poaching

This seems to be exactly what happened to the OP. The superstar spent years after poaching employees and starting trouble.

Extending an offer is not the same thing as "poaching". You're not doing anything unethical as long as you don't lie about your company, its prospects, or your friend's role in it.

The article uses an interesting phrase "[BC] has been accused of poaching [employees]". As if competition on the buyer-side of the labor market was morally suspect...

Well I think these anti-poaching agreements are a form of theft. Employees did not receive fair market salaries. It's not black and white, but you can't say Apple is 100% correct in going after IP theft and yet they are 100% innocent in pursuing these non-poaching agreements.

Most of the employees in question in this case and probably every other case where poaching is worthwhile are autodidacts. These employees are valuable precisely because they work hard to increase their own value.

Google and other large Seattle-area companies keep poaching our best, most experienced developers, and we hire youths straight from college to replace them. I will say all of the ex-Microsoft folks I've encountered at Google Seattle have been fantastic.

> “Noncompetes reduce the potential for poaching,” said Mr. Hazen, whose company makes scratch lottery tickets and special packaging. “We consider them an important way to protect our business.

He does not offer any evidence at all for his claim that the no-poaching agreement drove down programmers' salaries. It may have been anticompetitive enough for the participants to get sued, but how much did it actually decrease salaries?

When I first joined, I commented for a few weeks and then stumbled into a conversation that involved Steve Jobs and poaching employees. The top comment was talking about how greedy Jobs was and I replied pointing out that he had taken $1 in salary and no stocks for several years.

Also Google participated in an industry wide conspiracy to keep wages down and keep other companies from poaching or even hiring applicants from Google.

Many countries are kicking themselves now for not growing/poaching tech talent more aggressively. Interesting times when having good web developers is a big national security asset.

I love how this no-poaching debacle really shines a light on the hypocrisy of some much beloved tech mega-corps. Google and Apple execs may shower employees with perks, but at the end of the day, top execs still treat most of their labor like a statistic to be optimized and exploited for maximum value rather than human beings.

Edit2: As another example, the recent non-poaching deal between SV companies was probably rationalized as "let's be nice to one another" while those that didn't participate were seen as not being nice or being too cutthroat. Niceness between natural competitors can quickly lead to a collusive agreement.

There's a lot to think about w/r/t poaching employees, particularly from peers. It's important to remember that the ethics of poaching from another company have to be weighed against the best interests of candidates; refusing to talk to someone because they work for a friend's company is probably a fraught decision.

In almost every poaching context, the most successful experiments were always the simplest: Pay the poachers to be rangers instead. We found that the primary motivation for poachers was profit, so we approached them and essentially said "We'll pay you more if you protect the cats instead of hunting them." The 180s we observed were remarkable, and the money they made from poaching was usually so small that beating it was almost trivial for us.

In a world full of rip-off artists keeping your mouth shut, promising under penalty that you won't be poaching your employers employees and promising to keep your data carefully and to get rid of it after the job is done is simply good practice. There are plenty of parties for which signing an NDA makes no sense but if you're a hired gun that will build something or do some work for a fee then signing and NDA is par for the course.

Our counsel had reviewed the non-compete before we hired the engineer, and concluded that the non-compete didn't actually prevent an engineer from working for a competitor, but rather prevented much narrower activity like poaching customer lists or supplier relationships. We were somewhat surprised that Amazon aggressively pursued the matter because it seemed so obvious to us that they wouldn't prevail.

Even in the limited areas where elephant populations are not highly endangered, there's still substantial controversy around any practice that allows the ivory market to legitimately revive itself, since it not only provides cover for black-market ivory, it also fuels the kind of demand that leads to increased poaching in places where elephants remain truly endangered. You should also know that what you saw on that video is the exception, not the rule.

Remember when Facebook started aggressively poaching Google employees and Google responded publicly by giving every engineer a substantial raise and privately in ways substantially more expensive than that? And Facebook pretty much just laughed and matched offers? And every engineer in the Valley figured out simultaneously that $100k was a floor not a ceiling? That strikes me as persuasive anecdotal evidence of what happens when a tech titan feels threatened by poaching that they cannot resolve by a gentlemen's agreement.

Mr. Jobs proposed a no-poaching deal to Edward T. Colligan, Palm’s chief executive. Mr. Colligan responded that such a deal would be unfair to employees as well as “likely illegal.”