It's intentional language used by employers because it has preconceived notions and they succinctly communicate a story that benefits the employer.
When you hear poached, you think illegal and victims. It makes you think that the employer has been wronged in some way and that the employee was both participatory in something illegal or at least underhanded and at the same time being taking advantage of.
The reality is that the employee was being taken advantage of by the employer and received an offer more closely aligned with their actual value.
But that's the nature of the employer/employee relationship, it's never truly balanced and one party is always benefiting more than the other.
In the vast majority of cases, I agree. If someone is working at CompuTech for $100K per year, and gets an offer from TechuComp for $110K per year, that's market forces working in favor of the developer. This is a good thing.
But there is the possibility for entities the size of Google to ignore market forces entirely in order to better position themselves. For example, a guy working on self-driving cars might command a salary of $400K in most cases, but Google or Tesla or someone might offer them $600K just to prevent competitors from having access to them.
Most companies couldn't afford to do that, but FAANG are so vastly wealthy that they can hire entire engineering teams as a loss leader.
This is still good for the developers involved, at least in the short term, but it isn't so great for the market, or society, overall.
Yes, literally speaking, it's "worth it" to Google, or they wouldn't do it. Being so large, Google can throw advertising money on their self-driving car division, no problem. They can take a loss for 5-10 years, no problem. However, it's extremely anti-competitive, which is the problem others are pointing out here.
Then the Goog enters the picture and is willing to add another $200k premium to that, in order to prevent you from working for that employer. This isn't sustainable; you're still you and your direct value to Goog is only $100k. The additional amount represents how much damaging a competitor is worth to Goog. As soon as the competitor goes out of business or Goog stops having piles of cash laying around to fight with other companies, that additional value evaporates.
If you decide to leave Goog, you should probably not expect to get $300k or more. In fact you may get less than $100k, if Goog has eliminated the competitors to whom you are valuable.
"Market rate" is extremely unstable.
This is true of everyone of course. Even a more or less commodity junior Javascript developer isn't worth much more than their generalized ability to do random tasks to a company that doesn't do any software development.
But some people have a skillset and track record that is very valuable to some companies but that would make it hard to be hired at most.
Imagine some market where 10 companies sell bread and it costs $5. And lets assume that the costs are $4 and $1 is profit.
Then comes a company that makes its money on selling water and it is doing very well. It comes to a bread market and starts selling bread for $3.
The competition is quickly destroyed and the bread prices rise.
Edit: as a sibling comment mentioned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing
Maybe 50 of the other 99 bakers at the 10 bread-selling companies are also capable of making good bread and will feel bad, maybe the company that lost the baker will feel bad, maybe that company will even fail because it turns out that really was their best baker... but in that case, it just proves that the water company was paying the market price for that baker. Which they were.
Spending more on talent is not predatory pricing.
Yes it does: Google makes money from advertising, not from self-driving cars.
This is not possible according to the usual definition of "market rate".
If Google is willing to pay X, that is the market rate.
edit - I see how my post was misleading. I should have said X is a "lower bound" for the market rate.
This puts Google in the position of being a monopsony for the labor of programmers; that is, they're the only or primary buyer of that commodity. Part of antitrust laws is preventing that, so, yes, there is a problem if a monopsony arises, but Google isn't in that position anyway because jobs aren't completely interchangeable the same way programmers aren't completely interchangeable. For example, companies can compete on the basis of not being Google, which attracts some people. Companies can compete on the basis of being based in some other geographic location, or having other things to work on, or having a different mix of salary and benefits.
Google offering the highest salary doesn't mean they automatically get everyone. It means they get people who want the highest salary to do what Google's interested in as opposed to wanting to work on some kinds of technology Google isn't pursuing.
Single-firm anticompetitive behavior, as defined by FTC: (https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/anticompetitive-practices)
Single Firm Conduct:
"It is unlawful for a company to monopolize or attempt to monopolize trade, meaning a firm with market power cannot act to maintain or acquire a dominant position by excluding competitors or preventing new entry. It is important to note that it is not illegal for a company to have a monopoly, to charge “high prices,” or to try to achieve a monopoly position by aggressive methods. A company violates the law only if it tries to maintain or acquire a monopoly through unreasonable methods."
