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sigstoat

> your boss could call your new future boss and you could lose the job

and say what?

"hey yeah that guy who worked for us until leaving of his own accord is total garbage, you don't want to hire him"?

they'd sound like an idiot doing that.

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In the past senior people at major companies that were competitors entered into agreements not to poach staff from each other.

I have seen this happen to a colleague who tried to leave for a competitor. His manager at his current job found out, contacted their counterpart at the competitor and got the job offer rescinded. Needless to say, my colleague was extremely pissed off and ended up exiting to a non-competitor as soon as possible.

Also I used to work at a consultancy. The unwritten rule was that clients would not try to hire any of the consultants directly, especially if they had been seconded in to the client for an extended period. If a consultant applied for an advertised position, it wouldn't be blocked but would be frowned on and cause tension for the client with the consultancy (usually an increase in rates).

Your first example is illegal in most places. The second is perfectly normal practice - it's in most contracts and stands to reason - if you're introduced to a client by your employer and you jump ship to work for them, it represents a breach of trust.

> Your first example is illegal in most places.

But that didn't stop it from happening in some of the largest companies in Silicon Valley:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

    Also I used to work at a consultancy. The 
    unwritten rule was that clients would not 
    try to hire any of the consultants directly

Here (East Coast, US) this is almost always a written rule in the consultancy contract, because otherwise it is a very common case.

Usually I think it's like, "if you hire one of our consultants you owe us $xx,xxx" or something.

While I am just about always pro-worker, I accept this as a necessity.

Otherwise consultants get "poached" non-stop, because they've basically already "auditioned" for the client and the client gets an extended amount of time to figure out which ones would be great to poach. Makes it just about impossible to run a consultancy otherwise.

I once tried moving from parent company to child company. And such a phone call made the move impossible.

Also, I've heard similar stories from people trying to move within the company to new department. Your old manager might be higher in the hierarchy and just might be an asshole.

No, it's more like:

"Hey Mike, I understand you are hiring Joe, though because of our good relationship, I'd like to tell you why exactly is Joe leaving. Well, we didn't want to cause an uproar in the company, but Joe caused this one issue that cost us $100M and his behavior was exceedingly erratic." Now mix in some typical subconscious behavior of Joe that anyone could notice in 10 minutes and build some story on top of it so that the new manager has it always in front of his eyes. That's how intelligent character assassination works these days. Many managers got to the position of power by using these "dark techniques" so they know how to do it properly without raising a suspicion.

Don't tell anyone where are you going. Don't put it on your LinkedIn until you are established there.

If Joe costed you $100M and his behavior was exceedingly erratic, why didn't you let him go? You should be happy to have such a problematic employee go. If you _did_ let him go, why are you stalking him and make his life even harder? In both cases, I would rather talk with Joe directly over a manager who's either lying or causing harm to his employees. It's also not like hiring managers form some kind of a club, warning each others about bad hires.

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