Stop calling it poaching—especially for devs

When out talking with folks about the new project I’m working on the phrase “poaching” comes up about 10% of the time. When “poaching” is used to describe one company offering an employee of another company a better job here’s the subtext I hear:

1. An employee doesn’t have the right to find the best job for themselves.
2. The employee is the property of the company.
3. The employee is as good as a dead animal if it leaves.

Remember this asshole?

You’re being compared to Cecil, and the company making you a great offer is this asshole.

Seriously—this is the metaphor that’s being used.

Poaching—maybe the worst metaphor possible?

I get it—it’s hard for a company to replace key people. But on the other hand we live in a world where there is very little commitment by employers to employees. You often hear the term “it’s just business” when talking about decisions that hurt an individual because it’s better for a company, but when an employee gets extended an offer for a job that makes more sense for them they are “poached”. It’s an excellent way to dehumanize someone, and a terrible way to think about the most important part of your business—your team members.

Eight employees of Shockley Semiconductor left as a team and joined forces with Sherman Fairchild to begin Fairchild Semiconductor. Most Silicon Valley institutions can be traced to this team—either directly or through funding.

Poaching—maybe the most economically productive activity?

Did you know that the roots of Silicon Valley can be traced back to one of the most epic “poaching” events of all time? They called them the “traitorous eight”, they felt underutilized and mistreated—so they left and built a new company.

Fairchild Semiconductor’s founding set a key piece of DNA into the Valley:

• Bring a bunch of smart people together.
• Let them solve hard problems together.
• Give the best teams the ability to self-select and solve new problems.

Here’s a map of the first couple of generations of companies born out of this practice—including AMD and Intel. Today the chart would be unimaginably complex with incubators, angel funds, VCs, and spin-offs with tens of thousands of companies.

Each of these companies brought together smart people, then allowed them to recruit a team. This method works great for entrepreneurs to quickly build world-class teams.

Especially for devs and other tech folks—people leaving in teams is how new companies grow.

We need more liquidity in the labor marketplace

When it comes to marketplaces for stocks, bonds, or real estate we bend heaven and earth to get “liquidity”. We’ll let robots algorithmically trade stock thousands of times a second if it means that there’s always someone ready to buy or sell a stock quickly without it losing value. It makes complete sense. If you have an asset and you want to turn it into cash the marketplace is better if there is someone ready to buy instantly at a given price. It’s why when you pull up Uber and it says 1 minute to pick up you feel like you won the lottery—good liquidity!

If the labor market were liquid it would mean that if you needed to leave a job, it would be quick and easy to find a good match that paid a similar amount with little friction.

What low labor liquidity means for companies:

• Difficult to find and attract talent.
• Losing key employees can set back projects by months or years.
• Need for an army of internal and external recruiters.

What low labor liquidity means for employees:

• Your wages are likely being artificially held down—most of the biggest Silicon Valley companies actively colluded to this end.
• If you lose your job, it can take weeks or months to find a comparable one.
• You might be stuck in a job you hate, and it’s really hard to switch.
• If you start out without the same pedigree it can be really difficult to get your foot in the door.

Team is everything

If you think about it, every company is looking to build great teams, yet they almost exclusively hire individuals. The future of work is going to be based in teams, HBR agrees. Someone is going to build the marketplace that allows great teams to meet companies looking for those teams. We think it’s going to be us—you can check out Elevator. So far we’ve got 80 great companies and 600 teams on the platform. Check it out—maybe your team would be interested in finding out which companies would be interested in bringing your team on.