I think before people jump on the bandwagon they should think about Jobs state of mind when he wrote this.
iPhone just launched and still vulnerable. Senior staff going to a competitor and also Personally poaching staff and being involved in the interviews etc.
Let alone Jobs health issues etc.
Im not saying that Jobs was right, but we have the benefit of hindsight to see that the iPhone worksed, there was no guarantee of that happening.
I'll bite. Whatever's Steve Jobs' state of mind was, it was still wrong.
What if you were looking to change jobs or would have jumped jobs given the offer proposed. Is it right to limit your recruitment because Steve Jobs was sick or worried about a project? What if the project wasn't the iPhone, but the Apple Newton? What if the destination company wasn't Palm, but Google?
The circumstances surrounding the situation don't absolve Steve Jobs of what he tried to do.
A lot of companies were in on this pact, and I think they should all be punished.
Steve was pretty consistent on this issue, he talked google and many other companies on this. This is what makes him "bad". He did it willfully and repeatedly.
I think what really irks me about the whole case is, that it's a free market for competition, but it's more free for corporations than employees.
I rarely jump into HN comments any more. There's little more than snide in them these days. For what it's worth, I think yours is the only original comment in here thus far.
This sentement has come up semi-frequently in the past (almost) four years I've been a member of the site, and I lurked for months prior to creating an account. From my perspective, the site has trended towards mass appeal, but not at a very quick pace. The articles on the front page today aren't all that different from the ones I remember being on there four years ago. The level of discourse ebs and flows. Sometimes it's really good; other times it isn't.
None of these things seem to be working very well. They may alleviate a portion of the pain temporarily, but the baseline level of quality throughout the community still feels way off to me compared to what I see in the old threads.
As a sidenote, I like the explanations in this post about why digg, reddit, and slashdot went sour:
iPhone just launched and still vulnerable. Senior staff going to a competitor and also Personally poaching staff and being involved in the interviews etc.
Let alone Jobs health issues etc.
Im not saying that Jobs was right, but we have the benefit of hindsight to see that the iPhone worksed, there was no guarantee of that happening.