poaching
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Apple, Google and Intel CEOs ordered into questioning over no-poaching deals
If you're the sort to go CEO-watching, you may want to swing by Judge Lucy Koh's courtroom in the near future. Judge Koh has ordered four hours each of depositions from Apple's Tim Cook, Intel's Paul Otellini and former Google chief Eric Schmidt to glean more information about the alleged no-poaching agreements at the heart of a civil lawsuit that also includes Genentech, Intuit and Pixar. The line of questioning might not lead to any smoking gun statements -- the Department of Justice already did some homework, after all. Should Judge Koh find against the companies, however, the high-profile investigation might determine the size and scope of any potential compensation for technology workers who claim they were shortchanged for years.
Officers' Quarters: All star team
Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook. This week, a raid leader faces a difficult decision: stay with his current guild or join the hottest raid team on the realm. (FYI, this email is from mid November so adjust your progression expectations accordingly.) Hello, I am in a conundrum and require some help. I am a Raid Leader for a guild, and have been since early Dragon Soul for this guild (2 years in total). our team has always gotten content down, just took a long while to due so, usually to low numbers and unskilled players and poor attendance. We have been progressing through Mogu'Shan Vaults and Heart of Fear with some pace, just getting Zor'lok and Will of the Emperor this Thursday on Normal. Now i am one to play to the utmost caliber, pushing the limits of my class (Blood DK) with both mitigation and damage, even ranking on all bosses killed aside from Elegon. Now here's where my issue is, a guild on the server that was just recently formed and stomped 6/6 MSV and 4/6 HoF in 1 week has asked me to tank for them.
Google reportedly poaches key Samsung marketing VP for Motorola
Google may be doing more to boost Motorola's presence than whipping up a new device strategy, if rumors are true. AllThingsD claims that Google has poached Samsung's American VP for strategic marketing, Brian Wallace, for a roughly equivalent role at Motorola. The move would not only give Motorola a high-profile executive who's had stints at companies like RIM, but one who's not afraid of taking the competition head-on: Samsung's TV ads poking fun at iPhone launch queues appeared under Wallace's tenure. We've asked Google, Motorola and Samsung whether or not the shift is real; Motorola won't comment in either direction, and we haven't heard from the remaining two. If there's any truth to the story, Motorola might have a stronger carrier-independent sales pitch than the occasional dystopic TV spot.
Nintendo takes on Disney veteran as senior VP for digital in US, gets serious about this whole internet thing
Nintendo hinted it was improving its notoriously rudimentary online access with word of the Nintendo Network early this year, and was even more adamant at E3 about making a big push into digital video. Some have accused the company of nothing but flag-waving -- if that's true, the waving is about to turn into a full parade through a new hire. As of July 1st, Nintendo is bringing on Disney's former Interactive Media Group senior VP Duncan Orrell-Jones to take on the just-minted role of senior VP for the company's Network Business group in the US. He'll be handling the overall American digital strategy, which covers both gaming as well as content. We'll need to wait awhile before we see the results, but if it helps make sure friend codes never rise from the dead to haunt our Wii U, we're all for it.
Officers' Quarters: How to avoid the feeder guild label
Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook, available from No Starch Press. No community wants to be known as a feeder guild. No raid team wants to see its best members leave for more progressed guilds when they have the opportunity. No guild leader wants to fall victim to poaching over and over again. It's an embarrassing place to be. How can you stop the bleeding and shake the label? Read on to find out! But first, this week's email: Hi Scott. I'm GM of a guild that is not a hard core raiding guild. We have been around since Ulduar and were founded at the break up of a guild that existed since vanilla. ... The founding principle of the guild was no drama and keep it casual. This has crystallised into my own rule as GM: advice for other players is fine if you ask if they want it first. Unsolicited "you are rubbish" comments are not allowed. ... One advantage of the guild is that the atmosphere of advice and support over criticism means that "OMG you Noob" players either change their tune or leave. This mean the relations between guild members generally remain good even after people move on. So on to the issue.