Horizontal Conduct:
"It is illegal for businesses to act together in ways that can limit competition, lead to higher prices, or hinder other businesses from entering the market. The FTC challenges unreasonable horizontal restraints of trade. Such agreements may be considered unreasonable when competitors interact to such a degree that they are no longer acting independently, or when collaborating gives competitors the ability to wield market power together. Certain acts are considered so harmful to competition that they are almost always illegal. These include arrangements to fix prices, divide markets, or rig bids."
Staff aren't a product or commodity.
I have a relative who bought a very nice beach house from his legal fees suing a hospital network for doing something similar.
I don't think what you're describing is anti-competitive behavior, rather it's omni-competitive. Pretty much all the money Google throws at anything is "advertising money" but if they are really trying to make self-driving cars, what's wrong with that?
Should my Brad Pitt Summer Blockbuster profits not be able to bankroll my Teletubbies Christmas Special?
There's plenty of antitrust fodder already with their stranglehold over the web and the behavior they've taken to protect their search/ad business. But if they're hiring people away in cutting edge areas of research simply to destroy startups, that's abhorrent. That means they're pouring their obscene wealth from advertising into unrelated fields in order to dominate them.
Monopoly.
This doesn't mean that the market price of a McDonalds burger is $0
If all I can afford to pay a developer is minimum wage, is he or she now obligated to work for me at my "market rate?" At what point does it go from not having enough money to afford a highly qualified developer to becoming "poaching?"
ed: Toned it down a little. I think tech is making an absurd amount of money and it's exasperating to see people complain about paying their workers too much.
Let's say you're a company in a field, competing against other companies in that same field. Everyone is basing wages on how much money they expect to make and so on. Not everyone has the same estimations, but in the end they're all grounded in that market.
Now comes a company with virtually limitless from some other market, who doesn't care about making money but about achieving dominance. All of the sudden, they're throwing wages around you can't compete with because they're not trying to be profitable.
Did I miss something?
The market will correct very quickly, as competitors will immediately head over to McDonalds to purchase $\infty$ burgers at $0, killing MCD dead in seconds.
The moment McDonalds applies a purchase limit (Free burgers! Limit 5 per customer), the burgers have non-zero cost, as they require a person's time in order to purchase.
If McDonalds does have enough capital to buy long-term customers and kill off competition with free burgers, perhaps they should consider it. I assume that they've considered such a strategy on occasion and concluded that it isn't worth it. Burgers are probably worth more than $0 to McDonalds, too.
I'm pretty sure they should not consider it, because it is generally illegal.
It is really not. At least in America. In America, where laws are based on consumer benefit, it is extremely difficult to prosecute companies for having too awesome of a service, that they give away for too good of a price, in a way that helps consumers too much.
It really just isn't something that gets prosecuted, except in absolutely exceptional circumstances.
But of all the things that Uber has gotten in trouble with, do you know what they have not been prosecuted for? They have not been prosecuted for selling taxi services for too low of a price to consumers.
Breaking taxi laws = yep prosecuted
But price dumping = nope, not in trouble for that.
If walmart takes its surplus capital and decides to sell toilet paper at a loss, to run everyone else out of business (till they're the last man standing), I'm not sure its correct to say that the market value of TP has reduced during that time period. Walmart has undercut the market value (the point where buyer and sellers generally meet) -- it hasn't actually changed the market value, except temporarily, in whats effectively a hack. The permanent shift in this case would occur when the dust has settled, and all competition has been eliminated
All market values are temporary. Walmart absolutely has changed the market value in this scenario. It might be anticompetitive in the Walmart example, but in the case of one company paying their staff better than another I don't think the company paying less and complaining about it is going to get much sympathy :)
I think the S&P is overvalued today. The market thinks otherwise. No matter how much I would like to purchase reasonable stocks at P/Es of 15, by and large, I can't. If someone else wants to buy them at P/Es of 21, they are going to attract every single seller.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
a) These companies are much bigger than they were, which increases the impact a programmer can have. This means the amount of money a programmer can bring in for one of these companies is much higher than previously, and so they're willing to pay more.
b) Previously, programmers were capturing a much smaller share of the value they were creating for their employers. Either through explicit collusion to keep employee salaries down (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...) or because the threat of startup founding (which is both easier and more normal relative to 10y ago) has pushed salaries up.
