fraught with morale issues that many managers recommend against them no matter what. And auctions suck for buyers due to the "winner's curse" – wise buyers will often try to avoid being part of an auction process.

Does that mean the seller always wants an auction, highest price always being best? Maybe if you can sell-and-forget a physical item. But selling your unique-in-the-industry talents for the next N years isn't quite like that: it's a relationship where you'll need a full gelled team and other costly resources to do well, and some safety margin for miscalculations. A 'cursed' winner who overpays for you, and others, might wind up sinking your projects and career when the errors manifest.

Pixar employees have done very well, overall, including through stock options which became more valuable because their teams stuck together, and delivered critically-lauded and highly-profitable work at sustainable costs. Perhaps an alternate-history, with more talent raids and compensation bidding-wars, would have led to some superstar employees making even more money. But it might also have torpedoed key projects at key moments, and left the company and the bulk of the employees, far worse off. It's not a simple situation to model.

[alexqgb]

"That's a simplistic view. What if the 'whole point' was avoiding project-unraveling team turnover, and deterring a corrosive culture of mercenary focus on salary rather than intangible or equity compensation?"

The easy (and legal!) way to do this is to get people under contract. Executive teams do this among themselves all the time, so it's not as though they're unfamiliar wit the principle or the practice. Sports teams do it too, as do a lot of creative fields where the particular people involved make all the difference.

The obvious downside (from the perspective of the suits) is that they end up paying more for talent than otherwise would. Every dollar going to the staff is a dollar that isn't available to the executive team. It's a zero sum game, and the guys on top were playing dirty to get what they'd never be able to get if they kept it clean.

[cookiecaper]

It's not easy at all to enter into a contract with a large number of employees. Nobody wants to do things that way, including the employees. Individual contract negotiations happen only on a small scale; as you stated, typically only for executives or sports teams, which may total <= 30 individuals.

I've personally tried to negotiate a contract in an at-will employment state with a company when I accepted a directorship there. They refused to budge on it. It was at-will or nothing, and their excuse was "We've only ever heard of that kind of thing for C-levels". I would've been giving up a lot of flexibility too, and most employees wouldn't be ready for that or willing to do it.

>Every dollar going to the staff is a dollar that isn't available to the executive team.

That's not how corporate structure works, especially corporate structure in a progressive startup like Pixar used to be. Yes, there are performance bonuses for executives, but there are also profit sharing bonuses and stock options for rank-and-file employees, which creates an interest in the company's welfare beyond the universal "I don't want to lose my job". It's silly to act like there's a direct inverse correlation between dollars spent on wages and dollars forwarded to executives' personal bank accounts.

At this point I'm convinced this thread is just an anti-capitalist, anti-business crusade by misguided justice warriors. Pretty disappointing for a platform that's supposed to be intended for entrepreneurs.

[alexqgb]

"Nobody wants to do things that way, including the employees."

Well, nobody except yourself, of course.

Like you said a moment later, "I've personally tried to negotiate a contract in an at-will employment state with a company when I accepted a directorship there."

I don't know about you, but if I typed something that flatly contradicted a statement I'd made not two lines prior I'd think twice about hitting "publish". As the old saw says, 'It's better to say nothing and be though a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt'.

And as it turns out, there are lots of people who recognize the unwelcome risk built into an agreement that allows their employment to be terminated with or without notice, with or without cause, at any time, and without any compensation. (That's the definition of "at-will" for those of you unfamiliar with the precise legal construction.)

Typically, this is far more beneficial to employers than it is to employees and it shouldn't be hard to figure out why. Indeed, most people's reasons for wanting a contract are probably similar to your own reasons for doing precisely what you did. So before you embarrass yourself any further, take a moment and just...think.

[cookiecaper]

I can tell you that my case was atypical. Most people do want at-will employment. They don't want a contract. I usually want at-will employment, and as it turned out, the contract I proposed would've ultimately come back to bite me if it had been implemented. I'm currently employed and I don't want a contract with my current employer (unless my role was completely changed). Again, we don't need to jump right into "business people are evil moustache-twirlers" every time employee-employer relations come up. At-will employment was put in place for Good Reasons, and there are employees (like myself!) who usually want it.

