From Ed Catmull's email to Steve Jobs:
"...one of our department managers told me that she was offered a position as producer for Sony’s first CG film and is likely to accept.
"The director of the movie is REDACTED [Jill Culton, ex-Lucasfilm and on Pixar-produced Monsters Inc—M.A.] who started off as head of story on Monsters but burnt out. She is good but fragile."
REDACTED will talk with her [the Pixar manager that Sony was poaching]. She isn’t so great that we have to keep her, and she isn’t so bad that she would hurt Sony.
Where wage-fixing is very general and hard to quantify this is quite personal and tangible. He's directly looking to derail someone's career by preventing them from seizing an opportunity he's not willing to give them. At the same time he craps on someone who even he can't deny was a founding part of what was at that point their biggest hit.
It's a grown man treating people and careers the way a toddler does toys.
1: http://pando.com/2014/07/10/revealed-emails-court-docs-show-...
The "she isn't so bad that she'd hurt Sony" starts to sound bad. But it really gets bad after the part you excerpted:
We don’t have a no raid arrangement with Sony. We have set up one with ILM [Lucasfilm] and Dreamworks which has worked quite well. I probably should go down and meet with Sandy and Penney and Sony to reach some agreement. Our people are become [sic] really desirable and we need to nip this in the bud.
At which point I was like, dude, fuck you Ed.
I would expect the discussion to move to how could they keep her (more money, better position, or just extol the long-term benefits of staying), whether she was worth the cost of keeping her, the long term consequences on Sony and other employees etc. But unfortunately, he instead suggests a "no raid agreement" with Sony and that:
Our people are becoming really desireable and we need to nip this in the bud.
EDIT reading the whole thing, I see one aspect of Catmull's concern that seems reasonable. Entrants want to grow fast, and therefore offer unrealistically and unsustainably high wages - it's a bubble. It's disruptive to keep losing the people that you've trained - and then, the competitor goes out of business anyway. This hurts the industry as a whole, the employees and employers.
Successful industry problems. But it's up to employees what they think is in their best interest - not for employers to decide.
"They're babes in the woods. I think I can help turn Alvy and Ed into businessmen."[1]
I guess training Mr. Catmull to do things like what we see in the above email was part of it...
I have no idea how it works in the US.
Reporting on staff movements isn't necessarily selfish or evil. It's important to understand what's going on with your workforce: know where they're going and why. Catmull's email seems totally fine to me -- he's reporting on a poached employee to Jobs, explaining that Sony is aggressively pursuing Pixar personnel, and that they were already taking a certain employee of moderate value particularly. Catmull reiterates that there is no extant no-poach arrangement with Sony. That's useful information for a CEO, right?
I think some people are trying to make this a bigger deal than it has to be. If there's an email that shows direct evidence of conspiracy to fix wages, I'd be interested in seeing that, but I don't think the no-poach agreements need to be assumed to have been a bad-faith arrangement.
EDIT: Woops, HN has decided I'm not allowed to talk anymore. Usually when this happens it lasts a pretty long time (at least several hours, I suspect something like 12-24). I'd like to continue discussing with you all, but that'll have to be it for me in this thread.
Understanding where staff is going is reasonable. Making it so that your staff doesn't have opportunities to go anywhere? That's a criminal conspiracy to rig a market.
It doesn't really leave the employee without somewhere to go, it just makes it harder for them to find employment at a direct competitor while still employed. I would bet that most people who would've been poached would've been hired by a competitor within hours of resigning at their current employer.
That doesn't make it OK, and like I said, it's very possible all of this was illegal from the get-go. I'm just saying there's no need to jump to the conclusion that malice and conspiracy were the primary motives behind these compacts, and there's no need to drag someone's name through the mud when definitive evidence doesn't exist.
It's the parties who were not party to the agreement but whose wage-earning potential was affected by it that are the problem.
Depressed wages are the whole point. The no-poach collusion is there to prevent the companies involved from being in a position where they need to make a counteroffer to retain their talent.
Counteroffers once an employee has mentioned a plan to leave are so fraught with morale issues that many managers recommend against them no matter what. And auctions suck for buyers due to the "winner's curse" – wise buyers will often try to avoid being part of an auction process.
Does that mean the seller always wants an auction, highest price always being best? Maybe if you can sell-and-forget a physical item. But selling your unique-in-the-industry talents for the next N years isn't quite like that: it's a relationship where you'll need a full gelled team and other costly resources to do well, and some safety margin for miscalculations. A 'cursed' winner who overpays for you, and others, might wind up sinking your projects and career when the errors manifest.
Pixar employees have done very well, overall, including through stock options which became more valuable because their teams stuck together, and delivered critically-lauded and highly-profitable work at sustainable costs. Perhaps an alternate-history, with more talent raids and compensation bidding-wars, would have led to some superstar employees making even more money. But it might also have torpedoed key projects at key moments, and left the company and the bulk of the employees, far worse off. It's not a simple situation to model.
* Preventing major disruption to studios' projects as key players are poached any time a film goes into production. You could say they should have separate contracts binding the employee to stay for the duration if that's the concern, but that's not really practical, especially in an at-will employment state, where said contracts will be viewed with heavy skepticism by all parties. The more efficient way to achieve a similar effect is to just agree at the corporate level that you won't engage in this practice. This can have the side effect of limiting wages, but I don't think it necessarily has to.