And if a bunch of homeowners are willing to drive up housing costs and prevent building out an adequate supply of housing in an area, that's just the market.
I don't have a horse in either race, but I think there is an appreciable difference between paying a premium for a resource that you use, vs paying a premium solely to prevent someone else from having access to it.
but as a contrapoint; in capitalism there's a trend of selling a product or service substantially below market rate as a way of gaining significant adoption, once you have significant adoption- you raise the price as best you can.
This is called: undercut, corner and squeeze.
Often this results in monopoly positions or at least significant leads which are hard to overcome. (Uber, is a famous example).
Obviously this is only possible with significant financial capital, which google have.
I can see how the undercutting analogy has synergies with overpaying for talent. It's worth making a loss on hiring me if it means that someone else doesn't get the (lesser) value of me.
Arguably. But, if 10 average people are worth $200k and one exemplary person is worth $500k... and the company pays the 10 average people $100k instead, then the company can hire two exemplary people where it only needed one.
Scale it down to minimum wage and you end up with people who are worth way more than they're paid -- you literally don't have a business without their work -- who are held under by telling and treating them like they're worthless.
That's what predatory behavior disguised as a market looks like.
On the other hand, does it mean that some employers won't have money to hire talent? And will that result in some businesses failing? And is that ultimately bad for developers? I don't know, but it feels like it's such a big system that it will balance itself if that is the case.
Long term, however, there's a risk of a monopoly forming, which isn't good for developers or society. FAANG are willing to pay big salaries because they are competing. If they use their power to destroy the competition, that market force goes away.
Big companies have been overpaying developers for almost a decade now. It is not going away. It is not some short term thing. Instead, that is what these elite tech companies pay.
It is not some singular company, that is buying up all of the tech talent. Instead, it is a whole bunch of elite tech companies, paying lots of developers lots of money.
The idea that there is one singular company, that is a monopoly on developer talent, that is false, given that there are a whole bunch of them doing it.
But there is competition among those companies even if "everyone" else pretty much doesn't even try to compete with them based on comp. (Which makes talking market price a bit odd in this case. I imagine an economist has some term for it. I guess there's a market price for developers who can get a FAANG offer and then there's a market price for everyone else.)
If the companies sell ads, ads get more expensive. Then the items those ads promote get more expensive, working its way down to the rest of the population again.
Those developers will also see the increasing prices, but the extra cash will hopefully keep them happy for a while.
On the other hand, capitalism has this great thing where going bust is not the end of the world (or life), compared to previous eons.
A system which allows (and encourages) failing is great.
After the first $100k or so in salary - enough for living expenses, soft things like culture fit, are able to become more important to employees, and by offering services like on-site massages directly, employers are able to offer more value than employees could capture themselves. (On-site massages are also used to keep employees on campus longer, but once you start getting "free" massages, they're hard to give up!)
I'm not sure I think this is bad but I believe this is the argument.
That's the crux of the argument, though. Google can afford to take a loss on the employee's salary for years, just to keep them from a competitor. We're not talking about Google arbitrarily paying a developer more than their competitors, we're talking about Google diverting funds from other business units to cover costs.
Googled: https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...
It’s called predatory pricing in that case and legality is unclear. It seems you probably get away with it in the US.
This arguments fails on so many dimensions that it must just be a meme. I’ll use Google as the example. For it to work Google has to be able to monopolise the buying of talent.
Most damning, the premise itself is self defeating. Somehow Google is picking the most talented people (delivering far in excess of say $1M marginal returns), yet somehow it is paying well below that to steal that talent and furthermore Google is then wasting that talent (employee delivering value below their pay+overhead). To assume Google chooses to waste talent merely to achieve some low value outcome (damaging a competitor by $1 doesn’t magically enhance Google’s returns by $1 so the factors are way out here) seems to assume the Google is somehow acting against their best financial interests. I don’t think Google is as poorly run as that.
