> I haven't had to make my life depend on employees as of yet
And that's where your opinion comes from.
To be absolutely clear, I am not putting you down. I am merely stating what I believe to be a fact.
I see a lot of opinions on HN that obviously come from people who have never actually run a business. Of course, everyone is entitled to an opinion with the caveat that opinions loose a lot of validity when they are not backed by "skin in the game".
Bringing an employee onboard is an expensive process. The search itself can be expensive. If you found the employee through an agency you owe the agency a finder's fee. This typically runs from 15% and could be as high as 50% of the employee's salary. To put numbers to that, if you pay someone $100K and the agency charges 25%, you, the employer, owe them $25K.
Of course, it doesn't stop there. There's a lot more to employee compensation than the agreed-upon salary and recruiting costs. A quick Google search located this calculator:
Using that as a reasonable reference I calculated that, if you keep your $100K/year employee for three years your annual cost is $150K per year.
If, however, you only keep them for one year (change "Expected term of employment" to "1") the cost goes up to $170K per year.
If we look at a $150K/year employee who leaves in one year the cost of that employee sits at around $240K.
Even this doesn't paint the entire picture. Bringing someone onboard takes work and will definitely consume clock cycles. More than one team member is likely to be involved in the on-boarding process. Overall productivity will be affected during this period until the new hire comes-up to speed and can "solo" if you will. The effort isn't trivial at all and it costs thousands of dollars for every hire.
There's also a hidden "cost" which takes the form of internal competitive data that you have to trust your employees with. Nobody thinks that this is a cost until you go through the experience of training someone for months only to have them go work for a direct competitor. These things do happen, and believe me when I say that it never sits well. At that point thin ethical walls protect you from a competitor gaining a leg-up through ill-gotten insight. This very directly equates to money.
The cost of poaching by --presumably-- the very agency you might be working with is also not trivial. You just dedicated a ton of money and time to bring someone onboard and the agency convinces him/her to go elsewhere. Now you are left with a hole to fill, which will take time and money. During that time team productivity will take a hit, product delivery will suffer and you will be distracted away from product and business development in an effort to fill the hole. I can't put a precise number on this but believe me when I say that it ain't cheap.
So, yes, anti-poaching is fair and just. For some it takes going through the pain of having this happen once or twice to understand the concept.
An employee that leaves after a year has decided that they do not want to work for you. This employee is sacrificing a year's worth of work mastering your processes, environment, and code base in order to go start over somewhere else where they need to learn a new code base.
A couple thousand dollars isn't enough to convince most people to start over- something about their current work place made leaving seem attractive. Either the job does not fit them well or have reasonable paths for advancement (both from a development and career perspective), you are underpaying the employee, the work/social environment is bad, or something significant in their personal life has changed (graduating college, spouse got a job somewhere else, ect).
Poaching isn't unfair. You never have any guarentee for how long an employee will work for you, just as your employees have no guarentee they will still have their job tomorrow. The problem in the above situation isn't poaching; the problem is the employee wanted to leave.
I've employed people and hope to again soon and the conclusion to your post is 100% wrong. All the costs you mention are your problem. Finding talent is expensive. But it's expensive to everyone. You're spending all that money to find someone willing to invest their precious time and skill/knowledge with you instead of spending that value some other way. That doesn't make them your slave. You don't get any special rights because you spent money.
If you want to keep people give them a compelling reason to stay. Collusionary practices like anti-poaching, Noncompetes and so on are not fair and just. They are immoral and bad for the markets. Engaging in any of these practices should come with hefty fines.
And your creative interpretation of my post is 100% wrong.
This isn't about an unhappy employee leaving because the job is crappy. Of course not. If the job or the environment is crap I'd be the first one to say that they probably ought to leave.
I am also deeply offended by your use of the term "slave". Nobody has used this term. Not one person has even implied it. I certainly have not. It is a despicable and desperate measure to sensationalize something that has, in no way whatsoever, implied such a condition exist or is desirable.
My post, and the scenario that it referred to, was very narrowly focused on the case where an agency YOU HIRE to help you find talent turns-around and proceeds to attempt to poach the very talent they helped you find just a few months after they got onboard. That is scummy and, in my view at least, absolutely justifies a no-poaching agreement WITH THE AGENCY YOU HIRED TO HELP YOU FIND TALENT.
Other than that, if another company is going to reach out and offer your employees a better deal (whether that means more money, a more interesting project or better working conditions) so be it, that's the free market and nothing should impede that at all. Even if other agencies reach out and convince the employee to leave a week after he/she came onboard, that's OK.
Again, the point here is very narrowly defined around the issue of a head-hunter that YOU hired turning around and poaching employees you just got done paying them a fee to find. That is a very different issue, isn't it?
In order to fully illustrate the damage done I simply highlighted that there are huge costs involved in hiring and employing someone, particularly through a head-hunter, and that it is wrong for them (the head hunter) to then turn around and try to steal people away from you.
After a reasonable and mutually agreed-upon period they can do whatever they want. In the example given in the OP's article that period was 18 months. That's fine.
