Yes, I have been poached. The new team’s tech lead started planting the seed. I was just wrapping up my previous project, was unhappy with my management chain, and decided to take him up on it. I was friendly with the new team’s management, so the tech lead didn’t really need to pull any strings.
Ask HN: Have you ever been “poached” internally? Is this even a thing?
11–20 of 62 posts
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever been “poached” internally? Is this even a thing?
#12A small team of us self poached - we worked on a project that got killed by politics, so made a pitch to transfer a different group that we respected a bit more. Won’t say it’s perfect, but it is better.
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever been “poached” internally? Is this even a thing?
#13Switch teams without a 30% pay bump? Why bother, just interview.
Work visas :D
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever been “poached” internally? Is this even a thing?
#14> Have you done this/had this kind of internal "poach" happen to you
First job, was the QE and release build person for the team of embedded devs.
QE turned into QE automation (think AT commands in a loop & basic JTAG), release build work turned into being CVS admin & a sort of manual Jenkins job (come by my desk, drop a patch, get a debug build out faster than the dev laptops when the build server was idle).
And the result was that when a dev left, I was lifted into dev and someone else was hired into QE to run my scripts every week.
In under 2 years from start to finish, I was out of the door because it went from a work-item project to a time-driven project (so the faster you were, the worse the billable hours looked). I wasn't going to stick around office and fake overtime.
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever been “poached” internally? Is this even a thing?
#15I was recently "poached" as an engineer myself. I really like working for the company I'm at, but was ready for a change and new challenges. A colleague I'd previously worked with was building a new team reached out to see if I'd join his team. It sounded like a great opportunity, so I said yes. It's been a good decision.
Internal poaching is hardly uncommon and in fact you'll often see engineers follow each other large companies in small flocks- on engineer is frustrated, gets an internal transfer, and tries to get the best engineers from thier old team to join thier new team is. This is networking (the interpersonal kind) at work.
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever been “poached” internally? Is this even a thing?
#16Almost happened to me once, I turned it down because I'd just started and I felt a duty to the person that hired me. That was a good decision, because it would've moved me out of an engineering oriented department into a maintenance/infrastructure oriented one, which I was already good at, if I had taken them up on it I wouldn't have learned and grown the way I did.
If I was already familiar with my current role enough that it became repetitive and there was more to learn in the other team, absolutely I would do it. I've always got to be learning new things or I begin to lose my mind.
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever been “poached” internally? Is this even a thing?
#17I've seen it, and I've been it, on both sides of the table. But this isn't "poaching", a term loaded with unnecessary negative connotations. Your friend advertised their skills effectively in an internal market, subsequently transferring to a location where those abilities might create more value.
Not sure why this might be considered a stunning, surprising, or intrinsically undesirable outcome.
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever been “poached” internally? Is this even a thing?
#18Switch teams without a 30% pay bump? Why bother, just interview.
I really like my company, have continuously advanced within it, and I’m at point in life that while I still care about money, the difference in my happiness of an extra $30-60k/year isn’t particularly material but a bad work environment would be.
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever been “poached” internally? Is this even a thing?
#19I got tired of working as an engineer in the marketing org at Mozilla and told my boss I wanted to move to another team, so we shopped around a bit and found that the team working on web tools used by Firefox devs (e.g. crash analysis, experiment system) had a headcount to trade, and a few weeks later I was on a different team and the marketing team was interviewing to hire someone new. It was pretty normal and happened a lot.
Re: Ask HN: Have you ever been “poached” internally? Is this even a thing?
#20I've had this happen at my current place, my pm kept raving about me and giving me alot of kudos. Another pm grabbed me and have a good relationship with her. It's nice to feel appreciated.