* "Poaching" can be variously defined; the contract may make it legal for a competitor to process an applicant, but not legal to actively pursue staff that have not expressed direct interest. In such arrangements, employee mobility would be considerably less hampered.
I think those are good intentions. The business guy is trying to do right by the business, which is the sum of all of his employees. One could logically conclude that if films are constantly hindered by bidding wars, making 90% of the process recruitment, and secret information is constantly wrongly disseminated by that high rate of turnover, that his business may struggle and jeopardize the livelihoods of everyone involved. Some people may not believe it, but employee dependence does weigh heavily on good people in high-powered corporate positions.
One could also argue that the bidding wars just have to continue until the price for an animator stabilizes and that the companies just need to suck it up. These highly-editorialized articles definitely seem to make that case, and claim that the law backs up that perspective. That's fine if so. But it doesn't make Ed Catmull or the executives at every other firm involved in these pacts evil moustache-twirlers that exist only to steal from the middle-class, and we shouldn't be so quick to throw our own under the bus.
> We don’t have a no raid arrangement with Sony. We have set up one with ILM [Lucasfilm] and Dreamworks which has worked quite well. I probably should go down and meet with Sandy and Penney and Sony to reach some agreement. Our people are become [sic] really desirable and we need to nip this in the bud.
You might think that cookiecaper is an insensitive clod. But, he's not posting fluff, off-topic or otherwise distracting material.
That's a rule on Reddit, but to my knowledge it's never been a rule here.
Here's pg's own words on the subject.
>I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness.
In the same way that smoke indicates fire, a stink like this indicates a giant pile of shit. And that's exactly what's just hit the fan.
If you (a) agree with cookiecaper and (b) have anything to do with HR, now would be a great time to consider switching careers. You simply don't have the moral judgement your job requires. Better get out now before you find yourself in the middle of a similar mess.
His actions here are, I think, by definition evil. Decisions made with selfish intent with willful disregard to the negative consequences it has on others. That's my definition at least, everyone has their own. How utterly disappointing. :(
We're only getting one side of the story here: the story of the DOJ, which has its own political interests. And in typical fashion with these highly sensationalized scandals, bullying and shame are deployed to force people into one camp or the other. People are discouraged from finding a middle ground, trying to empathize with both sides, etc. They're told, "X is bad, and Y did X! How can you still act in any reasonable manner toward Y? He must be banished!"
We need to be careful and we need to quit feeding our own to the wolves. We need to back off of our hair-trigger. So far, I know of no documentation that shows clear mens rea on the part of Catmull, and even if that is shown, it doesn't mean all of his contributions should be thrown out the door. That's very simple-minded, silly thinking.
I he has money, power, comfort, is top-of-his-game -- then its very easy to really act as though it is a game and his actions only strengthening his position and the position of the system that supports his position (the company).
So in his mind, he is just being efficient/business minded/shrewd etc... and doesn't realize he is actually fucking up the lives of others -- he is only seeing it from his own perspective; that he is an effective person making shit-tons of money.
Utter lack of compassion/human perspective.
They think it's just a game.
Bastards.
I'm not going to burn my graphics books, but I'm really disappointed with Pixar right now.
"This needs to be nipped in the bud." Um, yeah.
Back from ~2001-2004 when I was working on designing the Lucas Arts Letterman Digital Arts center in the Presidio, there was a certain CIO who wanted us to plan to build a studio in Asia. The reason was that "Asain animators are very cheap, and they aren't primadonna's like the overpaid ones here in the states."
They saw animators as commodity COGs.
While that may be true - if this strategy was at the core of fomenting an illegal wage-collusion between companies, than it doenst matter if the strategy is valid: what matters is that to achieve the most effective outcome of said strategy, CEOs of the biggest tech firms colluded to prevent worker wages from reflecting true market value for the enrichment/better-ment of their bottom line.
It just goes to show that even the best of us can succumb to greed.
Could there be better business education in this regard?
Many years ago (10?) I distinctively remember reading an article about the collapse of salary of animators. Their salary had shot up as much as a million a year thanks to surprise hits such as the first batch of hits from Pixar. But in a matter of a few months or a year or so, the salary had gone down drastically.
The article was mentioning glut of animated movies etc, but I'm suspecting it was due to this illegal act.
Ed was someone I really looked up to.
Since they do such specialized work, and since there is a very limited supply of such talent (i.e. it takes many years of experience you can't get in school), it would be surprising if their salaries weren't extremely high.
When I worked at EA, we had technical artists come over from DreamWorks, Pixar, etc. But I don't know how much they were paid.
http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Pixar-Salaries-E5118.htm
"All 307 salaries posted anonymously by Pixar employees."
Apple and Google’s wage-fixing involved dozens more companies, over 1M employees
I wouldn't be surprised if it's happening for the $250K+ jobs though
That'd give us some idea of how much wages were suppressed all those years...
There's no way being unethical (or at the very least, "an utter dick") in one area doesn't bleed over into other areas.