I've done a reasonable amount of interviewing and hiring in my time, and I never had a candidate propose a long-term contract. I know some of the people I hired would probably think it sounds good at the outset, but they would be quite upset when the employer doesn't do the "polite" thing and let them out of their contracts whenever they want to go somewhere else. They would then come on HN and try to name and shame this company that hates its employees and resents their professional development, and is keeping developers in iron shackles while they have to pass up opportunities to make way more money! Then a bunch of social justice warriors will call the corporate heads monsters, claim their actions violate obscure elements of obscure laws, burn effigies, etc.

Others are like me and almost always want the freedom to leave when things start to go awry. There's no need to stay aboard a sinking ship any longer than necessary.

Almost nobody really wants employment-by-contract.

[lr]

I can see what you are saying (however, I don't agree), but I think there is a bigger issue afoot: there are just too few companies that do any one thing, i.e., in a world of 7+ billion people, there are only a handful of companies that make feature-length CG films that the majority (of movie ticket buyers on the planet) watches. Because of this, those handful of companies are a virtual monopoly (cartel), and can, and do act in this bad way.

[rahimnathwani]

s/monopoly/monopsony

[brown9-2]

What are the good intentions you think someone could hypothetically have?

[cookiecaper]

* More effectively preventing the transfer of trade secrets or other proprietary information; non-competes are widely unenforceable, so while no-poach doesn't necessarily stop it, it makes it less likely.

* Preventing major disruption to studios' projects as key players are poached any time a film goes into production. You could say they should have separate contracts binding the employee to stay for the duration if that's the concern, but that's not really practical, especially in an at-will employment state, where said contracts will be viewed with heavy skepticism by all parties. The more efficient way to achieve a similar effect is to just agree at the corporate level that you won't engage in this practice. This can have the side effect of limiting wages, but I don't think it necessarily has to.

* "Poaching" can be variously defined; the contract may make it legal for a competitor to process an applicant, but not legal to actively pursue staff that have not expressed direct interest. In such arrangements, employee mobility would be considerably less hampered.

I think those are good intentions. The business guy is trying to do right by the business, which is the sum of all of his employees. One could logically conclude that if films are constantly hindered by bidding wars, making 90% of the process recruitment, and secret information is constantly wrongly disseminated by that high rate of turnover, that his business may struggle and jeopardize the livelihoods of everyone involved. Some people may not believe it, but employee dependence does weigh heavily on good people in high-powered corporate positions.

One could also argue that the bidding wars just have to continue until the price for an animator stabilizes and that the companies just need to suck it up. These highly-editorialized articles definitely seem to make that case, and claim that the law backs up that perspective. That's fine if so. But it doesn't make Ed Catmull or the executives at every other firm involved in these pacts evil moustache-twirlers that exist only to steal from the middle-class, and we shouldn't be so quick to throw our own under the bus.

[dpritchett]

Why not negotiate a way to make the employee want to stay for the duration of the project? If the monthly salary isn't enough to ensure the duration of service you need, find a way to offer additional compensation.

Try back-loading the employee's contract with increasingly large incentives in the latter stages of the project. Any steps you take that limit the employee's career mobility and agency without employee agreement and compensation are suspect.

[shiven]

I do like this idea of a 'vesting'-like timeline. Especially in high-risk, high-turnover projects, tying final bonuses upfront to sticking till the project ends sounds like a rational solution.

[greggman]

An employee really worth it will see their salary go up. An employee that keeps switching to the highest bidder will gain a rep as unreliable.

That problem solves itself. No need for the employer to trample on the employee

[gojomo]

But is simply refraining from one specific something – outbound targeted 'poaching' of your competitor's superstars – really 'trampling' on the employee?

If they never hired an applicant from a competitor, that'd be low. If they sabotaged their own employees' independent applications elsewhere, that'd be low.

But targeted outbound recruiting is a very specific activity – which is sometimes even viewed as harassment by the targets themselves. It's likely zero-sum for the industry, and possibly negative-sum – if it disrupts ongoing projects and deters investment in employee-specific enrichments.