Apple Stores and Microsoft Stores by the numbers
TUAW readers know from a series of posts we've run over the years that Microsoft has been opening self-branded stores throughout the U.S., usually just a stone's throw away from well-trafficked Apple Stores. Fortune's JP Mangalindan took a metaphorical bullet for the sake of a story and visited both the Microsoft Store and Apple Store in Santa Clara, California. What the reporter found was that while Microsoft is doing its best to emulate the look, feel and success of the Apple retail outlet, there are differences in the way that things are done. Mangalindan obviously had fun with his visits, listing the number of customers (14 at the Microsoft Store, 40 at the Apple Store), the number of employees on the floor (11 for Microsoft, 35 for Apple), and such questions as "Employees who said I wouldn't like the laptop I was looking at" (1 at the Microsoft Store, 0 at the Apple Store). My favorite part of the article was the response Mangalindan received from employees at each store when he told them that he was also looking at Macs -- "We're priced more competitively. What about this Ultrabook from ASUS? It's slim, light, and sexy" -- or at the Apple Store, also looking at PCs -- "Bro, they may be cheaper, but Apple's all about quality. Our customer service can't be beat. [fist bump]" While we've seen no definitive word on exactly how successful Microsoft's retail strategy is, we know that Microsoft is being almost fanatical about moving into the retail arena. TUAW has heard multiple accounts from Apple Store employees who have been approached by Microsoft to switch teams and go to work at Microsoft Stores; in some cases, the Microsoft offers have reflected dramatic bumps in salary over the comparable positions at the Apple stores. Have you had a good, bad or indifferent experience at either an Apple or Microsoft Store? Let your fellow readers know about it in the comments below.
Report: Google hires Apple exec to work on 'secret project'
Google appears to have scored another coup in its ongoing rivalry with Apple, having reportedly lured one of the company's senior directors to its Mountain View headquarters. Simon Prakash, pictured above, has worked at Apple for more than eight years, most recently serving as the firm's senior director of product integrity. According to VentureBeat, however, that tenure has come to a close, now that Google has hired Prakesh to work on a "secret project." The report speculates that this project could be helmed by co-founder Sergey Brin, and that it may be mobile-related, though declarative statements were few and far between. Prior to arriving at Apple, Prakash served as director of engineering design validation at Cielo Communications, and held managerial positions at 3Com. VentureBeat claims he'll be starting work at Google today, though the company has yet to issue any statement on the matter. Once finalized, though, the hiring could help dispel some of those "no poach" accusations flying around federal courts.
Officers' Quarters: Members turned poachers
Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook, available now from No Starch Press. It's bad enough for an officer when you start losing core raiders. As any long-time officer can tell you, though, things can always go from bad to worse. This week, a guild leader falls victim to a member's alt guild that suddenly turns into anything but. Hey Scott-- We lost three of our core raiders yesterday, and may be losing more. The girlfriend of the Raider Leader/MT in our casual 10m decided to start an "alt" guild. Not a big deal in its own right, myself and the other GM were a bit concerned about her underlying intentions; she'd been a core raider up until about three weeks prior to her founding this new guild. Myself and the other GM are not sure why the girlfriend stopped raiding with us; it was a choice of hers, and when we inquired as to whether everything was all right, we were always assured it was. Co-GM and I noticed that to start her alt-guild, she'd recruited several members from our guild: mostly alts, but what concerned us was the handful of mains that left us to join the alt guild. Slightly annoyed that we, the leadership, hadn't been notified of her intentions, we spoke amongst ourselves with how to best handle this; if it's truly an alt guild, we should not have to worry about our ranks thinning. We weren't going to reprimand her, demote her, or remove her remaining character from the guild. We're not like that. She, along with her boyfriend, had been kind and helpful in the past. Late the other night, I saw that the boyfriend, along with the another core raid dps who I'd been particularly close with, had left the guild to join up with the girlfriend's alt guild. I was crushed.
Officers' Quarters: Guild wars
Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook, available now from No Starch Press. Guild splits can be traumatizing for all involved, often ending in bruised egos, stabbed backs, and rancor all around. (Yes, rancor isn't just that monster in the pit under Jabba's throne room.) In the best outcomes, the two factions can ignore each other and go about their own business. Unfortunately, it doesn't always turn out that way. Sometimes, as you'll see in this week's email, one faction isn't content to live and let live. Sometimes, it's war ... I'm an officer in a smallish casual raiding guild. We just recently got enough of our players geared enough to start raiding and are starting the process of continuously wiping on early bosses to learn the encounters. The officers aren't freaking out about our difficulty in completing the encounters or the fact that some of our members still aren't raid-ready yet, because we understand that the game has barely been out a month and some people didn't get it until Christmas or later. Our problem has been that a couple of the more hardcore members have been causing quite a fuss and complaining that the guild is going nowhere and in some cases, openly attacking officers and general members in guild chat. This has gone far beyond the occasional good-natured ribbing and has become a major source of tension in the guild.
