Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

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The companies have argued to the government that there's nothing anticompetitive about the no-poaching agreements. They say they must be able to offer each other assurances that they won't lure away each others' star employees if they are to collaborate on key innovations that ultimately benefit the consumer.

Some economists believe that banning such agreements could harm Silicon Valley's open, collaborative model.

If the existence of an agreement isn't disclosed to the employees, then the model is not really what it is always held out to be, but something more akin to private industrial policy. I don't believe this is any better for consumers than for employees over any length of time. I've personally felt (as a consumer) that tech & internet development have stagnated in the last year or two, notwithstanding the existence of new things; perhaps this is why.

Settlement or litigation, this is probably going to set off a wave of cross-hiring because firms will no longer have the security of the agreement in place when negotiating employment agreements, and turning away a candidate from another firm with good skills may look suspicious. Good for engineers, good for the local economy, probably good for innovation; not so good for CFOs and CIOs who like sleeping at night.

I'm guessing companies will settle rather than fight; but if not, it'll set off a sector-wide feeding frenzy in the market. This should make the rest of the year interesting. It's partly political, to be sure, but slow wage growth in a period of generally rising productivity per capita has been a source of discontent for quite a while now. There is a lot of pent-up frustration, and also a lot of companies sitting on cash reserves in search of a market signal; neither situation is sustainable.

Incidentally, Microsoft, IBM and Genentech are all said to be in the clear.

This definitely should be disclosed to the employee. From my understanding, it would make it difficult to get a job at Apple if you accept an offer at Intel. Basically, this closes doors for you, and makes a job offer at Intel less valuable.

I've personally felt (as a consumer) that tech & internet development have stagnated in the last year or two, notwithstanding the existence of new things.

I can't reconcile those two clauses.

Oh, sorry! I meant that some people are innovating, but that the overall trend has been towards sameness and value extraction. Many superficially novel offerings are only stylistically different.

It's hard to articulate; I feel like I've seen the pattern before at least twice, and soon after there's a game-changing disruption. The two previous instances would the browser and web services. This time? Adaptive structural decomposition.

"Adaptive structural decomposition."

Congratulations on stumping all of DuckDuckGo, Google, and my own linguistic inferential ability with that term.

My curiosity is piqued, might I ask for an elaboration?

Edit: Wait a sec, found something, this it?

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1458841

No, though it's that sort of thing. I came up with the term because it seemed to describe the key process at work in future software - at least, the kind which I expect/hope to see - and which depends on a sort of weak AI.

It needs an essay-length answer, and I'm not quite ready to do it yet. And at that, it's conceptual, addressing my subjective view of content/interaction problems in different domains, and my equally subjective view that they're isomorphic to some other technical problems for which we have or are converging on solutions. Some might find it aggressively different, others a handwaving restatement of ideas that already exist. I don't want to be a tease, so rather than saying more I'll start making notes this weekend.

> I meant that some people are innovating, but that the overall trend has been towards sameness and value extraction. Many superficially novel offerings are only stylistically different.

I think you're half-right, but the most exciting thing happening right now in technology are some of the expensive cool technologies turning into commodities. This doesn't have the "wow!" factor of new breakthroughs, but is an important step. Soon-ish (10 years?) everyone will own a smartphone, which means a computer in your pocket. That's pretty cool. Also, the mobile web stuff is pretty cool, and the ability to get high end scalable cloud hosting for relatively cheap is cool.

These aren't major breakthroughs the way social news was, the way better search was, the way better email was, etc. I do see less of those, but new competition and collapsing prices in cool technologies is a really good thing, even though it doesn't set off the wow factor so much.

I think the poster above is suggesting that the new things, though extant, are not sufficiently many/various/innovative/useful/delightful to constitute satisfying progress.

In many states, non-compete agreements are enforceable. In CA, they aren't worth the paper they are written on.

If CA courts had held non-compete agreements to be enforceable, "Silicon Valley" never would have happened as the free flow of technical expertise never would have happened.

These companies are trying to bypass the legal system by conspiring to make their own arrangement of "non compete agreements" without the knowledge or consent of the workers.

Implicit collusion is easy to maintain, even without explicit agreements.

Unless the settlement or ultimate ruling has some enforcement teeth to it, it's unlikely that anything will change very much.

There's been some interesting research on that in airline fares. Airlines are pretty careful these days not to engage in any private collusion, but they have quite complex dances of intention-signalling via their fare raises/decreases, their pre-announcements of those fare changes, their press conferences at which they discuss what they might do in the future (and what actions by their competitors might influence them one way or another), etc.

The goal is to avoid price wars and maintain some sort of soft price-fixing, but to do it all entirely publicly without direct discussions. It's not as blatant anymore as it used to be, but at its height (until some 1990s lawsuits), they were effectively conveying things like price-floor offers, e.g. "if you don't cut on route X, I won't either", but via completely public press conferences that openly said things like, "we're not planning to cut fares in the next 3 months on this route, unless a fare cut by Competitor A or B out of these hubs forces us to".

Some economists believe that banning such agreements could harm Silicon Valley's open, collaborative model.

Banning such secret agreements would harm an "open" model? Irony, anyone?

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