A cutthroat bidding-war attitude – between competitors, and between employee short-term compensation and the enterprise's long-term value – isn't necessarily in the interest of all industries or even most of the employees. (It might, for example, reward superstars but at the expense of the bulk of employees seeking stability and meaning in their work. It's hard to say, and the rush-to-demonize crowd does not appear to have studied the tradeoffs as closely as Catmull and similar.)

Starting a cycle of incentivized poaching could be like starting a cycle of nasty-negative-advertising. A first-mover might get a temporary advantage, but once everyone responds, they're all worse off for having competed in that way. Even the stars who 'won' immediate compensation boosts might wind up losing, as projects fail and the industry underperforms.

[secstate]

I appreciate the grey area here and that probably calling Catmull a monster is taking things a bit far. But especially the email about Jill getting poached suggested that Pixar had zero interest in promoting her internally, while Sony was offering her a chance at career growth.

It's hard not to sound like an asshole while you tell someone they're not good enough to be promoted while also having a handshake agreement with your direct competitors to nod along and make it easier for you to manage your profit margins.

[cookiecaper]

>But especially the email about Jill getting poached suggested that Pixar had zero interest in promoting her internally

The email seemed to reflect that Pixar had considered promoting the poached employee and hadn't done so for Good Reasons(TM). Catmull admitted she had potential and would probably grow into a promotion at Pixar, but stated she was lacking experience in a "major area" of the production cycle. That doesn't sound like an arbitrary "I hate employees, let's treat them like dirt" conclusion, it sounds reasonable to me. Sony was desperate enough to hire people that didn't have that experience, but Pixar wasn't, so she went to work for Sony. I don't see the problem.

[jsmeaton]

> An employee really worth it will see their salary go up.

Maybe at some places but I'd bet not at the vast majority. An employee that is worth more than they are paid will sometimes be given a raise that was not asked for. The employee may also ask for a raise and either be denied or accepted. Lastly, the employee may look elsewhere and be recognised for the new value that they can bring.

Of the 3, the last option is what I've noticed much more often. This isn't (always) the "fault" of the employee, but of the employer unwilling to recognise or pay for the value being delivered.

I imagine the thought process goes "they are delivering X for value Y, why would we give away our profits for value Z?". But just like companies that need to demonstrate profit growth, the employees will want to see their own profits grow especially when their experience should lead to increased value delivered.

[confluence]

What about this part?

> We don’t have a no raid arrangement with Sony. We have set up one with ILM [Lucasfilm] and Dreamworks which has worked quite well. I probably should go down and meet with Sandy and Penney and Sony to reach some agreement. Our people are become [sic] really desirable and we need to nip this in the bud.

[corysama]

Quick reminder to everyone: Please don't downvote comments that contribute to the conversation just because you disagree with them.

You might think that cookiecaper is an insensitive clod. But, he's not posting fluff, off-topic or otherwise distracting material.

[learc83]

>Please don't downvote comments that contribute to the conversation just because you disagree with them.

That's a rule on Reddit, but to my knowledge it's never been a rule here.

Here's pg's own words on the subject.

>I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

[tzs]

That would make sense if all down voting did was show the net score, or the up/down breakdown.

However, when an article has a more down votes than up votes, it is also made harder to read, and the bigger the difference, the harder to read it becomes. That makes pg's remark make little sense, unless HN is supposed to be a place where disagreeing with the majority is discouraged, which is not very hackerish. Some clarification from pg would be helpful here.

[alexqgb]

If nothing else, cookiecaper represents the kind of thinking that leads to these situations in the first place. Yes, it's stupid. Yes, it's amoral. Yes, it betrays profound ignorance of the law and ethics, and yes, it's shot through with the kind of "logic" so poor it's actually repulsive. But that's actually the point.

In the same way that smoke indicates fire, a stink like this indicates a giant pile of shit. And that's exactly what's just hit the fan.

If you (a) agree with cookiecaper and (b) have anything to do with HR, now would be a great time to consider switching careers. You simply don't have the moral judgement your job requires. Better get out now before you find yourself in the middle of a similar mess.

