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Comment by _chris_ | Hacker News Reader

I’m sure it’s also about setting a precedent to current and future employees regarding leaving and starting new companies.

What VC wants to spend their early money on lawsuits, even if you’ll (eventually) win?

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It's also sending a message to prospective employees to not take a job with Apple.

Most employees will not become entrepreneurs so I doubt it will factor much into the decision whether or not to work for Apple. Almost all employers in the US have that kind of non-compete clause and they are enforced more often than you would think, this is just making headlines because it involves a hot startup and corporate giant.

It’s more a statement that Apple owns its employees.

In California non-compete agreements are severely restricted and much less enforceable, and that's one major reason Silicon Valley is in California and not elsewhere, as so many semiconductor companies were started by people jumping ship. That's one reason why, for anyone who wants to get some experience in a major company but has dreams of eventually starting their own company, California may be a better place to be despite the high cost of living.

Counterpoint: the anti-poaching agreements between Apple, Google, and others [1] shows that other than better non-compete statutes, SV isn’t any better than any other place, especially if the largest employers want to collude to prevent hiring one another’s employees.

It’s unhelpful to fall into the trap of thinking the Valley is any better than any other place.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust...

An illegal agreement that ended in 2009 is a poor proof of your point.

It is unreasonable to believe that they stopped simply because of that minor slap on the wrist. I’m sure they’re just much more careful now; tens of billions of dollars are on the line.

Team leaders at the big companies now feel far more freedom to try to recruit people from big competitors, thanks in part to the poaching agreement being found to be illegal. So it did matter. You're launching a big project, you don't have the needed expertise in house, and a guy/gal you know who works for OtherBigFAANG would be a good fit. You call them. Back when the poaching agreement was in effect, HR would tell you you can't hire them. Now they won't, in fact, they can't.

Non-compete clauses are null and void in California. That doesn't mean they're not in the contracts and that doesn't mean that something non-compete-ish clause-ish isn't in there.

Still I think this is a bad look for Apple.

Not null and void. But they are limited in scope.

Eh, Apple has always been a big risk as an employee. They don't pay very well and they take secrecy (and the accompanying legal paperwork) very seriously.

None of this is new; Apple has always been like this (even in the Jobs 1.0 days).

This has always confused me. I don't understand why anyone works for Apple (or Amazon for that matter). If you're already selling your soul to big tech why not just go to Facebook or whatever and get paid more?

Apple is generally less immoral than Facebook and Amazon. Facebook is generally less immoral than Amazon, too, but Amazon has better PR.

? Apple is beholden to China more than the other two.

Amazon has some of the worst working conditions and highest injury rates in the country for domestic workers that aren't engineers.

https://gizmodo.com/exclusive-amazons-own-numbers-reveal-sta... (independent)

https://www.revealnews.org/article/behind-the-smiles/ (joint article with The Atlantic)

I'm not stating that Apple is good (just look at Foxconn suicide rates as proof that it's an evil company), but it's generally speaking the lesser of three evils here.

This isn't meant to excuse any bad behavior, but how many "domestic workers that aren't engineers" do they employ versus the rest of FAANG, and in what roles? If a huge portion of your business consists of plucking things off of shelves in warehouses then yes, of course you're going to have a higher rate of injury than the guy at Google whose job it is to wheel in new kegs of kombucha every week.

In the entire country, not compared to just tech companies. Read the articles.

There are many other jobs other than plucking orders off a shelf. If I had to guess (which I am), it would be about 50% of the work here. Another large percentage of work is done on the ship dock, where there's more heavy lifting (but nothing over 50 lbs), and much more walking. I prefer this type of job because of how it's safer for me. I know how to lift heavy packages without getting a back strain. I don't know how to bend and squat multiple times in an hour even when I'm picking without injuring my back and/or knees. I have a knee problem from back when I was a runner in HS and college, and repetitive motions like that make it difficult for me to walk on. I still have yet to get accommodations for this, but I have been able to evade having to pick for several months, and I should be losing my permissions for that shortly. Needless to say, I don't think Amazon is the best employer, but I do work with people in authority who care. So it's worthwhile while it lasts.

We've banned this account as well as several others because they only post comments to defend Amazon against criticisms, and all the comments are more or less the same. That's not what this site is for.

You're welcome to participate on Hacker News if you want to submit stories and post comments about topics that gratify your intellectual curiosity. That is, you'd be welcome to participate as a true community member. But single-purpose accounts aren't allowed here, and certainly not single-purpose accounts for corporate agendas.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> (just look at Foxconn suicide rates as proof that it's an evil company)

What are you counting, and how are you counting it?

Why do you think the rate of death at Foxconn is any different to any other large manufacturing company?

