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

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

#71

Post by sitkack » Sat, Jul 12, 2014, 4:45 AM UTC

gojomo wrote: post #63

alexqgb wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's the thing: when you're discussing the failures of another person's moral reasoning, you are inevitably calling their character into question. It may not be the point, but it's unavoidably the effect. 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 gen…

Your attack is high on prejudicial conclusion-jumping disgust-invoking labels – 'stupid', 'amoral', 'stink', 'pile of shit' – and low on reasoning. It's also unnecessarily personal – implying a person holding a reasoned opinion is an untouchable outcast. That's what makes it out-of-bounds. Looking back, you made no substantive comments on thread. You just opened by making a speaker the subject, and slurring that spea…

fancy words but a thin skin.

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

#72

Post by sitkack » Sat, Jul 12, 2014, 4:47 AM UTC

samstave wrote: post #25

chris_mahan wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think the thing is that while people can do good things, they can also do really bad/weird things to others when all of their hierarchy of needs is met. I he has money, power, comfort, is top-of-his-game -- then its very easy to really act as though it is a game and his actions only strengthening his position and the position of the system that supports his position (the company). So in his mind, he is just being e…

We are all our best when we are a _little_ hungry.

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

#73

Post by chrismcb » Sat, Jul 12, 2014, 5:49 AM UTC

cookiecaper wrote: post #24

wpietri wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree that a likely effect was artificial depression of employee salaries, but I don't think we've seen it adequately demonstrated that that was the primary intended effect and not just an unintentional or tertiary side effect of the agreement. 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. It's poss…

Did you miss this part: “…even raiding other studios has very bad long term consequences [i.e., higher benefits for employees, lower profits for companies and executives—M.A.].”

It looks like the primary intended effect was to keep salaries and benefits low

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

#74

Post by gojomo » Sat, Jul 12, 2014, 6:39 AM UTC

alexqgb wrote: post #65

gojomo wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your attack is high on prejudicial conclusion-jumping disgust-invoking labels – 'stupid', 'amoral', 'stink', 'pile of shit' – and low on reasoning. It's also unnecessarily personal – implying a person holding a reasoned opinion is an untouchable outcast. That's what makes it out-of-bounds. Looking back, you made no substantive comments on thread. You just opened by making a speaker the subject, and slurring that spea…

Try looking back a bit further. You'll note that it was actually the previous poster who had made the speaker the subject, and that was in the context of a remark about how he was being reflexively down-voted for (presumably) making conspicuously bad arguments. Bear in mind that it was failures of reasoning like these - that is to say, ones grounded in distinctly personal shortcomings - that produced the situation at…

You made the speaker the target of denigration. The previous poster was appealing for tolerance; you added name-calling and personalized shunning. You skipped any acknowledgement or engagement with cookiecutter's points, jumping straight to negative labels without supporting argument.

I suppose your armchair snap-judgment blackballing would also extend to people like Catmull, Jobs, Schmidt and others themselves. All of them, a pox on the industry who should have never held leadership roles. Sure, right.

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

#75

Post by DanBC » Sat, Jul 12, 2014, 6:47 AM UTC

incision wrote: post #8

I think the referenced bit on PandoDaily [1] has a bit more meat and seeing exactly what was said really drives home the point. From Ed Catmull's email to Steve Jobs: "...one of our department managers told me that she was offered a position as producer for Sony’s first CG film and is likely to accept. "The director of the movie is REDACTED [Jill Culton, ex-Lucasfilm and on Pixar-produced Monsters Inc—M.A.] who start…

"Good but fragile" - under English law this communication risks falling foul of disability discrimination and also health and safety law (protecting employees from harm, which includes stress).

I have no idea how it works in the US.

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

#76

Post by gojomo » Sat, Jul 12, 2014, 6:51 AM UTC

sanderjd wrote: post #34

cookiecaper wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Do you agree that this is an accurate framing of the issue: a few rich and powerful people were in cahoots in opposition to the best interests of a bunch of far less rich and far less powerful people. If not, in what ways do you view it as being incorrect?