Also:
1. Occam’s razor: Could it be that a Google is actually getting good value by paying very high salaries?
Yes. The average revenue per person for Google is about 160G$ / 115kiloemployees = 1M4 per employee. I do note that using an average is silly because the value distribution is not flat, but neither is the employee salary distribution flat. But the figure is so large, average does say something useful for back-of-envelope calcs.
2. Can Google monopolise by buying power alone?
No. Other companies have similarly high returns per employee (Apple is 260G$/160kiloemployees, Netflix is 20G$/20kiloemployees) so for Google to outbid them, it needs to outbid above the marginal revenue per employee, which clearly is well above a 600k$ salary.
3. Can Google corner the market for talent by restricting supply?
No. We know that there are plenty of talented developers because Google isn’t the only company making over $1M revenue per employee. Google employs about 115000 people. Let’s say 50000 of those were “overpaid“ to remove them from the competitors. If the total pool of equivalent talent were as small as 250000, then Google couldn’t monopolise talent. Yet other companies with high revenues per employee have a sum total of employees higher than 250000. Furthermore Google’s returns per effective employee become ~$2.8M/employee, so Google can obviously afford to pay $1M for talent it really wants!
> just to prevent competitors from having access to them
They don't ignore the market, they use their resources earned from participating in that market to keep and/or improve their current market positioning. Which is exactly what their shareholders want, and is fair game until treated as a monopolist.
Those are still market forces. They aren't paying the worker value, but the damage they will cause to competitors. Welcome to capitalism.
I think back fondly about the managers that genuinely wished me well at those exciting but scary junctions, even if I had my frustrations with them while I worked there. And if I'm being honest I still hold grudges against the ones that tried to make me feel bad and acted like I was betraying them for taking another job that I felt was the right decision for me at the time.
Even from a purely self-interest perspective, it seems to me that it's in every manager's interest not to try to guilt employees that are leaving or talk negatively about them. It's the last chance you have to leave a good impression, it costs you nothing at that point, and you never know when you may cross paths again, or the employee that left may be friends with someone you want to hire in the future and warn them not to join you, etc.
Employee value generation isn't fixed. It is entirely possible that the employee can generate more value in the same role at a different company. For example, if the product is more valuable, so is the work.
It is also possible that the "poacher" has such a ridiculous amount of money at their disposal that they're able to suck a talent pool dry with "so-much-money-you-can't-refuse" offers. I think, however, that enough employees are getting wise to the fact that a FAANG offer isn't an automatic "yes".
People do turn down offers even if the money is crazy high, especially older folks who have gained some control over their career path, have job-satisfaction, and don't want to stage-dive into a competitive hellscape of Type-A 20-somethings.
And why not? Are you saying that a market of free and voluntary exchange where every part has access to equal information cannot exist?
An exchange where a part is better informed than the other and thus gains profit, is the exact definition of "taking advantage". Wait, isn't that how all exchanges work in the capitalist's workplace?
Outside of very limited circumstances, how could it? Only for the simplest of products can you really grok them as well as the people making them.
The employer sees employees as resources. Property. Property doesn't have agency. Someone else is taking the employer's property, but the employer isn't being compensated for the loss of their property.
But buying a whole company? That's paying the shareholders for their property. Therefore that's good.
What other word would you recommend? Lured? Hired? They're not as precise.
Otherwise "they hired people who worked for me" and "they poached my employees" describe the same thing. If the bitter attitude is important to express, then it could be phrased as: "They hired people who worked for me and I have a stick up my ass about it."
"Did the employee reach out, or was he poached?"
I just do not think it's worth getting anal about the terminology. Who gives a shit if your old employer says "poached" when you just got a $50k pay rise?
'Poached' is inherently and deliberately demeaning terminology. There's no reason to not criticize it's use.
I responded that I wasn't owned by my employer and just as they were free to let me go, I was free to leave on my own. The real reason was that since employers pay them and talent does not, they don't want to risk their income stream. Since that day, when this agency emails me to ask if I'm looking for new opportunities. I remind them of that incident and request that they don't contact me again.
