Hacker News Reader

Comment by mindslight | Hacker News Reader

Thinking about it a bit, I bet this wasn't born out of a desire to want to keep wages down per se, but a desire to avoid turnover of productive up-to-speed people.

It's quite funny to see that the downsides of near-instantaneous at-will employment are hitting companies so hard that they're willing to engage in such a boneheaded scheme, when sympathy is normally focused on employees.

Perhaps if these companies want to bring back some semblance of employee loyalty, they should start incorporating longer termination notice periods in their contracts and making employees happy before they want to leave, rather than treating individuals as interchangeable cogs and getting what they ask for.

View on HN

Thinking about it a bit, I bet this wasn't born out of a desire to want to keep wages down per se, but a desire to avoid turnover of productive up-to-speed people

I understand your thinking but I don't think it logically holds together. If the main concern was stability, that could be addressed by matching/topping any competing offers ... so you're right back to this being about holding down wages.

Your method would increase complexity while making the pact harder to hide, and keeping down wages is a nice side benefit. Keep in mind people generally don't start off trying to do overt wrong.

Thats a misapplication of the aphorism. People don't start off trying to do wrong, they start off trying to benefit themselves.

And an ignorant, unstructured, or illegal approach to benefiting yourself often hurts other people.

People do want to benefit themselves, but nobody wants to thinks of themselves as the bad guy either. In the simplest case, they invent a justification where their actions are actually positive or they're a victim, in more complex cases they tell themselves they're doing something for an innocuous reason even though there is a huge moral hazard and self-interest ends up winning.

I really struggle with some of the thinking on HN.

If anything I might buy the argument that Jobs was a huge control freak and that's what drove him to do this more than anything else, but how do you think this went down.

Jobs really didn't like having his engineers poached because it disrupted continuity. So he said to himself ... what am I gonna do? what am I gonna do? Offer 2x whatever Google is offers? Noooo ... that would never work. I need to call up Google and threaten a poaching war?

I'll go with Occam's razor. The simplest explanation is the best.

Jobs's ego could certainly have been a large part of it. But doubling salaries isn't a solution because the competition will raise salaries to counter their people leaving and you'll be back in the same insecure position while paying twice as much.

And please note, I'm certainly not defending any of this behavior, just examining possible motivations.

(And well that's how exploration of different narratives goes, it's a constant struggle compared to simply picking from the limited two-sides-max of mainstream press)

You just mentioned two doublings like it was nothing. 4x salary. Not something that can be glossed over.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com