Sounds like a few engineers found out that Apple was looking into their company and knowing Apple was interested they took a new gig, meanwhile the CEO got upset and decided to fire the last remaining defecting engineer, who out of goodness of heart actually declined Apple, but gratefully took the offer once he got fired. Although it probably hurts to have your team poached, it sounds like potentially it wasn't a great working environment to begin with as the team was happy to jump ship at the first notice.
We should rid of the term 'poaching'. There's no such thing. We're not animals, we are free to accept a better offer it comes along. The CEO should have counter offered with something more substantial, but he couldn't so the engineers went to greener pastures.
(I'm assuming you did your research and the CTO is in fact female, but it's better to teach people to use a gender neutral term when they don't know the gender of the person in question, and it is irrelevant to the discussion like it is here)
In English, it’s common to use the expression “we are not animals” meaning “we should not be treated like we treat other animals”. In this particular example, the problem was applying the term “poaching” to humans, when it is commonly used for non-human animals.
It has been accepted for decades by the scientific community, and the general population at large, that humans are, in fact, animals. But language takes time to react to changes changes. And that’s why “we are not animals” is still being used, even though the meaning today is “we should not be treated like we treat other animals”.
But when you're talking about a whole team, it's a little different. Original employer A went to a lot of expensive effort to find a very particular set of qualified engineers that could work together at the same time -- where the sum is much more than the parts.
If employer B hires the team already put together perfectly qualified for a similar task roughly all at once... they're not just taking advantage of employees' freedom (which is fine) but literally essentially "stealing" the massive work employer A did to assemble the team piece by piece.
I'm not saying it should be illegal, because I don't see how you'd write any effective law against it. But when you take a whole team at once, I think the word "poaching" is apt.
Yeah, seems fitting, "Poaching has been defined as the illegal hunting or capturing of wild animals, usually associated with land use rights." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poaching
The "land use rights" part. The analogy works because on some level the company is "your land."
The other scenario where I would find "poaching" somewhat unethical is when the primary purpose is depriving a competing company of talent.
In that scenario, in order to entice them you might offer bonuses and salary that are disproportionate to the value those employees would contribute to your company, but the loss of those employees would cripple the competitor (loss of institutional knowledge, schedule delays and cost of finding replacements, morale, etc).
The company can counter-offer but that costs them money they wouldn't otherwise have to spend, to protect their "investment" -- the sum of the parts as you mentioned. Ideally a company would be resilient against the loss of employees (e.g. getting hit by a bus) but smaller companies like startups don't often have that luxury, which makes them more vulnerable to poaching and other shenanigans instigated by large companies.
When you can't compete on salary, you can compete on other axes. Not just financially (equity/etc), but also:
- flexible schedules
- autonomy + impact
- interesting work
- culture (respect, appreciation... etc)
It's not hard for me to imagine an environment where I'd love to work despite giving up a lot of salary. Hell, I'm not unique—just look at how many incredibly skilled people choose research careers over far more lucrative industry jobs.
And yet, I don't see many startups that seem serious about this. If you want to compete for great engineers, choose some of the things I outlined, actually commit to maintaining them and figure out how to demonstrate this (show, not just tell).
I still wonder why startups don’t offer more flexible work. If anything, my time in a startup was significantly less flexible than at a bigco, where I had a much bigger team to cover my shifts.
It could be something as simple as a 4 day workweek. Or even 4x 10 hour days. Instead startups are a place where people are expected to put in 60 hour weeks!
Likely because people believe they'd happily give up salary for more flexible work, but really wouldn't, and so you'd not get any employees if you didn't pay high salaries and offered more flexible hours and some culture benefits.
I think Tikhon's point about figuring out how to show that you're offering the benefit is key.
If my salary is $200k, it's clear what that means, and I can be pretty confident that there won't be weird social games to get me to actually accept less this pay period. (There's an argument that income tax is an example of this, but that doesn't vary in unpredictable ways between positions.)
Well, they have to compete on some front. If they can't exceed Google on salary + risk-discounted equity + benefits + flexibility + employee-desire-for-company then it is economically efficient that they do not get people.
How do you express that as a percentage in equity? Also, it really seems pointless, because as they take on more funding guess whose “huge stake” gets diluted.
got an offer to be the 20th employee or something in a startup as a senior engineer, and they offered me 0.01% of equity or something. I thought that was ridiculously low.
But 0.01% of one million is ten thousand, which doesn't sound that bad. One million also seems low for a successful company. The same offer would give you ten billion at apple.
Disclaimer: I am not good at math and I don't understand stocks, equity etc. So maybe I am completely wrong.
Ah damn, you see, that's how incapable I am with maths :D I just calculated one million * 0.01 and thought that'll be it. Thanks for correcting me, seems like 0.01 isn't that much after all.
Fortunately my job does not require math skills, so at least I am no danger to society :D
I would bet that most companies vastly overestimate their initial engineering requirements and thus their talent requirements. A past job had a strong interest in scalability when the software serviced maybe a 20-30 (admittedly high value) people an hour. Even their loftiest ambitions maybe put use into the hundreds or low 1000 an hour.
Yet most engineers were hired with the goal of making it "scalable" when most of the work was frontend anyway.
Honestly, for certain jobs, you would be almost crazy not to work at a big company right now. FB/Google at el can offer salaries that are multiple-x of those at startup. If money is what you are after, it just makes a lot of sense to work there and squirrel away the cash.
In fact, there are probably only two things that startups can offer that big companies cannot:
(1) A product that when successful it will change everything, think Google/Facebook/SpaceX material. This is good because it puts employees in a position to "change the word," while also potentially getting paid in the long run.
(2) Flexibility and room for the mind to work. No useless meeting, no endless discussions to cover one's ass, no set hours or obscure HR policies. Just hard work and a ridiculously challenging mission.
To me it sounds like the CEO and the investors neither understood what was valuable about their company, nor who was creating that value. A completely self-inflicted wound from Hooked, with everybody who actually understood the situation ending up better off.
I can't imagine why you'd ever feel bad for a company that fails to retain its staff. Employees finding better jobs in other companies is one of the best market outcomes you could want.