Apple, others talking to DoJ about anti-poaching agreement
Apple, Google, Pixar, Intel, and a few other companies are currently in talks with the Department of Justice about an alleged anti-poaching agreement, according to sources speaking to the Wall Street Journal. The government is considering accusing the companies of agreeing to not hire each others' employees for a certain period of time. If, as a law professor tells the Journal, the government finds that these companies are actually agreeing to not poach, then employees could be hurt by not having access to the best deal available. For their part, the companies are reportedly arguing that non-poaching agreements are a requirement, especially when companies are so closely collaborating on various technologies and standards. Apple and Google, for example, would want to create the best products possible for customers, and wouldn't be able to do that if they had to worry about their employees possibly getting hired away by the other partner. There's no actual lawsuit yet -- this is still just an investigation, and the Journal says that there are "some companies more willing to settle to avoid an antitrust case than others." But we'll see -- if the Department determines that the companies did make an agreement and that employees were punished by it, then the case could end up in court eventually.
Officers' Quarters: Pre-expansion doldrums
Every Monday Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook, available this spring from No Starch Press. On most servers, guilds experience a severe lull in interest and activity prior to the release of an expansion. Players get sick of the old content. They achieve the goals they care about. Then they do other things with their free time until the next expansion gives them new goals to achieve and new content to conquer. These pre-expansion doldrums hit guilds pretty hard during the long wait for The Burning Crusade, especially considering that many raid teams were unable (or unwilling) to progress into AQ40 or vanilla Naxx. The situation grew so dire while players were awaiting Wrath that poaching -- despite its stigma -- became rampant (so much so that I had to rant about it). Now we are facing the same situation again while waiting for Cataclysm. One guild leader is reaching out for advice on how to recruit in this environment. Hello, I am writing in hopes that this could be answered in an upcoming Officers Quarters feature. I am an officer in a small, semi-casual raiding guild. We exclusively do 10-man content; we lucked into having a group of players that enjoy raiding, but not the "cat herding" required for the larger 25-man raids. I use the term casual loosely; we're (mostly) serious raiders, we just don't have attendance requirements for raids nor a complex looting system. We've had relatively steady raid progression thus far, where we're working on a few (normal mode) encounters in the upper spire of Icecrown Citadel. In short, we feel that the 10-player difficulty was designed for our level of play, and enjoy the challenge that it provides. Unfortunately, we've also run into the problem of some serious guild attrition.
Microsoft's new retail hiring policy: shop at Apple
If you're an Apple retail employee, you might want to keep an eye out for coy glances across the Genius Bar or little notes emailed to your iPhone -- someone may be trying to offer you a job. Word comes via The Loop, citing anonymous sources, that Microsoft's ramp-up process to launching its new line of retail stores has resulted in the harvest & hiring of some Apple Store managers, who in turn are making offers to their hand-picked lists of colleagues with the promise of higher wages in Microsoft's mall outposts. Some managers have been offered relocation assistance to go along with their salary boosts. You can't blame Microsoft for going after the best in the effort to build out a retail presence (and apparently this kind of bodysnatching goes on all the time in the retail sector), but one does wonder how well the Apple team members will make the transition over to working for Microsoft -- it's a bit more of an adjustment than going from Victoria's Secret to Lady Foot Locker. It might not just be the lure of more money that draws the iCrew over to the new shops; some may be profoundly dissatisfied with their current working environment, according to an ifoAppleStore report noted by AppleInsider. Frustrations between employees and management at the Alderwood Mall store in Washington have led to the threat of a walkout scheduled for October 3rd, which would be the first such demonstration of labor power by Apple retail employees, according to the post. If you're an Apple Store employee and you've been approached by Microsoft directly or by colleagues who are jumping ship, drop us a line at tuaw.com/tips and let us know what's going down. Illustration via the Iconfactory, in belated honor of International Talk Like a Pirate Day.
