51–60 of 96 posts
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Agreed. I'm reading his book Creativity Inc. right now, and it's chock-full of goodness. Except that now, I question the very motives and integrity of the author, so the whole thing is completely suspect, and I might just not continue reading.
Just because someone made a mistake, it shouldn't automatically make all of their work 'evil'.
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Quick reminder to everyone: Please don't downvote comments that contribute to the conversation just because you disagree with them. You might think that cookiecaper is an insensitive clod. But, he's not posting fluff, off-topic or otherwise distracting material.
If nothing else, cookiecaper represents the kind of thinking that leads to these situations in the first place. Yes, it's stupid. Yes, it's amoral. Yes, it betrays profound ignorance of the law and ethics, and yes, it's shot through with the kind of "logic" so poor it's actually repulsive. But that's actually the point. In the same way that smoke indicates fire, a stink like this indicates a giant pile of shit. And t…
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Agreed. I'm reading his book Creativity Inc. right now, and it's chock-full of goodness. Except that now, I question the very motives and integrity of the author, so the whole thing is completely suspect, and I might just not continue reading.
Just because someone made a mistake, it shouldn't automatically make all of their work 'evil'.
I'm not going to burn my graphics books, but I'm really disappointed with Pixar right now.
"This needs to be nipped in the bud." Um, yeah.
That'd give us some idea of how much wages were suppressed all those years...
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I don't see anything exceptionally dirty about that mail. I went to the article to get the full context and still don't see it. The intimation of the article and, in fact, everything I've heard on this stuff, is that all anti-poaching agreements exist solely for the purpose of depressing employee wages, but I don't think that holds true. It may be technically illegal, but the potential moral implications of a no-poac…
I can see what you are saying (however, I don't agree), but I think there is a bigger issue afoot: there are just too few companies that do any one thing, i.e., in a world of 7+ billion people, there are only a handful of companies that make feature-length CG films that the majority (of movie ticket buyers on the planet) watches. Because of this, those handful of companies are a virtual monopoly (cartel), and can, an…
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Agreed. I'm reading his book Creativity Inc. right now, and it's chock-full of goodness. Except that now, I question the very motives and integrity of the author, so the whole thing is completely suspect, and I might just not continue reading.
We're too fast to discard people in this community. The linked article is heavily editorialized; it doesn't represent anything like even-handed coverage. We should give important figures in our community the benefit of the doubt, and learn how to respectfully disagree with one another. Even if something is illegal, it's not necessarily self-evidently immoral, and Catmull et al easily could've made anti-poaching pacts…
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Prices arise through market forces: the competition of buyers for the same goods. If the largest purchasers of a given good agree not to compete, then prices are absolutely harmed. Understanding where staff is going is reasonable. Making it so that your staff doesn't have opportunities to go anywhere? That's a criminal conspiracy to rig a market.
As a tangent, one could also argue that there's nothing wrong with these compacts, and that market forces would make them untenable if there were truly a dearth of the needed specialized labor to complete the product. Again, that doesn't mean this practice was legal, but the illegality is non-obvious. It's not something that has to strike the average person as fundamentally immoral and socially harmful. If you cast i…
It's not a good argument.
There are markets where these agreements work and markets where they don't -- it depends on the cost of entry. But this is probably a market where they work, because, well, they exist. Smart people entered into them despite being on notice that they were probably illegal.
To clarify cost of entry: let's say the employees here are wheat farmers. There are hundreds of wheat farmers and five companies that buy wheat to make bread. Those companies compete to buy as much wheat as possible so they can enter as many markets as possible while still making a profit. So they drive up the price, and end up paying roughly as much for the wheat as the value it contributes to the bread-making enterprise. Those are market forces, and the capitalist notion is that they fairly distribute profits among all the people involved -- but they reduce the profits of the five companies.
So let's say the five companies get together and agree to split up the wheat and only pay 80% of the market price. All of their profits go up, all the wheat farmers' profits go down, market forces are no longer operating -- and therefore the agreement is illegal. It's cool if that isn't obvious to everyone, since it's not exactly relevant in most of our lives -- but anyone who's allowed to run a market-leading company has probably had the concept mentioned to them at some point.
But so now the other market forces you're referring to come into play: the five companies have created an opportunity. If some sixth player (like Sony Bread Co.) is willing to come into the market and pay 90%, they can get all the wheat at below market price. This is great for Sony because they get cheap labor without even having to break the law, but it doesn't solve the problem for the wheat farmers. Only if a lot of other players have the same idea will they drive the price back up to the free-market level.
But that assumes the 20% entry bonus created by the illegal cartel is enough to overcome their competitive advantage from already being in the market. Becoming Disney isn't free -- and this kind of cartel is something, pretty much by definition, that you would only go for if you thought you and your compatriots had the market locked down. And you would only drive the price down as far as you thought your competitive advantage could defend.
So, no -- market forces are not a magic wand to make agreements designed to nullify market forces OK.
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If nothing else, cookiecaper represents the kind of thinking that leads to these situations in the first place. Yes, it's stupid. Yes, it's amoral. Yes, it betrays profound ignorance of the law and ethics, and yes, it's shot through with the kind of "logic" so poor it's actually repulsive. But that's actually the point. In the same way that smoke indicates fire, a stink like this indicates a giant pile of shit. And t…
Your personal attacks on cookiecaper are disgusting.
For the same reason that you can't state that someone is lying without denigrating their character, you cannot point out that someone is representing an utterly amoral position without implying that they are a generally untrustworthy human being.
Let me put it this way: would you be comfortable having cookiecaper running HR for your company? I should hope not. But if you were, what would you tell a board member who came across a post like this an wanted to know why - exactly - a guy this demonstrably off-base was being allowed to fill a position that carried so much risk?
For what it's worth, people were just downvoting the guy. I think there's some value in seeing what he has to say in order to better understand that mindset that let to the moral implosion we're presently discussing.
Separately, I think the tone of condemnation is actually very important. I'm sure there are plenty of people here who have had damaging encounters with others who think and act like cookiecaper (e.g. anyone who has worked under Catmull). It's important to establish, in a very public fashion, that the values he displays are absolutely not okay.
Totally not surprised: Back from ~2001-2004 when I was working on designing the Lucas Arts Letterman Digital Arts center in the Presidio, there was a certain CIO who wanted us to plan to build a studio in Asia. The reason was that "Asain animators are very cheap, and they aren't primadonna's like the overpaid ones here in the states." They saw animators as commodity COGs.
Which was not, and is not, an entirely invalid strategy.
While that may be true - if this strategy was at the core of fomenting an illegal wage-collusion between companies, than it doenst matter if the strategy is valid: what matters is that to achieve the most effective outcome of said strategy, CEOs of the biggest tech firms colluded to prevent worker wages from reflecting true market value for the enrichment/better-ment of their bottom line.
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* More effectively preventing the transfer of trade secrets or other proprietary information; non-competes are widely unenforceable, so while no-poach doesn't necessarily stop it, it makes it less likely. * Preventing major disruption to studios' projects as key players are poached any time a film goes into production. You could say they should have separate contracts binding the employee to stay for the duration if…
Why not negotiate a way to make the employee want to stay for the duration of the project? If the monthly salary isn't enough to ensure the duration of service you need, find a way to offer additional compensation. Try back-loading the employee's contract with increasingly large incentives in the latter stages of the project. Any steps you take that limit the employee's career mobility and agency without employee agr…