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Comment by boldpanda | Hacker News Reader

So Google, Facebook, and Apple are bad because they come to secret agreements to not poach each other's employees and now Uber and Lyft are bad because they'll do everything in their power to poach each other's employees?

Make up your minds.

This sort of poaching is good for the drivers, and this sort of ruthless competition is a good indication of a market that is good for riders.

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Imagine if google and facebook were calling up random numbers at each others' headquarters in order to recruit. If the recruiter ended up guessing a number of an engineer that they've already reached, they would hang up. If they hadn't spoken to them they would give them a pitch on switching companies.

This would be an accurate analogy, and I think if either google or facebook were doing this we (the tech community) would complain about it.

Except there are other, easier ways to contact google or facebook employees. Why would anyone do what you suggest instead of using linkedin or github? There's no such alternative for contacting lyft drivers in this case, so you're analogy is not very accurate. Also, lyft drivers aren't employees of lyft, which strains to your analogy more.

It's by no means a perfect analogy, but it's the closest thing I could come up with to compare to the anti-competitive practices of google/facebook/microsoft, which is what the OP was trying to do.

Yes, because there's only those two options. Only. Those. Two.

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