561–566 of 566 posts
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Employers would say such an agreement is not immoral, because it benefits them, but employees would say it is immoral, because it harms them. However, most people are employees, so yeah.
Immorality aside, it is illegal.
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Another way to combat churn is platform lock-in, which I think is more Apple's strategy. Also the Genius bar, no other consumer tech company gives you in-person access to support employees.
There are many ways to combat churn. My point was that doing what is right to make the customer happy can be an awesomely powerful and more importantly POSITIVE weapon in the battle against churn. Platform lock-in is a negative, customer-hostile approach. The positive alternate version of "lock-in" is "stickiness." Ie. the concept that your product/service/experience is so amazingly awesome that your customers have m…
Absolutely.
At my office, it was amusing when others would adopt the latest iPhone, but the charger was different... yet again! People would scurry about looking for a compatible charger, while the few of us with android phones would look at each other and mouth the words, "micro usb". Simple.
Good products can still be good while conforming to industry-wide standards -- something I seem to find less prevalent in my years of experience working with Apple products. (Design agency)
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When someone says "any company", it's easy to interpret that as meaning "any company without exception". This is a very logical interpretation, but it is not necessarily reasonable to interpret it that way. My experience is that (1) most companies do a lot of things wrong (2) the respect which support receives varies from company to company as well as industry to industry, with business support taken more seriously t…
> When someone says "any company", it's easy to interpret that as meaning "any company without exception". This is a very logical interpretation, but it is not necessarily reasonable to interpret it that way. Well, it's not logical at all in the common sense of the word logical. It's like you're talking to a compiler... In casual conversation everybody understands that it doesn't mean "absolutely every company".
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> This is the Prisoner's Dilemma, plain and simple. It's not really, but that is an enlightening comparison. Using the prisoner's dilemma as an analogy for this hiring situation, the employees aren't players (prisoners, if you prefer) at all. Which is exactly the problem.
If you are looking at the players as the companies deciding to poach/not-poach then the payoffs look just like the prisoners dilemma. That just gives you the reason why two companies would want to collude and would have to agree to collude to get the best outcome for both companies. I agree the more important issue is as you say; the legal and moral aspects are what they are because of the fact that employees are bei…
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> This is the Prisoner's Dilemma, plain and simple. It's not really, but that is an enlightening comparison. Using the prisoner's dilemma as an analogy for this hiring situation, the employees aren't players (prisoners, if you prefer) at all. Which is exactly the problem.
If you are looking at the players as the companies deciding to poach/not-poach then the payoffs look just like the prisoners dilemma. That just gives you the reason why two companies would want to collude and would have to agree to collude to get the best outcome for both companies. I agree the more important issue is as you say; the legal and moral aspects are what they are because of the fact that employees are bei…
Okay, but the problem itself is different. In a classic prisoner's dilemma the players cannot know how the other will decide and so they act in the manner which benefits them the most. When pursuing their interests they both rat out their accomplice, with the ironic outcome that neither avoids punishment.
> But that means that we are happy to see a prisoners dilemma dynamic here, it means that there has to be some type of collusion to make this dynamic happen. Collusion is explicit and detectable.
Okay, but the collusion is why it's not a classic prisoner's dilemma, I would think.
Also, we're not that happy. The collusion means the companies can avoid punishing one another prisoner's dilemma style. Great for the companies but bad for the employees, since "punishment" in this context involves... hiring.
But... the author worked in customer support, managing agents. Customer support in any company is like this: it's full of bobblehead managers who make work to justify their own jobs. It's a cost center, and cost centers are where you put executives who are capable, but not exceptional. This is why OP has stories about how firing people was considered heroic -- when you work in a cost center, the only thing the busine…