> I had convinced myself that these things were myths, so now I'm sad that my boss isn't Ed Catmull.
Wasn't Catmull involved in wage-fixing? [http://www.cartoonbrew.com/artist-rights/ed-catmull-on-wage-...]
Wasn't Catmull involved in wage-fixing? [http://www.cartoonbrew.com/artist-rights/ed-catmull-on-wage-...]
"“Like somehow we’re hurting some employees? We’re not,” Catmull said. “While I have responsibility for the payroll, I have responsibility for the long term also,” Catmull said. “I don’t apologize for this. This was bad stuff.”"
I can't find the other interview, but in a later interview he makes it clear his job is to worry about Disney's profitability.
I worked in visual effects for five years and loved every moment. People who choose that profession are fun, creative, passionate artistic, super energetic, crazy, smart, pull off the nearly impossible every project, out of the ordinary in every way, and crazy (listing that one twice). I miss the people. When I changed back to non-vfx development work my take home pay literally doubled. Obviously there is more to life than just pay! But the wage suppression has had a lasting effect... at the same time there are so many people who want into "the biz" it appears they that can/should? get away with it.
In VFX, as in game dev, there is far more supply of people desperate to get those gigs than there is demand. That's why your take-home pay doubles when you switch to something less alluring, not a competitor's agreement not to recruit.
Catmull has to look at the big picture, i.e., "Is our company going to operate well if competitors are constantly sending out emails to our employees and offering them 120% salary to switch jobs? Since it'd be equally disruptive if we did this to them and no work would ever be accomplished in this sector, let's just have a truce where we don't actively pursue one another's talent, and then we can stop destroying each others' projects with these counterproductive bidding wars."
Continuity and seniority is very important to the smooth operation of a company. VFX projects take years to complete and they're probably more sensitive to high churn than other types of projects, so the concern is even more justified in this sector than in the general sense.
If the company can't see the big picture and find a way to be productive within that climate, far worse than not getting cold calls from the recruiting department of the competitor, everyone will be out of work.
I know it's fun to hate on executives and believe me, I know they very frequently deserve every bit of it. But there is validity to the perspective that concerns for overall corporate performance must be take into the balance.
I gotta say I agree with Catmull. I understand that specifically the VFX people are trying to blow this up into some massive offense, but I simply do not see it. As I stated in other comments, this is a very common arrangement that is in no way limited to VFX, Silicon Valley, or tech.
It's great that Catmull has the backbone to refuse to apologize when someone is trying to shame him into submission. This is a surprisingly rare attribute these days.
One potential interpretation is that this artificially depresses worker salaries as workers are not continuously being auctioned back and forth. Another potential interpretation is that this allows the company to have the stability it needs to function, prevent toxic sentiment among peers who take a bid from one company or the other, potentially leaving others holding the bag for the project.
I believe this latter interpretation is the intent of most such agreements, and that the former is rarely considered legitimate (i.e., continuous bidding wars would be too disruptive to be feasible even if there were no formal agreements in place).
Such understandings are very common across competitors in all lines of work, whether they're written or not; at a former company, I was personally told by the CEO that we couldn't actively recruit someone who worked at a competitor because we didn't want to risk starting a bidding war over talent and potentially throwing everything off-kilter. Such arrangements are not SV-exclusive, let alone Pixar-exclusive, and they are done out of practicality, not malice. Market value for employees can be correctly surmised without feverish, aggressive overbidding.
The incident is frequently misconstrued as a complete block on any cross-hiring. My understanding is that it was simply an agreement forbidding cross-recruiting; a gentleman's agreement that they wouldn't try to start an arbitrary bidding war over the one company's talent if that company wouldn't try to start one over theirs. Employees were still free to seek and obtain employment at any of the major studios independently if they so chose.
I think that panicked cries of wage fixing and intentional repression of employment opportunities are not only not credible, but farcical. I'd ask myself why someone is interested in painting an imbalanced and unrepresentative picture such as that.
If anything, these agreements are a failure of the contemporary legal and HR departments across every major technology company involved in computer animation. I believe the intent of the executives was nothing more than maintaining a stable workforce. Their lawyers and HR people should have warned them that there was another dormant interpretation that could've been used by exploitative politicians to misrepresent the situation.
Last time this came up (that I saw), the Pixar, Apple, and Intel et al chiefs were being compared to Nazis. That is beyond the pale.
Just as we don't go out of our way to defend the guy who did rm -rf for what he did specifically, but rather move on.
IMO, the lesson to draw from this is "get better legal advice and avoid showboating politicians". Happy to move on.
EDIT: also, shortened the parent for you. I agree it was overly long.
You can't make ANY agreements to refuse to recruit from certain companies.
Making any "official" effort or policy to prevent a bid war is illegal.
Do we really believe that the big shot lawyers at all of these places (remember, many household brands were parties) are so bad they would allow a contract that was pro se illegal to be entered into, or that the executives secretly fast-tracked these documents and bypassed counsel? To me, the situation sounds much grayer than some portray it.
This case was settled, not tried. We are left to speculate on what the outcomes and conclusions would've been had the settlement not proceeded.
I don't believe their lawyers or the companies are incompetent. I believe that they were actively malicious.
They thought that the legal costs of getting caught and losing the lawsuit, or settling, would be less than following the law, so they actively chose to take the risk and break the law.
And it turns out, they were mostly correct about that. Doesn't mean that they shouldn't be condemned for it.
This is backed up by all the statements that they made about "don't put this stuff in writing! ", ect. And the fact that they stopped engaging in these practices. (if they were doing nothing wrong, then they would continue, right?)
X billion gain > Y billion loss.
These companies won. They saved more money than they lost.
From a business standpoint, it was a good idea to break the law, and get sued.
I think this is one of those occasions where it's OK for companies to individually come to this conclusion and not implement this as a practice. But the moment several companies come to a collective agreement on the same, it enters questionable and probably illegal territory.
But Catmull in particular was involved in the more extreme implementations of the deal. In his version, not only did cooperating companies agree not to actively poach, nor to passively extend offers when approached by employees of competitors, but also they agreed to actively report amongst themselves whenever they were approached by employees of competitors.
This probably damaged the careers of engineers who were not completely satisfied with their current employer, because as an exec are you going to give a key project to someone who's about to go work for the competition?
Maybe even the Catmull version of the wage-fixing scheme has some defenders, but I think there are very few defenders of the Catmull form of the agreement compared to the fraction of HNers who are OK with the milder form that merely instructed recruiters not to actively initiate conversations with employees of competitors.