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Steve Jobs personally asked Eric Schmidt to stop poaching employees

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Re: Steve Jobs personally asked Eric Schmidt to stop poaching employees

#111

Post by chc »

itmag wrote: post #45
michaelochurch wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Upvote back to +1, just because I think it's interesting how words fairly arbitrarily acquire strong signed (positive or negative) meanings, e.g. awful vs. awesome, collaboration vs. collusion. It's not at all stable across languages. If you call someone a "collabo" (collaborator) in France, that's a huge insult (referring to Nazi collaborators in the Vichy era).

I think my comment is valid and on-topic. People make fun of conspiracy theories, but the fact is that conspiracies go on all the time. There is even a crime called "conspiracy", after all. It would be better to say "implausible crank theories" or something when that is what one refers to.

But by the same facile reasoning where modern linguistic norms are ignored in favor of older, simpler roots, "crank" just means "turn," and turning is often a good thing.

Re: Steve Jobs personally asked Eric Schmidt to stop poaching employees

#112

Post by jphackworth »

pullo wrote: post #109
jphackworth wrote: post #54

So let's say I am running a startup with two employees. A friend of mine is also running a startup and needs to hire people. Is it wrong for me to ask him not to hire my employees?

there is a good article by Ben Horowitz to this point. http://bhorowitz.com/2011/02/23/is-it-ok-to-hire-people-from... what happened here is much bigger than a deal that goes between two friends who run a startup. it by all means seems like collusion by the overlords to ensure the minions are kept where they are to 'serve' them ( a minor exaggeration). Parts of this story is revolting, like firing and making an examp…

An interesting article - thanks for the link.

In summary, these practices are extremely common, and Ben Horowitz recommends them. However, they are technically illegal in California.

Re: Steve Jobs personally asked Eric Schmidt to stop poaching employees

#113

Post by coffee »

codeonfire wrote: post #68
coffee wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised that people in these threads say "I'm not at all surprised by this behavior" - It's a sad state of affairs when we, as employees, wholly expect this behavior between the few leading companies in this area.

We have to work among the group of people for which this behavior is standard procedure. We are reminded daily of how insane, sociopathic, and child-like middle managers can be and that it only gets worse (far worse) the further up the chain. If I were working at a place where someone didn't expect this behavior I would think that person was very inexperienced. If I found a company where management didn't behave like…

I'm sorry, I just have a problem with this mentality.

Things are fucked up, so we should expect it to continue being fucked up, and now that it is expected, we shall deem it acceptable...

> It's a sad state of affairs when we, as employees, wholly expect this behavior...

Re: Steve Jobs personally asked Eric Schmidt to stop poaching employees

#114

Post by redthrowaway »

josefresco wrote: post #8

I can only imagine how hard it is to have fair negotiations when a prospective employee applies at a competing company only to be told "no thanks" simply because of a hush hush agreement between the executives of said companies. This flies counter with Google's "do no evil" statement and certainly doesn't paint a positive posthumous picture of Jobs.

Agreed. If I were larry or sergei I'd fire Schmidt. Now, that might mean I'd never run a company as large as google, but I'm okay with that. This incident removes Google from my list of tech giants I'd work for leaving it, well, empty.

Sad to see. I'm not surprised by the behaviour of Apple and others, but I thought better of Google than this.

Re: Steve Jobs personally asked Eric Schmidt to stop poaching employees

#115

Post by nluqo »

ajays wrote: post #64

CEO to the Board: I am indispensable; therefore I need the 10s of millions of dollars as compensation. CEO to the employee: You are indispensable; therefore you can't leave for a better paying job.

CEO to the Board: please give me 1 dollar in compensation.

Re: Steve Jobs personally asked Eric Schmidt to stop poaching employees

#116

Post by MichaelSalib »

nluqo wrote: post #115
ajays wrote: post #64

CEO to the Board: I am indispensable; therefore I need the 10s of millions of dollars as compensation. CEO to the employee: You are indispensable; therefore you can't leave for a better paying job.

CEO to the Board: please give me 1 dollar in compensation.

Salary is not the same thing as total compensation.

Re: Steve Jobs personally asked Eric Schmidt to stop poaching employees

#117

Post by bwarp »

vacri wrote: post #12
bwarp wrote: post #4

This is 100% why you shouldn't work for a big corporation. You're a resource rather than an employee.

Same in small companies. In our company of 14 people, my last HR meeting had the officer dismissing my mention of doing 30-60 minutes unpaid daily overtime as 'it's a small company, that happens'. They were trying to nail me into a contract doing even more unpaid work: 'Sometimes that happens in a small company' -> 'Yes, I do the in-house IT, and it's part of the job, but I'm letting you know that it's every day' ->…

What country are you in?

I'm in London in the UK, do a 37 hour week, earn $80k equiv, work from home 4 days a week and live about 5 miles from the company (just over an hour scenic river walk or cycle).

Stop selling yourselves into slavery, grow some balls and either get paid for what you do or stop working so much.

Time is finite, don't waste it.

Re: Steve Jobs personally asked Eric Schmidt to stop poaching employees

#118

Post by BadassFractal »

nyellin wrote: post #16

Everyone is commenting on the "no evil" thing, so I want to give my take on that. Yes, companies are large entities that maximize shareholder profit and therefore talking about "good companies" or "bad companies" is meaningless. But I always understood the "no evil" slogan to be accepting of that. To me, "do no evil" was the mentality that no matter how corporate the company may become, the humans who are part of it…

To quote another poster in this thread:

Tell that to the employee who was "terminated within the hour."

Re: Steve Jobs personally asked Eric Schmidt to stop poaching employees

#119

Post by tikhonj »

martinkallstrom wrote: post #103

Serious question: if an accelerator asks participating startups to not hire employees from one another, does it violate laws governing fair competition?

Even if it isn't illegal, it's probably contrary to the interests of the accelerator: if one of your startups needs somebody more than another--enough for an increase of pay or some other benefits--then, for the whole program, having that person move is probably better than artificially forcing him to stay.

Re: Steve Jobs personally asked Eric Schmidt to stop poaching employees

#120

Post by codeonfire »

coffee wrote: post #113
codeonfire wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have to work among the group of people for which this behavior is standard procedure. We are reminded daily of how insane, sociopathic, and child-like middle managers can be and that it only gets worse (far worse) the further up the chain. If I were working at a place where someone didn't expect this behavior I would think that person was very inexperienced. If I found a company where management didn't behave like…

I'm sorry, I just have a problem with this mentality. Things are fucked up, so we should expect it to continue being fucked up, and now that it is expected, we shall deem it acceptable... > It's a sad state of affairs when we, as employees, wholly expect this behavior...

Just because something is expected doesn't mean that it is acceptable. On the contrary, if someone fucks up, like they always do, and you EXPECT it, you can act on it. In this case, thousands of people are about to have a payday because some evil execs who probably don't even know how email works fucked up. Someone, somewhere expected it, got the evidence nailed down, and went after them. After this settles, there's going to be lots of people (and many lawyers) expecting this behavior and actively looking for it.
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