41–50 of 56 posts
What I like about the new Silicon Valley elite is that those asshats are too socially gauche to realize that their attitudes are considered completely unacceptable by, well, everyone else. It's really fun to watch them humiliate themselves in Valleywag.
This article was written just a few months after the Justice Department in late 2010 announced its agreement with Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit and Pixar regarding their anticompetitive practices. It is clearly a reaction to that agreement and its purpose is to lay out an argument that can be used to maintain plausible deniability regarding anticompetitive agreements by arguing that these activities are just fr…
I think this is an interesting aspect about business reasoning that a lot of people don't understand. Even though another comment here points out this isn't correct. If something is illegal and carries a risk of large fines or a large civil judgement, that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it necessarily. It just means that you have to weigh that potential cost against the benefits of doing it. If the benefits are greater, you go ahead and pay the fine or the litigation as a cost of doing business.
You don't change the way companies operate by going on about whether something is right or wrong. You have to introduce a cost larger than any potential benefit. If not hiring person X costs you a couple hundred thousand dollars in a civil judgement, but helps you keep a business partnership that's worth hundreds of millions in revenue, you'd have to be crazy to go ahead and hire someone from a business partner in those circumstances.
The similarities between this post and the actions that Google and Apple took and are now being investigated for are striking. At a small scale, it's just "good business" not to poach. At a large scale it's "evil" and illegal. Seems rather arbitrary to me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not about colluding, it's just that the new CEO is bound to not hire you out of loyalty to his/her friend. Social laws and laws on the books don't always line up well.
col·lude (kə-lo̅o̅d′) intr.v. col·lud·ed, col·lud·ing, col·ludes To act together secretly to achieve a fraudulent, illegal, or deceitful purpose; conspire. -- Seems like colluding to me. Just like in the Google/Apple/Adobe case. It doesn't matter if it's done out of friendship or fear of upsetting almighty Steve Jobs.
But even if it wasn't outright collusion, it could still be ethically questionable to limit another person's opportunities just because you're afraid of losing someone's friendship.
What a bizarre kind of possessiveness. Companies don't own their employees. Slavery is supposed to have ended quite some time ago (yes, I know it still exists). If you want to hire someone, hire them. If an employee leaves, let them leave. No hard feelings. If you really don't want them to leave, offer them more. Preferably do that before they think about leaving. This sort of unfair limitations on employee's employa…
I feel like that is not the point though. The analogy he made was fairly reasonable: people have fairly demanding (sometimes irrational) restrictions on who they decide to keep in their lives as friends. This is about that. Not about slavery. Not about mismanagement of a company.
This article was written just a few months after the Justice Department in late 2010 announced its agreement with Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit and Pixar regarding their anticompetitive practices. It is clearly a reaction to that agreement and its purpose is to lay out an argument that can be used to maintain plausible deniability regarding anticompetitive agreements by arguing that these activities are just fr…
It's not this post that's terribly wrong, but the widespread fallacy of equivalence between tiny companies and large corporations. It's not inconsistent to think it reasonable for small startups to avoid hiring each other's employees, yet that scaling this up to a significant part of the labor market is problematic.
The similarities between this post and the actions that Google and Apple took and are now being investigated for are striking. At a small scale, it's just "good business" not to poach. At a large scale it's "evil" and illegal. Seems rather arbitrary to me.
I don't think it's good business at all. It's stupid and evil. It's very small scale, so it doesn't have a lot of consequences outside the one employee that gets screwed, but scale is really the only difference here. And even one employee getting screwed unfairly is one too many.
Grow the fuck up or do not run a company. Childish viewpoints are for the playground. If your friend can't deal with the fact that you offer a more attractive work environment, he or she deserves for their company to tank and the smart employees will follow the first one who leaves.
I've met (and quickly distanced myself from) many people here in the Valley who prioritize short-term/short-sighted goals over long-term relationships. Even if you're not yet part of a tight-knit community here, word travels fast, especially on Secret. Screwing someone over can have long-term repercussions, and the last thing you'd want is for something as trivial as a single employee ruining a strong relationship fo…
So, the advice given here is certainly practical and useful, but it's also wrong. Not wrong as in incorrect, but wrong as it's effectively steeling an opportunity from an individual (and you!) in order to appease a relationship with someone who views their employees as property. The "thing" there is not the employee, but the opportunity.