Palm's Colligan rebuffs Steve Jobs' 'likely illegal' plea to stop hiring from Apple
Imagine the scene two years ago, August 2007 to be precise. Palm was busy preparing to launch its Foleo and the OS that would save Palm was still expected to be coming from ACCESS. In fact, things were looking so bad for Palm in August that we penned an intervention letter that then CEO Ed Colligan responded to. Apple, for its part, was still enjoying the glow of the golden halo rising above its iPhone launched just over a month prior with the help of 2% of Palm's hired workforce, according to Bloomberg. Oh, and Apple had just lost Jon Rubinstein, the man leading its iPod division, to Palm.Now Bloomberg is reporting that Steve Jobs approached Palm's Ed Colligan in August 2007 with a proposal to refrain from hiring each other's staff (read: quit poaching our employees, Ed!). Colligan refused, saying,Your proposal that we agree that neither company will hire the other's employees, regardless of the individual's desires, is not only wrong, it is likely illegal.Meeeow.
Breakfast topic: Poaching
I'm working on growing our little guild. I've met with some success. I don't spam trade chat to advertise our guild bank, vent, website or or smokin' hot tabard (all of which we have). I like to get to know people a bit before I bring them into the fold. The best way that I know how to do that is to run instances with them.Since we're small, I PUG a lot, so I'm introduced to many players. I'm looking for folks that are both good at what they do and would be a good fit for what we've established. I've found that many times people pug because even though they're in a guild they can't seem to get the assistance that they need. I find that some are actively looking for a change and others just generally enjoy the experience grouping with my comrades.
Poaching for skins
I have to thank you, other players on my realm. If it wasn't for you, I probably wouldn't have reached 450 Skinning already. Yes, the garbage of dead mobs that you leave behind becomes my profit -- when you leave that worg corpse or the dead drakonid behind, I'm all too happy to run over, skin it, and clean up that little mess you've made, while sticking a little gold in my pocket as well. Matthew is right there with me -- he calls it poaching, though we're both referring not to stealing, but to simply skinning the leftover mobs of all those players before us.Truth be told, I probably poached more than ever down in the mines of Netherwing Ledge -- there were always players killing down there, and what they didn't skin, I did, both for the quest skins and for my own Knothide. But in the expansion, things are even better -- everywhere I go, there are fields of leftover mobs, and even when someone is able to kill a mob before I get there, I hover over them to pick up the skin afterwards.Matthew has put together a list of all the great places to pick up extra skins -- I'll agree that Coldarra is full of poaching options right now, as is Kamagua on the other side of the continent. Grizzly Hills, also, is not only full of creatures to skin, but lots of leftover corpses as people quest across the zone (though odds are that if you keep up on skinning, you'll be 450 by then anyway). Think of it as a service -- we're the garbagemen of the realms, cleaning up your kills so the next can spawn and the circle of loot can go on.
Motorola goes after RIM for nabbing employees, too
Moto's bleeding from a lot of places lately -- and the hemmorahging isn't just of the financial sort, either (it actually seems to have those cuts and bruises under control for the moment). Hot off a suit filed against Apple for making off with one of its higher-ups, the company is going after RIM for allegedly hiring away some 40 employees in Florida and the Chicago area since February, which coincidentally happened to be right about the time that things were falling apart in the patent cross-licensing negotiations. Motorola is seeking at least $50 large in damages (way to aim high and put a premium value on your staff there, guys), possibly egged on by RIM CEO Balsillie's brazen comments that he wants to poach "hundreds" of its people. Question is, with the economy in the tank, isn't there enough talent to go around without these types of tactics?[Thanks, Eric]
Officers' Quarters: My pre-Wrath rant
Every Monday Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership.Bleak is the word I would use to describe the current situation for raiding guilds. For many guilds, activity and recruitment are at all-time lows. It's becoming harder and harder to cobble together enough people to run anything these days. Must we simply endure? Is there no hope for us until Wrath launches? Will we officers respond to this crisis with moral fortitude -- or weakness? Will I actually use boldface to call out our officer community on their behavior? Find out after the break! But first, the author of this week's e-mail relates his own guild's experiences. Hi Scott, My name is Dmitry. [My guild is] a casual raiding guild made up mostly of people over 20, who either go to school, or work, or both, many of whom have kids. This is all taken into account and we have a very strong RL-before-WoW stance. Unfortunately the past month or two has been really hard for us. Our MT was gone for 3 weeks because of a new job, lots of people went on vacation because of the summer, others stopped playing as much to spend more time with their kids, etc. After having guild firsts on Mag, Hydross, and Lurker in 3 weeks in June our guild has started to go backwards, having trouble taking down Gruul some nights.