That's an awful framing. Here's a less-prejudicial, more-correct framing:

Leaders at some major tech companies, responsible for their teams' productivity and often-recognized by their employees as effective and inspirational, turn out to have used reciprocal non-solicitation agreements, now considered illegal, to avoid talent turnover and bidding wars.

This likely reduced some employees' compensation, especially for a few superstar performers, but also may have been a key component to the magical product results their teams achieved, ultimately rewarding everyone involved in those companies (including their satisfied customers). The net effects on employee welfare and total social welfare are unclear, as they've not been carefully studied.

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

#77

Post by gojomo » Sat, Jul 12, 2014, 8:00 AM UTC

mullingitover wrote: post #44

cookiecaper wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If there's an email that shows direct evidence of conspiracy to fix wages, I'd be interested in seeing that, but I don't think the no-poach agreements need to be assumed to have been a bad-faith arrangement. Depressed wages are the whole point. The no-poach collusion is there to prevent the companies involved from being in a position where they need to make a counteroffer to retain their talent.

That's a simplistic view. What if the 'whole point' was avoiding project-unraveling team turnover, and deterring a corrosive culture of mercenary focus on salary rather than intangible or equity compensation?

Counteroffers once an employee has mentioned a plan to leave are so fraught with morale issues that many managers recommend against them no matter what. And auctions suck for buyers due to the "winner's curse" – wise buyers will often try to avoid being part of an auction process.

Does that mean the seller always wants an auction, highest price always being best? Maybe if you can sell-and-forget a physical item. But selling your unique-in-the-industry talents for the next N years isn't quite like that: it's a relationship where you'll need a full gelled team and other costly resources to do well, and some safety margin for miscalculations. A 'cursed' winner who overpays for you, and others, might wind up sinking your projects and career when the errors manifest.

Pixar employees have done very well, overall, including through stock options which became more valuable because their teams stuck together, and delivered critically-lauded and highly-profitable work at sustainable costs. Perhaps an alternate-history, with more talent raids and compensation bidding-wars, would have led to some superstar employees making even more money. But it might also have torpedoed key projects at key moments, and left the company and the bulk of the employees, far worse off. It's not a simple situation to model.

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

#78

Post by vijayr » Sat, Jul 12, 2014, 12:29 PM UTC

Will anything come out of these investigations, other than fines? Fines are useless. How are the going to prevent such things in future?

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

#79

Post by cookiecaper » Sat, Jul 12, 2014, 1:23 PM UTC

chrismcb wrote: post #73

cookiecaper wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that a likely effect was artificial depression of employee salaries, but I don't think we've seen it adequately demonstrated that that was the primary intended effect and not just an unintentional or tertiary side effect of the agreement. 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. It's poss…

Did you miss this part: “…even raiding other studios has very bad long term consequences [i.e., higher benefits for employees, lower profits for companies and executives—M.A.].” It looks like the primary intended effect was to keep salaries and benefits low

The brackets are editorial from the editor of the post. They're not in the original email. That's the author's opinion on the bad consequences that Catmull is referencing.

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

#80

Post by cookiecaper » Sat, Jul 12, 2014, 1:29 PM UTC

secstate wrote: post #67

gojomo wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But is simply refraining from one specific something – outbound targeted 'poaching' of your competitor's superstars – really 'trampling' on the employee? 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 b…

I appreciate the grey area here and that probably calling Catmull a monster is taking things a bit far. But especially the email about Jill getting poached suggested that Pixar had zero interest in promoting her internally, while Sony was offering her a chance at career growth. It's hard not to sound like an asshole while you tell someone they're not good enough to be promoted while also having a handshake agreement…

>But especially the email about Jill getting poached suggested that Pixar had zero interest in promoting her internally

The email seemed to reflect that Pixar had considered promoting the poached employee and hadn't done so for Good Reasons(TM). Catmull admitted she had potential and would probably grow into a promotion at Pixar, but stated she was lacking experience in a "major area" of the production cycle. That doesn't sound like an arbitrary "I hate employees, let's treat them like dirt" conclusion, it sounds reasonable to me. Sony was desperate enough to hire people that didn't have that experience, but Pixar wasn't, so she went to work for Sony. I don't see the problem.