It took about 8 years to finally sink in that I would NEVER have any dealings with them and they eventually stopped emailing me.
I was a SWE for a large corp for a while, and after that transitioned to a role of manager.
As I was very eager to build a good team, and the company HR looked slow and unefficient I tried doing recruting myself, at least the part of meeting people and talking them into come to work for us.
What I could decide (up to a point) the salary and benefits but people had to go thru testing with the people from HR (IQ tests, personality tests etc)
Anyway I was pretty successful in finding experienced engineers but the thing fell apart when it came to HR testing. "He/She is not a good fit for the company" they would told me.
This was going on for months. I did more than 300 interviews in my free time in maybe 5 months and only about 5 people where "ok".
At some point a guy from HR told me: 'you must stop sending employees from companies X,Y,Z to testing, we have a deal with them that we don't take each other's people' 0.o
The deal was not only no to stop "poaching" but when someone form those companies applied to a job posting they would call up the other companies HR and told them about it.
And there was more than 10 of companies they told me about that where forbidden.
Imagine all the people that applied for job at some company not knowing that their boss, the HR etc. would know about it.
I would be extremely surprised if these are wet-ink-signed naked no-poach agreements.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/atr/division-operations/division-upd...
It's seems counterproductive to blacklist them for behaving ethically just because it worked against you in one scenario. No recruiting agency is ever going to act in your best interests because you aren't the one paying them. One that behaves ethically is about the best you can ever hope for.
1. https://venturebeat.com/2014/05/23/4-tech-companies-are-payi... (adding to the confusion, Venture Beat incorrectly calls it a fine)
Their behavior wasn't ethical. They didn't approach me. I found their job posting and approached them.
For example, some agencies only limit themselves to not representing a previously placed candidate if they are still the role where they were placed by the agency. Outside of that, if a candidate wants to move from one client company to another, the agency may even act as a catalyst, especially if the candidate would be a great fit for the new role.
"We will do everything in our power to find you the employees you need, unless it might make one of our other clients unhappy."
This would be a disqualifying conflict of interest for a law firm.
My decision to make them persona non grata was about not rewarding them for behavior that negatively impacted me.
That's why I strongly prefer reaching out to companies without any middlemen. The more people are involved, the worse for me.
https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-google-offer-415-million-to-...
The scenario I'm talking about when you bring in a company as a partner. For example, we work with TCS and the contract states that we can't hire their employees and that TCS can't hire our employees, at least not to work within the partnership. We partnered with another company and as part of that contract we are transferring people them with the promise that we will not hire them back for a year or two depending on their position.
That's a failure of American governance. Economists used to all know that markets needed to be regulated to make competition fair --- and efficient. But the American right has pushed for 50 years to deregulate everything, and the FAANGs have benefited from this rollback of anti-trust.
I'm not sure 'poaching' is the right word, but what the FAANGs are doing is unfair. And it's unfair because they benefit from deregulation and monopoly power that hurts anyone at a small business.
If you, as a founder, don’t want to give up equity, who’s fault is that? You’re expecting employees to work for a pittance of what they can make elsewhere and take on the risk without upside.
If employees are look at your business and decide the probability of their equity being worth anything is too low, who’s fault is that? You’re trying to dupe them into taking a bad deal, or failing to communicate the opportunity.
If your company cannot scale to provide market-rate salaries, whose fault is that? You’re expecting your employees to give up their salaries and their financial security to subsidize a non-competitive lifestyle business that suits you, not them. You’d better figure out some incentive where that equation makes sense.
There isn't an infinite maw for staffing at FAANGs, they aren't going to suck out all the air for all the technical talent in the room. Just the air for other members of FAANG and maybe the second-tier competitors. Startups that want to pay less than F500 compensation packages for greater job insecurity only think they're in the anoxic depths of available technical talent. They're really swimming in a talent-rich pool, they just want a McLaren for a Toyota price.
You can get a helluva lot done with a well-managed fleet of Toyotas, and done right, you'll get to the point where you will afford that McLaren cash-over-the-barrel should you really have your heart set on such managing such talent. Not every problem in the world requires world-class problem solvers, and in fact, most problems are solved every day by everyday people with sufficient time and determination. It just doesn't make for good copy for VC's to read about in the pitch deck.