Officers' Quarters: No poaching!
Every Monday Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership.If the wildlife in Nagrand didn't reproduce faster than rabbits injected with Viagra, one could accuse the genocidal Hemet Nesingwary, or even the Consortium (with their endless need for ivory tusks), of funding poaching on a massive scale. And of course, we would be the perpetrators, guilty of the annihilation of entire generations of species. But fortunately, those elekks, clefthooves, and talbuks never seem to become endangered. This week's e-mail is about a different kind of poaching, but one that is no less nefarious. Hey. I have been reading your blog for awhile now and I am an officer in a small casual guild (66 accounts) that one day hopes to have some endgame on farm. The problem we seem to have is people just leaving with a stealth guild quit. When asked they normally say they left for a friends guild or something along the lines of "just wasn't working out." About a week later I see them in Shattrath with a guild tag of another guild that I know just poached them from us. I understand that it's their $15 a month but is there anything that we as a guild can do to keep them? We seem to lose one once a week.
Is it okay to kill animals for money and experience?
The time-honored tradition of starting out as a noob fighter, taking down the local wildlife to level up, has probably not been the subject of too much consideration. After all, you gotta kill something, right? Well, actually, that's another discussion completely. Now, I'm not one to trot out the 'Won't someone think of the children?' complaint, but this is a topic that's been on my mind ever since Pokémon arrived on our shores.Sure, we can all tell the difference between reality and a videogame. And the average game wolf critter is no substitute for the real thing, of course. But it's a casual element that's easily rectifiable, and at some level, the message is clear: it's okay to kill animals for fun. At least with humanoids, there's provable intent to cause harm. With animals, you're just treading on their territory, and you should leave. I'm under no illusions about where my meat comes from, but this isn't about survival. Gaming or not, this is poaching.Now, I can appreciate that this is a silly argument to some extent, but as game designers (and I include myself in that category, having worked in the industry previously), we ought to be able to develop ways to level up that don't involve predation. It sets a bad example, at this stage of MMO development history it's lazy, and there's no real excuse to use animals in place of people. A warrior should practice his combat skills on opponents who behave like he does, not on creatures with their own innocent agendas.
Children of a lesser guild
The worst part of guild membership is, by far, watching a guild die. I've seen guilds die from poor recruiting practices, internal drama, and, in one memorable case, a disgruntled member with /gkick privileges. But the most painful death I ever saw was that of a large casual raiding guild in which I was an officer. We weren't very good, and we never progressed far, mostly because anyone decent in our guild was immediately recruited away by one of the high-end guilds on our server. We kept it together for several months, but in the end, ten of our best players (including our two tanks and the best healer) were poached away by another guild. Eventually, the guild leader and I left too. Judging by his post on the EU General forums, Aires, GM of Flames of the Phoenix on EU-Terenas, is having the same problem. His small Kara guild is being eaten away by larger guilds who whisper his members, invite them to come to 25-mans, and then ask them if they'd like to join. Admirably, Aires does not cry about it or name names, but asks a general question: Is it ethically right to poach members from smaller guilds who don't approach you first? Opinions seem to be divided. On one hand, few people will argue that it's "nice" to cannibalize a smaller guild, and many SSC/TK guilds who do this to "loser guilds" would scream bloody murder if a BT/Hyjal guild did the same to them. But every server also has a limited supply of players who don't suck, and new recruits do have to come from somewhere. Plus, there's no real way to steal a player who doesn't want to be stolen in the first place. The thread also contains a rare personal opinion from a Blizzard employee. CM Vaneras says that your answer to the question basically depends on why you play the game. If you play for what Vaneras terms "shiny epics", you probably won't see anything wrong with poaching, while those who play for "the cameraderie and accomplishments of a guild" will hate it. What do you think about guild poaching?
