When did stealing employees from your competitors—a longstanding and honorable tradition about as old as business itself—become a bad thing?
I used to work in the newspaper business way back when a) the newspaper business was still healthy; and, b) there were still cities in this country that actually had honest-to-God competition between daily newspapers. I know that makes me a dinosaur, but I can remember a time when the best part of my job was figuring out how to poach some up-and-coming star away from the other paper in town.
That’s why I am surprised at what’s going on in California’s Silicon Valley, where “the U.S. Justice Department is investigating whether Google, Yahoo, Apple, Genentech and other tech companies conspired to keep others from stealing their top talent,” according to a story in the San Jose Mercury News.
According to the newspaper, “few details have been disclosed so far about the hiring-practice probe, which The Washington Post first reported in a story on its Web site late Tuesday. Citing two unnamed sources, [the Post] said the Justice Department was examining the possibility that the four companies and other unnamed firms may have violated antitrust laws by ‘negotiating the recruiting and hiring of one another’s employees.’ ”
My surprise at this story flows out of my experience working at a San Francisco dot-com during the boom years from 1998 to 2001. Back then, poaching talent from a competitor (and we viewed just about ALL companies battling for technology workers as such) was a mark of both a strong company brand as well as a crackerjack recruiting operation. Luring talent away from someone else was as common as fighting traffic on the Bay Bridge—and, a helluva lot more fun.
So, having some sort of agreement among tech firms to not recruit talent away from one another, if true, would be a huge change in how Silicon Valley tech companies traditionally operate. Plus, it flies in the face of California’s “tough rules barring companies from restricting their employees’ job hunting,” the Mercury News noted.
“Many companies across the country require employees to sign so-called noncompete agreements, in which the worker agrees not to be hired by a competitor within a certain period of time,” the newspaper said. “But California law generally regards such pacts as unenforceable, said Bob Taylor, a Palo Alto attorney who specializes in antitrust law. … As a result, Taylor said, California ‘is one of, if not the most, difficult states for employers to prevent employees from taking jobs with competitors.’ ”
Maybe I just see things differently out here on the Left Coast, but a deal among big tech companies to pull their punches and not recruit talent from one another is akin to thieves agreeing not to steal from each other. What’s the point? And, can you really trust anyone to hold up their end of such an unholy agreement?
I follow the philosophy that all’s fair in business, love and war. Isn’t this what the whole notion of “passive” recruiting—an oxymoron if there ever was one—is all about? I’d love to hear what recruiters have to say about this, because if deals like this to not hire from competitors make sense, we might as well kiss the whole notion of recruiting goodbye.
Sometimes however, you see some spur-of-the-moment action take place in the workplace that is so over-the-top wrong that it makes you wonder—what the hell were they possibly thinking?
Don’t know what I’m talking about? Well, in the sunny Sunshine State of Florida, “Take Your Sons and Daughters to Work Day” events in the local prisons turned into a form of show-and-tell that ended up going terribly wrong.
According to the newspaper account, “Three prison guards have been fired, two have resigned and 16 more employees—from corrections officers to a warden—will be disciplined due to the incidents that unfolded April 23, said Florida Department of Corrections Secretary Walt McNeil. An investigation is ongoing. None of the children in any of the incidents required medical attention or was notably harmed, McNeil said. He said the children, who ranged in age from 5 to 17, were all children of prison officials.”
And in what must easily qualify as the Management Understatement of the Year (and I’m open to your nominations for a better one), DOC secretary McNeil said, “I can’t imagine what these officers were thinking to administer this device to children, nor can I imagine why any parent would allow them to do so. This must not happen again.”
If you look at the goals for “Take Our Sons and Daughters to Work Day,” it talks about things like “helping (children) discover the power and possibilities associated with a balanced work and family life, and providing them an opportunity to share how they envision the future and begin steps toward their end goals in a hands-on and interactive environment … each year, we develop new interactive activities and partnerships that will assist us in taking girls and boys to the future they dream of.”
Somehow, I don’t think that the organizers of this event anticipated that the “hands-on and interactive environment” would include getting some up-close-and-personal contact from the business end of a stun gun, but the thing that surprised me the most is that this isn’t just some random incident. It happened at three different correctional facilities to 43 children!
I can’t imagine a worse way to expose children to the workforce, even if you account for the fact that a prison, jail or correctional facility isn’t your typical, run-of-the-mill workplace environment.
“(Corrections secretary) McNeil repeatedly stressed that the stun-gunning only happened at three of the 55 institutions and that it wasn’t part of a widespread practice,” the Herald story said. “Still, he acknowledged that it was ‘logical’ to assume other children had been shocked on other take-your-kids-to-work days.”
And if that’s not bad enough, the newspaper story added this kicker: “So far this year (in Florida), none of the devices have been used on the 100,000 prison inmates—only the children of DOC workers.”
I’m all for helping get children excited about jobss and careers, and I’m sure that “Take Our Sons and Daughters to Work Day” is a wonderful success 99 percent of the time, but really, did any of the numbskulls wielding the stun guns stop and think about this for more than 10 seconds? If they had they would have known that this is hardly the way to handle children, keep your job, or most importantly, to encourage those delicate young minds that will become your future workforce.
The five-month study that was conducted for Intel by the Michigan-based Ponemon Institute, “examined 138 laptop-loss cases suffered over a recent 12-month period by 29 organizations, mostly businesses but also a few government agencies. It said laptops frequently are lost or stolen at airports, conferences and in taxis, rental cars and hotels.”
“About 80 percent of the typical cost—or a little more than $39,000,” according to the Mercury News story, “was attributed to what the report called a data breach, which can involve everything from hard-to-replace company information to data on individuals. Companies then often incur major expenses to prevent others from misusing the data. Lost intellectual property added nearly $5,000 more to the average cost. The rest of the estimated expense was associated with such things as investigative costs, lost productivity and replacing the laptop.”