In any case, rare is the startup I've seen that can even supply the right infrastructure to leverage FAANG talent. Their benefits aren't delivered de novo like Athena leaping from Zeus' head. For example, if you have a Free Electron personally grinding out non-core code and manning your most senior-level support desk fielding rando calls, instead of teaching more junior engineers and wading in only for the most difficult project-endangering parts, you're wasting your and their time, whether you're a startup or a FAANG.
Complaining about not being able to hire FAANG talent with sub-FAANG compensation packages without any discussion of the infrastructure is cargo-culting the effects of FAANG talent.
If you're a startup that must have FAANG-grade talent in specific positions, then pay the market price for that talent. Otherwise, you'll accommodate for lower-skilled staff like nearly any other manager in the world does, and adjust accordingly. The market has evolved so FAANG talent obtains competent legal and financial advice now, so promises without founder-level or even VC-level protections against dilution and other valuation clawback mechanisms are more correctly priced towards the market-priced zero.
Not from the employer's perspective.
Is this really a thing? Am I a giant dumbass for staying in Colorado? Even factoring in my stock grants, I'm nowhere close to that number.
Netflix median engineer pay is around $400 - 500k, because they only really hire engineers who would be E5/L5 or above. Apple and Amazon also pay this at the titles which map to E5/L5, as does Microsoft, Uber, Square, Snap, Pinterest, etc.
This does not include stock appreciation, but stock appreciation certainly helps inflate the comp even further.
Going further out from FAANG: if you include non-liquid compensation, many pre-IPO companies pay comparably (or better, with the tradeoff of uncertainty); including Airbnb, Stripe, and Snowflake.
Source: I earn about that myself, I have friends at almost all of these companies, and I have worked at or received offers from some. Also, see levels.fyi.
I can't tell you what you should do, but from a cost of living perspective: people who make at least $300k in SFBA or NYC will very often come out ahead compared to making maybe half that in a significantly cheaper area, despite the higher cost of living.
I'm in my 30's now, with a family. There is no reasonable amount of money that could convince me to uproot and go to the valley. Sure I could come out ahead financially, but at what costs? Commuting for hours each day, working long hours, living in a smallish house with no yard, high crime, high pollution, etc. Those are just some negatives, but there are of course some positives too. For me, my time with family is my most valuable asset, and I don't think I'd sell it for $500k.
Sure you could go there and make a lot of money and basically retire in 10 years, but I'd rather have those 10 years back in time at the end I'm sure.
* Commute/housing: you can afford a lot of house in a good location on $500k (or even 250-300k which might be more attainable).
* Long hours: varies a lot from team to team, and company to company. From my own experience, there's not a lot of correlation between long hours and salary, and a lot of people who work long hours do it because they want to.
* Crime: crime in the US is at historic lows, not sure what you're worried about here.
I include commute time into long hours. Many people I knew there, admittedly NOT at FAANG, would spend an hour or more each way on a bus or train, plus 8 or more hours working, that's a huge chunk of the day. I'm remote, if that helps give a frame of reference.
As for crime, I guess it's just culture shock. I've had people tell me not to drive, and if you do drive and park, to leave your doors unlocked and empty your car, or else someone will break the windows and take things. And I've seen the broken windows. That, along with being harassed by mentally ill folks, was just a big turn off to me. Though, this may just be more of a SF thing specifically.
There's outrageous equity offered by like 5 companies. Everybody else is getting stock option grants worth 5-10% of what Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft are offering (the situation is a little different for Netflix).
> Am I a giant dumbass for staying in Colorado?
Probably not, Colorado is great.
- Snap
- Lyft (though their stock is hurting right now, they still have top-band comp)
And then there's HFT, where $500k is probably considered average, but I guess that may as well be a completely different industry.
If we want to drop down to approaching $400k, you can add:
- Dropbox
- Square
Also I don't think Microsoft should be on your list unless you're specifically referring to LinkedIn's SF and Sunnyvale offices.
