Emails, court docs show how Sony stood up to Steve Jobs’ and Pixar’s wage-fixing

If they never hired an applicant from a competitor, that'd be low. If they sabotaged their own employees' independent applications elsewhere, that'd be low.

But targeted outbound recruiting is a very specific activity – which is sometimes even viewed as harassment by the targets themselves. It's likely zero-sum for the industry, and possibly negative-sum – if it disrupts ongoing projects and deters investment in employee-specific enrichments.

A cutthroat bidding-war attitude – between competitors, and between employee short-term compensation and the enterprise's long-term value – isn't necessarily in the interest of all industries or even most of the employees. (It might, for example, reward superstars but at the expense of the bulk of employees seeking stability and meaning in their work. It's hard to say, and the rush-to-demonize crowd does not appear to have studied the tradeoffs as closely as Catmull and similar.)

Starting a cycle of incentivized poaching could be like starting a cycle of nasty-negative-advertising. A first-mover might get a temporary advantage, but once everyone responds, they're all worse off for having competed in that way. Even the stars who 'won' immediate compensation boosts might wind up losing, as projects fail and the industry underperforms.

Do we need to demonstrate intention? You brought up mens rea elsewhere in the thread but it hardly seems relevant at the end of the day. Someone with a clear intent to screw his employees certainly is more despicable and villainesque, but the practical impact on the employees is the same even if he did so unintentionally.

And we can frown upon it all the same, because it's not as if he did something innocent with unforeseen side effect - the agreement was illegal, and the fact that it was secret suggests everyone involved knew this.

So yeah, I'm maybe willing to believe that Ed Catmull didn't go out there with the explicit intent of screwing his employees. He may have engaged in this agreement in protection of his company, or of his work, but ultimately he (and every other SV CEO involved) kept it hush-hush because they knew it was illegal and immoral, and that the wider world would cry foul at what they were doing.

Mens rea would make the morality of this more open and shut, but I do not believe it is critical to our ability to judge the impact and legacy of these actions.

> "Frequent poaching is often considered unsportsmanlike competition by business people; I know several of the companies I've been affiliated with have felt that way."

But yet this isn't a game. These are people, not basketballs. It's careers, not the soccer field. It's families, children, vacations, dreams, plans, not points in to be scored against your opponent.

You're being unfairly downvoted IMO and you've brought up some good points, but what you're seeing (some have stated this explicitly) is backlash against business folk who are so concerned about the high-level game being played that they've forgotten that the pieces on the board are people.

The mistake here is the belief that this is somehow unique to Ed Catmull, Eric Schmidt, Steve Jobs, et al. The demonization of him I'm seeing in this thread is disappointing because a large percentage of the people doing the pitchfork-waving would have done the exact same thing in his position. All sufficiently complex systems (the movie industry certainly one of them) evolve complex rules and strategies, and it's remarkably easy to get lost in them and forget that these systems are built on top of people.

It's tempting to think of people who do bad things as "evil men", because it gives us security: "I'd never do something like that, phew". In reality though there are few evil men, but many men who do evil things. The notion that some people are capable of evil while others are not is hubris, and is a great way to end up on the wrong side of the morality scale without even knowing it. I personally doubt Ed Catmull ever got out of bed in the morning and decided he was going to screw a bunch of animators and inhibit their careers, but yet it happened, and I'd encourage all the pitchfork-wavers in this thread to consider that they themselves can just as easily end up in that position, especially if they approach life with the assumption that they're one of the Good Guys.

However, when an article has a more down votes than up votes, it is also made harder to read, and the bigger the difference, the harder to read it becomes. That makes pg's remark make little sense, unless HN is supposed to be a place where disagreeing with the majority is discouraged, which is not very hackerish. Some clarification from pg would be helpful here.