As staggering as the $50,000 figure is—if you really believe it—even more staggering is the variation in the dollar loss for stolen or lost laptops that were included in the study. The individual losses associated with stolen or lost laptops in the study varied from a reasonable (and understandable) $1,213 to an out-of-this-world (and hard to believe) estimate of $975,527.
Wonder about the reason for the huge variation in lost-laptop costs? According to the study, “The faster the company learns that a laptop is lost, the lower the average cost … If a company discovers the loss in the same day, the average cost is $8,950. If it takes more than one week, the average cost rises significantly to approximately $115,849.”
That still doesn’t explain the near-million-dollar estimate for a single lost laptop, but it does explain why Intel linked up with the Ponemon Institute for this study: It’s because the computer chip maker has recently developed technology that companies can use to make notebooks harder to steal. That technology, according to the Mercury News story, can help make a laptop inoperative when it is lost or stolen.
Clearly, organizations have a strong interest in protecting their proprietary information that workers may have on their laptops, and Intel of course has a vested interest in marketing a technical solution to the problem. But as I have noted here before, there are a lot more ways that sensitive company information can walk out the door—such as when workers lose their jobs and decide to take it with them.
There is another solution: strong and specific HR policies that clearly delineate how employees are to handle their laptops and the sensitive information they may have on them. Too few organizations focus on that aspect of the problem, and it’s why you hear so many stories of a worker having their laptop filled with company and customer data getting stolen out of the back seat of their car.
Intel’s technical solution is a good one, but the skeptical side of me says it’s just an easy way to avoid having HR truly manage this problem with strong policies, training and an everyday focus on the issue. And, no technical solution can possibly account for human nature and the inherent ability of humans to do something stupid at the worst possible time.
Without strong HR involvement in managing the lost laptop and data security side of the equation, all a technical fix does is lull workers and management into a false sense of security about this problem—until a crisis erupts when the next lost laptop gets breached.
As a longtime newspaper, magazine and Internet editor, I frequently find that people who know me want some insight into one of the most perplexing idiosyncrasies: Why it is that the media seems to swarm to certain stories all at once, sometimes to the exclusion of just about everything else?
And sometimes, the media swarms around a story that is so obvious and such common knowledge that it hardly seems like news at all, at least not to anyone who has half a brain and is moderately alert.
Still don’t know what I’m talking about? OK, here’s my example of a terribly obvious story the media is starting to swarm about today: the notion that it is tough for older workers to find a job.
One “expert” actually said that “older workers have a lifetime of preferences and skills—essentially unique-shaped pegs that can fit into a limited number of holes [while] younger workers are malleable and can fit more easily into a variety of positions.”
This incredibly broad generalization—that older workers are severely limited because of their long experience, while younger workers with a limited background are more flexible and therefore employable—brings little real insight to this discussion. But that just gets back to my original point: Is anyone really surprised that older workers are having a hard time finding new work? Is this a news flash to anyone?
I suspect that you’ll be reading a lot more on this topic in the next few weeks, because newspaper stories like this feed radio and television (since they do very little original reporting), and that in turn feeds the cable talk shows, bloggers and the larger public debate.
In the end, there will be a lot of words expended on something that was not really news six months ago, and is even less so today. Employers prefer younger workers, for the most part, because they are generally cheaper. There are other reasons, of course, but that’s the long and the short of it. It’s hardly a news flash to anyone who engages the brain for even just a few minutes a day.
“No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people,” H.L. Mencken once said, and unfortunately, he’s been proved right over and over again.
Here’s the latest example: An upcoming Fox show called Someone’s Gotta Go, “a reality series in which real companies that are struggling to stay afloat in this lousy economy agree to let their staffs decide who among them will get pink-slipped to cut costs,” according to television columnist Lisa de Moraes writing in The Washington Post.
“Each week, a different company will be showcased,” according to the Post story. “Each week, that company’s boss or owner will call the employees together and tell them someone has to be laid off. He or she will give the employees all the available information about one another—salaries, job evaluations, etc.—and let them decide who gets the pink slip.”
Not only is Someone’s Gotta Go an HR nightmare (more on that in a minute), but who in their right mind thinks that employees ganging up and voting to fire one of their co-workers, Survivor-style, has any entertainment value at all in the middle of a recession where 600,000 real-life workers are getting tossed on the street every month?
Producer Mike Darnell told the Post that he got the idea for the show from an item on a cable channel in which a small-business owner let all her workers know what each person in the company was getting paid.
“We’ve taken it a step further,” Darnell said, “and opened up the books to everybody’s salary, opened up their HR files and let them talk about each other and to each other— this one’s lazy, this one’s a hard worker, I hear this one’s having an affair. And in the end they will decide who’s to go.”
I’ve written about this before, but employees talking about pay is never a good idea, despite what some might think. It’s a nightmare for managers and HR when people do, at least in my experience. And sharing the content of confidential personnel files with everyone in the company is a nightmare scenario that should make any decent HR person want to run screaming into the night.
My hope is that Someone’s Gotta Go turns out to be so campy and odd that it comes off as a real-life version of The Office rather than anything that has a hint of reality to it. And given that it will air on Fox, the likelihood is far greater that it will turn out to be more of a bomb like Temptation Island or Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire than a popular hit like American Idol.
But, I don’t trust Fox, or the Dutch company behind this show (which also created the trashy summer series Big Brother) to pull off a reality show about layoffs with any real wit or humor.
Maybe Mencken was right about the intelligence of the American people. In today’s economy, a TV show about the fun of firing your co-worker is nothing less than tasteless and cruel, especially since so many can see so much of it going on for real around them every day.
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