Note that getting $500k+ TC offers as a senior is still exceptional even in the Bay Area (look at levels.fyi). Netflix is supposed to be the most consistent when it comes to giving offers in that range (and all-cash too). Whereas if four senior engineers got four offers each from other companies on the list, they would likely range between $300k and $500k before negotiation.
What I wanted to emphasize, mostly, was that there exists a tier of companies that offer stratospheric compensation primarily through equity, but there are many more people working at other publicly-traded companies that offer RSUs that are worth closer to what you might consider to be a yearly bonus.
Man I'd happily take up one of those Google jobs, but being an embedded software guy, I'm not even sure what they'd want me for. It seems like a lot of silicon valley companies are a great place if you're a web dev, or use C#/Java all the time.
You probably won't end up doing embedded work though, just as a point of warning. I mean you might, but probably not. As sibling poster alluded to, there are some jobs closer to that area, but more likely than not you'll end up on some other team doing something completely unrelated to embedded.
It doesn't have to be a permanent thing though -
It does not take too many years of $300-$400k compensation to make your future much more free to pursue what you want. If you do FAANG for 5-10 years while saving aggressively and can't take any more of it, then you can go back to working on embedded software for a third of the pay and have a huge buffer for retirement.
You're in a lower cost-of-living location, and one where there's less competition; employers don't pay as much there because they don't have to. That said, if you like where you are, you might start by looking for remote work that pays better (from companies that don't say "we can pay you half as much because you're not in California").
Also, look for employers that have a robust technical job ladder for advancement; that's part of how you get a salary like that, and even higher. (I know software architects making 7-figure salaries.)
Like in retail, it depends on location, location, location; a regular developer will never make that much in Europe - remote (for a EU company) or not.
An interesting analogy is how many people uprooted and moved to LA in time's past to become movie stars, and how many succeeded.
Times are changing though and you can now apply to some major tech companies remotely, more will follow as Cali is now the hardest hit state and the desire to move their cools off.
It makes sense to pay a few that much so that you can have riches of people to choose from (and exploit?)
I've even seen this internally. If I want to go to another team, why would my manager use their budget or political influence to promote me when they can use it on someone who is staying on their team.
In a perfect world, your manager should not care and your company should not treat you any differently for looking, but this is rarely the case.
At my company, internal postings notify your manager when you apply, so there's no avoiding it. It's generally better to talk to them first so they aren't blindsided by the posting. Otherwise, if you don't get the new position that could create some friction with the existing one. My company can also trap you in your current position if they designate you as a "key resource".
The best way to protect your prized employees is to treat them so well they'd be crazy to look elsewhere. If you, the business owner, can't afford that then you just aren't as competitive or successful as you think you are.
I don't mean to be malicious or anti-capitalist, but this seems like another example where companies want free markets when it involves taxes or costly regulation. But they oppose free markets when it causes labor costs to go up or reduces barriers to entry. It's a logical position for a corporation to hold but there is no ideological justification.
It's all platitudes of free market competition and meritocracy until the going gets tough and the competition (be it other businesses or labor) gets ahead of you. Then it's sob stories for bailouts, anti-competitive practices, and "but we're like a family here" drivel.
I think your analogy is only slightly apt. I rather see the company being raided for talent as the prey. The employee as its ivory.
First, elephants are usually not being protected from predators, but rather from hunters (illegal ones). I know it might sound like a nitpick because the two words can be synonymous, but since this is about terminology, I think it's appropriate. At the time you lose an employee due to "poaching", they're often not unhappy with the conditions you've given them and are not actively looking for another position. But they have been spotted by a "head hunter" hired to find talent for a specific role in a different company.
Second, employees might not belong to a company, but some companies spend a lot of time nurturing their talent through various programs (knowledge transfer, mentoring, experimental projects, personal time), because they hope it will benefit them in the future. Time is not free, it's even dearer than money, but it's the currency we all have the same amount of. If we don't consider another company just swooping in at the 11th hour to simply reap what should've been your benefit as a form of legal "theft", then what should we consider it?
