Comment by arg01 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arg01 | Hacker News Reader

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If you poach an engineer from another company that means the other company must replace that engineer or be less productive. This company would then be the one to hire the outside engineer at the improved salary.

i.e. If Google wants another engineer it can hire from outside or it poaches Facebook's(or another's in that club). In the second case Facebook (now needing an engineer) will then either poach from Google(or another in that club) or hire an outside engineer. The only way an outside engineer isn't hired is if Facebook/Google decide that an extra engineer is not worth the new higher salary (or the expected lower worth of them since they constantly jump ship).

Even if the pool is smaller than the current pool of engineers at the big companies it would still arguably be a "fairer" distribution of wealth because the profits are more evenly spread through the successful companies. It would also mean that as the larger companies produce less (fewer engineers to make things) there are more engineers that could be working on competing/niche products that are currently worked on by the larger companies.

I doubt it, often headcount back-fill puts in a more junior person. So post poaching, you might see the company hire a replacement outside engineer at lower salary than the person he replaced.

Also, again, this is only about no-cold-calling. If someone truly thought they were hot stuff, and wanted to cash in, all they need do is threaten to quit, seek out an offer themselves, and they could gain your "fairer" distribution.

In fact, it was not at all uncommon to people to threaten to leave and get big counter-offers to stay in recent years, especially higher level employees.

I can't speak to how the demographics of the back-fill would turn out, though I'd agree what you say seems likely. However I will say that that Junior engineer is also likely getting a pay rise from his old job (or perhaps just entered the work force).

As to your second point regarding the cold calls if the cold calls do not have some benefit for the one called then it wouldn't matter if other companies were making them (as why would the employee leave). The fact that these companies colluded to avoid them speaks to the fact that threatening to quit vs being poached does not have the same benefit for the employees(or that not all employees have the tendency to act as mercenarily as perhaps they should).

"If you poach an engineer from another company that means the other company must replace that engineer or be less productive. This company would then be the one to hire the outside engineer at the improved salary."

You could raise salary of your existing engineers to match the market. "Poaching" is possible only because finding job elsewhere is often only way how to get raise, no matter how much they learned since they started working with you.

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