The Word You're Looking for Isn't 'Poaching' →
Sean Hollister at the Verge, with recently released documents on the class-action lawsuit against some Silicon Valley tech companies for allegedly colluding to not hire employees from each other:
“Mr. Jobs wrote: “I would be very pleased if your recruiting department would stop doing this.” Mr. Schmidt forwarded Mr. Jobs’s email to undisclosed recipients, writing: “I believe we have a policy of no recruiting from Apple and this is a direct inbound request. Can you get this stopped and let me know why this is happening? I will need to send a response back to Apple quickly so please let me know as soon as you can.”
Mr. Geshuri told Mr. Schmidt that the employee “who contacted this Apple employee should not have and will be terminated within the hour.” Mr. Geshuri further wrote: “Please extend my apologies as appropriate to Steve Jobs. This was an isolated incident and we will be very careful to make sure this does not happen again.”
Three days later, Shona Brown, Google’s Senior Vice President for Business Operations, replied to Mr. Geshuri, writing: “Appropriate response, thank you. Please make a public example of this termination with the group.”
A lot of headlines are calling this “poaching”, quoting from evidence in the trail. But that’s exactly wrong and diminishes the scope of what they did.
Poaching traditionally meant illegally hunting animals that didn’t belong to you. Poaching also has a long counter-cultural history that made it more of a moral grey area: think Robin Hood and his Merry Men hunting animals in Sherwood Forest.
But Silicon valley engineers aren’t chattel, and what the tech companies involved were doing wasn’t taking from the rich and giving to the poor.
