[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.