To be ultra-redundant:
If someone other than the agency you hired manages to pull someone --anyone-- away from you, that's fair game. You can do that to others as well as they can do it to you. The issue here is with an agency that is supposed to be working for you.
> I am also deeply offended by your use of the term "slave". Nobody has used this term.
When I read slave I immediately jumped to 'Wage Slavery' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery and it happens all the time. People cannot leave their job or risk looking for a new one because they are living pay check to pay check.
Well, I'm glad you're at least reasonable about the employees rights (many people aren't!) but the issue is (as I referred to in another post): the agency you hire to help you find talent is in a field that can only make money with high volumes. What you and the article author are taking personal isn't. The agencies aren't going "muhahahaha! Now that we've placed Rockstar 275 at robomartin's company let's poach them!". They simply have the person they found for you in a database and when ever they get a new job or haven't filled an existing one within a certain amount of time they're going to connect with everyone that their DB report says matches the profile.
They don't know and they don't care who they've placed where (at least the part of the company that sends out these "poach" emails doesn't). A new employee isn't going to jump ship within a month of getting a new job unless a) they really hate the new job or b) the new offer blows them away to the point of being willing to burn bridges.
I suppose agencies could put some kind of filter in their DB to not let people under no-poaches show up in the results, but why bother? Every company probably has a different no-poach period and all kinds of bothersome clauses they want and it nearly never comes up anyway so it's not worth the effort to deal with the issue. It easier to worry about these things on an exception basis, e.g. employee answers back with interest. At this point we can check if there is any reason we shouldn't go forward. But they will be sending out so many emails, most of which will be ignored, there's just no point thinking about it until someone actually answers.
This is simply a classic case of assuming there is malice where in truth there is just laziness.
There are so many ways to look at this. Here's a dumb and imperfect example: You hire me to help you find a really good CFO. I charge you $40,000 to get that job done. After several weeks and two dozen interviews we find a candidate that is a great fit. You agree to pay her a very competitive salary, one that is certainly within the top level of what CFO's are getting paid in your industry. Everyone is happy. You pay me my $40K and she comes onboard.
Six month later I get pinged by a large corporation looking for a CFO. I remember the candidate I placed with you. She is definitely qualified. I email her directly and get her to jump ship. She didn't get paid any more. I simply convinced her that the large corporation was a better bet than your startup. I, of course, get to collect a fee from the large corp as well.
This is wrong. You hired me to help you build your team and paid me handsomely to do my job. If I then turn around and actually become your enemy, why am I serving? An even such as the one I just described is incredibly disruptive and costly beyond the obvious (I covered some of the costs in my prior post).
That why I will not work with any head-hunter who will not guarantee that they will not approach new hires with new opportunities for a reasonable period of time. As a business you don't derive a financial benefit out of hiring a new employee for months but there's a ton of upfront and ongoing investment.
And that's where your opinion comes from.
To be absolutely clear, I am not putting you down. I am merely stating what I believe to be a fact.
I see a lot of opinions on HN that obviously come from people who have never actually run a business. Of course, everyone is entitled to an opinion with the caveat that opinions loose a lot of validity when they are not backed by "skin in the game".
Bringing an employee onboard is an expensive process. The search itself can be expensive. If you found the employee through an agency you owe the agency a finder's fee. This typically runs from 15% and could be as high as 50% of the employee's salary. To put numbers to that, if you pay someone $100K and the agency charges 25%, you, the employer, owe them $25K.
Of course, it doesn't stop there. There's a lot more to employee compensation than the agreed-upon salary and recruiting costs. A quick Google search located this calculator:
http://www.artlogic.com/resources/employee-cost-calculator/i...
Using that as a reasonable reference I calculated that, if you keep your $100K/year employee for three years your annual cost is $150K per year.
If, however, you only keep them for one year (change "Expected term of employment" to "1") the cost goes up to $170K per year.
If we look at a $150K/year employee who leaves in one year the cost of that employee sits at around $240K.
Even this doesn't paint the entire picture. Bringing someone onboard takes work and will definitely consume clock cycles. More than one team member is likely to be involved in the on-boarding process. Overall productivity will be affected during this period until the new hire comes-up to speed and can "solo" if you will. The effort isn't trivial at all and it costs thousands of dollars for every hire.
There's also a hidden "cost" which takes the form of internal competitive data that you have to trust your employees with. Nobody thinks that this is a cost until you go through the experience of training someone for months only to have them go work for a direct competitor. These things do happen, and believe me when I say that it never sits well. At that point thin ethical walls protect you from a competitor gaining a leg-up through ill-gotten insight. This very directly equates to money.
The cost of poaching by --presumably-- the very agency you might be working with is also not trivial. You just dedicated a ton of money and time to bring someone onboard and the agency convinces him/her to go elsewhere. Now you are left with a hole to fill, which will take time and money. During that time team productivity will take a hit, product delivery will suffer and you will be distracted away from product and business development in an effort to fill the hole. I can't put a precise number on this but believe me when I say that it ain't cheap.
So, yes, anti-poaching is fair and just. For some it takes going through the pain of having this happen once or twice to understand the concept.