[cookiecaper]

On the contrary, I believe that the kind of "moral judgment" I've exhibited makes me better qualified for leadership than all of these people that have zero ability to empathize with the execs of Pixar and five other major animation houses, and automatically jumps to the conclusion that they're evil and dastardly. I didn't say Catmull is my new personal idol, I'm just making an argument that is conspicuously absent from the rest of this thread -- namely, that Catmull is not necessarily Literally Hitler based on the information we have available, which is a bandwagon most people here seem excited to jump aboard.

I didn't say Catmull shouldn't face consequences. I didn't say what he did was super-cool. I'm trying to provide a more reasonable POV here, and indicate that there's nothing indicating mens rea up to this point, and most people are inferring there is. And even if there is, we should consider this in a dispassionate manner, and continue to value Catmull's contributions in reasonable proportion.

I don't understand why this community is so quick to demonize and trample people, especially people like Catmull or Eich who have long, long histories of stellar contribution and reputation. I think it has more to do with the witch hunters being unable to think outside of the constraints of the cast story if it hits their righteousness button on the way down. But this attitude of discarding people like trash because they make a conclusion that we don't like is ridiculous and damaging. I can't see how anyone would be excited to enter a field filled with such people.

[judk]

Your personal attacks on cookiecaper are disgusting.

[alexqgb]

Here's the thing: when you're discussing the failures of another person's moral reasoning, you are inevitably calling their character into question. It may not be the point, but it's unavoidably the effect.

For the same reason that you can't state that someone is lying without denigrating their character, you cannot point out that someone is representing an utterly amoral position without implying that they are a generally untrustworthy human being.

Let me put it this way: would you be comfortable having cookiecaper running HR for your company? I should hope not. But if you were, what would you tell a board member who came across a post like this an wanted to know why - exactly - a guy this demonstrably off-base was being allowed to fill a position that carried so much risk?

For what it's worth, people were just downvoting the guy. I think there's some value in seeing what he has to say in order to better understand that mindset that let to the moral implosion we're presently discussing.

Separately, I think the tone of condemnation is actually very important. I'm sure there are plenty of people here who have had damaging encounters with others who think and act like cookiecaper (e.g. anyone who has worked under Catmull). It's important to establish, in a very public fashion, that the values he displays are absolutely not okay.

[gojomo]

Your attack is high on prejudicial conclusion-jumping disgust-invoking labels – 'stupid', 'amoral', 'stink', 'pile of shit' – and low on reasoning. It's also unnecessarily personal – implying a person holding a reasoned opinion is an untouchable outcast.

That's what makes it out-of-bounds.

Looking back, you made no substantive comments on thread. You just opened by making a speaker the subject, and slurring that speaker. That's nasty.

[alexqgb]

Try looking back a bit further. You'll note that it was actually the previous poster who had made the speaker the subject, and that was in the context of a remark about how he was being reflexively down-voted for (presumably) making conspicuously bad arguments.

Bear in mind that it was failures of reasoning like these - that is to say, ones grounded in distinctly personal shortcomings - that produced the situation at Pixar which we're discussing. Indeed, for those of us whose careers have taught us the importance of making suitably judicious assessments of the personal character of those we depend on, a discussion of the rhetorical hallmarks of people who defend illegal and abusive employment practices is vitally important. Spotting them quickly can be the difference between a really bad choice and a good one. So again, that's why I was saying there's value in cookiecaper's otherwise objectionable remarks: they're a case study in the kind of stuff you really do need to watch out for.

And within the specific social context I noted - i.e. people working in HR - remarks like cookiecaper's jolly well should him an untouchable outcast. For the same reason you don't want a person with a lax attitude about embezzling anywhere near your finance department, you don't want a person who thinks that contracts are "inconvenient" in a position where they're likely to conclude that violating the law "is just a lot faster and easier" than respecting it. (I'm paraphrasing, but that's the essence of the "reasoning" on display.)

Now perhaps you don't consider a frank characterization of the sub-par ethical traits that are the direct cause of problems like Pixar's to be "substantive". On that point I can only say that we sharply disagree.

[sitkack]

fancy words but a thin skin.