Maybe the solution for companies would be to put some of their employees under contract, like in sports. They'd pay substantially more for those services, but a clause would include them if another company was interested to acquire their talent. That or maybe some insurance companies may start offering some compensation against poaching.
Poaching, on the other hand, usually does not mean that. It means targeting key people at competitors and specifically courting them to make them switch. Hence the analogy with hunting on someone else's land. I would also agree that the term tends to be overused.
Not discussing salaries is the exact same thing - the employer doesn't want everyone to know how much their peers are making, lest it result in higher overall salaries. I always think of offering candy to a kid but saying "Don't tell anyone I gave you this". It's pretty clear someone is trying to be manipulative if they don't want anyone else to know the details of the deal.
> Never underestimate how much better a person's life can be by working for a FAANG instead of working for you
Edit: For those who are downvoting, I'm simply saying this is what's implied by the quote. I'm not making a statement about FAANGs.
FTFY.
The original quote was about their ability to poach employees.
What does it mean to poach an employee? It means to convince the employee to make the major life decision to work for them instead.
Why do people choose to make such a major life decision? Usually it's because they think it will make their life better.
Why do they think it will make their life better? Because the FAANG offers >= 70,000usd to switch jobs, pays for them to relocate and sell their existing home, offers fully paid health insurance for their entire family, offers hundreds of thousands in stock options, and an unbeatable salary.
This is how they convince engineers to work on the world's most effective attention machines. By making their life better in all these ways and more.
If you fail to understand that, if you fail to engage in any kind deep or abstract thought that isn't summarized by a four letter meme, then you're doing exactly what this article warns you not to do - you're underestimating FAANGs.
Edit: I should add, it's probably mostly about the money. I mean, nice office, all the perks, all enabled by money. And for most people a very material raise in pay makes a difference
(e.g. China recently hired away a few thousand engineers from TSMC this way)
Given that these folks are instead going to become apologists for obvious abuses of power in the name of "making a difference in the world", perhaps radicalized would be a better word choice :-)
Headhunters, poaching, they are clearly idioms because we don't live in the safari or a conflict zone with hostile tribes (because we won.)
Pull request rejected and closed.
2
a: to take (game or fish) by illegal methods
b: to appropriate (something) as one's own
>>> c: to attract (someone, such as an employee or customer) away from a competitor <<<
American English is a high context language. The GP was illustrating the current parlance, which Webster is lacking.
That said, I understand why people object to it and it may be one of those terms it's better to avoid even if it's used playfully.
E.g. https://www.unitedlanguagegroup.com/blog/communicating-high-...
You’re in 100% agreement with myself and GP if you say that “poaching” is commonly used to mean trying to hire someone from another company. But that has nothing to do with what GP is talking about. They are saying they really wish people wouldn’t use that term, despite it being commonly used.
Understood?
Or maybe you already knew that but really like putting people down on the internet.
I am not sure, hence my reference to the dictionary. In my opinion the whole discussion is because people only know one usage and think the other one is a hyperbole. Otherwise you'd been actually arguing about the meanings of words with the dictionary, which looks rather stupid.
To use an offensive example: This dictionary has a 4th definition for the word “Jew” meaning “to bargain sharply with”: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/jew
If somebody said “Maybe we shouldn’t use “Jew” as a verb to mean this, since it has negative connotations”, would you also cite this dictionary link to say that it’s perfectly fine? (I would charitably assume no.)
The discussion is, to me, very clear. We all know that “Poach” can mean hiring someone from a competitor. But some of us feel that using it in that regard creates the wrong connotation, and although it’s commonly used, and even in the dictionary, maybe we ought to not use it that way.
Do you see why citing the dictionary is counterproductive here?
It dehumanizes the employee by comparing them to an owned animal.
Some people would similarly have a problem with claiming a higher salary equals a 'better situation'
It just happens to also be one of the easiest indicators to sell to a prospective employee. A great company culture is also a “better situation” but it’s a lot less tangible from the outside.
(Satellite office of a bay area company)
I really wish we'd stop using the word "poach". It's a loaded word with negative connotations, but what it really means here is "offer someone a better situation than you offered them". Employees have agency, they aren't wild elephants who need your "protection" from "predators" who just want to pay them more.