Take a look at them, these are just the ones that happened inside of the factories.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn_suicides

Again, why do you think a death by suicide inside the factory is unusual?

Suicide is a leading cause of death in every single country in the world (albeit it doesn't always appear to be so because of the way it's counted) and so when you have a very large employer you're going to see many deaths in their workforce.

Every death by suicide is a tragedy for that person and their loved ones, but I'm not seeing anything that says Foxconn have unusually large rates of deaths.

As immoral as Facebook is, it isn't even close to Apple. It was Apple who gave control of Chinese users' iCloud keys to the Chinese government (and then used weasel words to pretend they didn't in news interviews). It was Apple who set up no-poaching agreements that suppressed tech workers' wages for years. Relative to that, Facebook's transgressions seem almost trivial.

And caused the prices of eBooks to rise.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Apple_Inc.

They do pay well; they've been trying to recruit my gf for the past few years. She just doesn't want the commute from Palo Alto.

For me (even if they would offer me a job, which they probably would not) the second worst would be the extreme secrecy and the worst would be the absolute prohibition of outside projects, even open source unless it were explicitly my job.

Compared to google, fb, netflix, etc for software engineers they don’t pay as well unless your a special interest.

Apple pays at or below market rate for most technical positions (which can still be pretty high for certain roles). The "Steve Jobs way" has always been to find people motivated by something other than money, so it feels like an intentional choice.

the worst would be the absolute prohibition of outside projects, even open source unless it were explicitly my job.

Wait, what? If you work at Apple, you are absolutely prohibited from having outside projects, even open source projects that are explicitly not a part of your job?

That's so surprising to me that it feels like it can't possibly be true. The best hackers all have some kind of open source projects, and Apple feels very supportive of open source work. How could they attract the best talent unless they were fine with people building open source projects?

They are very concerned about secrecy. It's just part of the culture; you know it when you sign on.

Apple is quite supportive of Open Source in an official capacity. I would actually say that the best talent almost certainly does not work on Open Source projects in their spare time (though quite a few talented people do get paid to work on Open Source projects). The "best talent" tends to have other hobbies outside of coding -- well-rounded individuals make better team members, especially when working with non-technical team members. A lot of young engineers don't appreciate this until they're older.

>>Apple has always been like this (even in the Jobs 1.0 days).

I remember reading in the Walter Isaacson's biography. Jobs would purposefully underpay or deny bonuses to top employees, especially top contributors to the products.

This kind of a behaviour comes puts up a giant red flag. Do only as much as what it takes to not get fired.

Which is silly... the right approach is to let employees leave and start their own companies, take their own risks, fail or succeed on their own. And if they succeed, you buy them and integrate them back into the fold. If they fail, you didn't take the risk of failure on your own.

Provided they didn't take insider knowledge and intellectual property with them, of course.

> Provided they didn't take insider knowledge and intellectual property with them, of course.

And that is exactly what Apple's legal filing claims...

Apparently they're not making a trade secrets theft claim, which seems a little unusual for a case like this.

Nope: every decent technical employee acquires insider knowledge, and companies don't have the right to enslave people because of that knowledge. The laws governing this differ from state to state, and California in particular gives employees more protection from restrictive contracts than other states.

If you put it this way, it sounds sensible. But as soon as VC money is involved it gets a bit fishy.

Say you assembled a great team of specialists. It cost you a lot of effort, time and money to hire all these really great people. Then someone comes along with a wad of cash and convinces a bunch of those people to all quit and work on a secret project. After they come out of stealth mode, it becomes clear they worked on the same thing as they did at Apple, only now Apple has to pay $250 million dollar to get the results of the work of the team that they had put a lot of effort into recruiting in the first place...

It turns out that you don’t actually own a team in the property rights sense: you didn’t assemble it very well if they all decided to leave.

This is the market pricing the work. If someone else came along with a wad of cash and hired them, you weren’t paying them enough.

See the thing is you didn't do the work, they did. If you can't get anyone to make the tech yourself then that's just how it is. If they decide to make the tech and it is worth 250 million then pay up, or live without it, or try to make an equivalent in house. You don't own your team, you will do whatever is in your best interest and so will they.

This is Cisco's model: two employees (or groups of employees) leave to develop some new tech, raising money and building staff in the process. In the end Cisco buys the one that gets traction and if the other fails the people can go back to Cisco.

It is a way of providing engineering bonuses without messing up the internal politics.

I have a neighbor who did this twice. Apparently that's not that common: I mentioned that in a random conversation once and the person I was talking to said "Oh, you live near XXX?"

Is this Sipura/Linksys story? Or there are more cases?

There are plenty -- it's called a "spin in". Unique to Cisco, though.

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