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...

1: http://izquotes.com/quote/240878

I have no idea how it works in the US.

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.

Leaders at some major tech companies, responsible for their teams' productivity and often-recognized by their employees as effective and inspirational, turn out to have used reciprocal non-solicitation agreements, now considered illegal, to avoid talent turnover and bidding wars.

This likely reduced some employees' compensation, especially for a few superstar performers, but also may have been a key component to the magical product results their teams achieved, ultimately rewarding everyone involved in those companies (including their satisfied customers). The net effects on employee welfare and total social welfare are unclear, as they've not been carefully studied.

It's not a good argument.

There are markets where these agreements work and markets where they don't -- it depends on the cost of entry. But this is probably a market where they work, because, well, they exist. Smart people entered into them despite being on notice that they were probably illegal.

To clarify cost of entry: let's say the employees here are wheat farmers. There are hundreds of wheat farmers and five companies that buy wheat to make bread. Those companies compete to buy as much wheat as possible so they can enter as many markets as possible while still making a profit. So they drive up the price, and end up paying roughly as much for the wheat as the value it contributes to the bread-making enterprise. Those are market forces, and the capitalist notion is that they fairly distribute profits among all the people involved -- but they reduce the profits of the five companies.

So let's say the five companies get together and agree to split up the wheat and only pay 80% of the market price. All of their profits go up, all the wheat farmers' profits go down, market forces are no longer operating -- and therefore the agreement is illegal. It's cool if that isn't obvious to everyone, since it's not exactly relevant in most of our lives -- but anyone who's allowed to run a market-leading company has probably had the concept mentioned to them at some point.

But so now the other market forces you're referring to come into play: the five companies have created an opportunity. If some sixth player (like Sony Bread Co.) is willing to come into the market and pay 90%, they can get all the wheat at below market price. This is great for Sony because they get cheap labor without even having to break the law, but it doesn't solve the problem for the wheat farmers. Only if a lot of other players have the same idea will they drive the price back up to the free-market level.

But that assumes the 20% entry bonus created by the illegal cartel is enough to overcome their competitive advantage from already being in the market. Becoming Disney isn't free -- and this kind of cartel is something, pretty much by definition, that you would only go for if you thought you and your compatriots had the market locked down. And you would only drive the price down as far as you thought your competitive advantage could defend.

So, no -- market forces are not a magic wand to make agreements designed to nullify market forces OK.

It could even be argued that the trust-busters in your analogy are really just anti-entrepreneurial and are attempting to close a rare market opportunity to protect the extant oligopoly. Many laws and regulations actually are written by the dominant powers in a field specifically to heighten the barrier to entry and prevent innovative new services from presenting a threat by burying them in paperwork and compliance expenses.

They stopped being direct competitors the minute they agreed to collude. The term you're looking for is 'fellow cartel member.'

It looks like the primary intended effect was to keep salaries and benefits low

Do we need to demonstrate intention? You brought up mens rea elsewhere in the thread but it hardly seems relevant at the end of the day. Someone with a clear intent to screw his employees certainly is more despicable and villainesque, but the practical impact on the employees is the same even if he did so unintentionally.

And we can frown upon it all the same, because it's not as if he did something innocent with unforeseen side effect - the agreement was illegal, and the fact that it was secret suggests everyone involved knew this.

So yeah, I'm maybe willing to believe that Ed Catmull didn't go out there with the explicit intent of screwing his employees. He may have engaged in this agreement in protection of his company, or of his work, but ultimately he (and every other SV CEO involved) kept it hush-hush because they knew it was illegal and immoral, and that the wider world would cry foul at what they were doing.

Mens rea would make the morality of this more open and shut, but I do not believe it is critical to our ability to judge the impact and legacy of these actions.

> "Frequent poaching is often considered unsportsmanlike competition by business people; I know several of the companies I've been affiliated with have felt that way."

But yet this isn't a game. These are people, not basketballs. It's careers, not the soccer field. It's families, children, vacations, dreams, plans, not points in to be scored against your opponent.

You're being unfairly downvoted IMO and you've brought up some good points, but what you're seeing (some have stated this explicitly) is backlash against business folk who are so concerned about the high-level game being played that they've forgotten that the pieces on the board are people.

The mistake here is the belief that this is somehow unique to Ed Catmull, Eric Schmidt, Steve Jobs, et al. The demonization of him I'm seeing in this thread is disappointing because a large percentage of the people doing the pitchfork-waving would have done the exact same thing in his position. All sufficiently complex systems (the movie industry certainly one of them) evolve complex rules and strategies, and it's remarkably easy to get lost in them and forget that these systems are built on top of people.

It's tempting to think of people who do bad things as "evil men", because it gives us security: "I'd never do something like that, phew". In reality though there are few evil men, but many men who do evil things. The notion that some people are capable of evil while others are not is hubris, and is a great way to end up on the wrong side of the morality scale without even knowing it. I personally doubt Ed Catmull ever got out of bed in the morning and decided he was going to screw a bunch of animators and inhibit their careers, but yet it happened, and I'd encourage all the pitchfork-wavers in this thread to consider that they themselves can just as easily end up in that position, especially if they approach life with the assumption that they're one of the Good Guys.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't most corporate agreements like this secret by default? It's an internal business mechanic and can be considered proprietary based on that. The press releases only come out when a company thinks something is of low enough tactical value that it can be revealed without harming the company and high enough PR value that it can be used to woo investors or consumers.

I don't think there's any inference that the pacts were considered immoral by the signatories in the fact that they weren't publicly declared. There were obviously many people between all of the participant companies that knew about these pacts, and it doesn't sound like it was considered super-duper-top-secret and could only be mentioned behind the closed doors of the CEO's office.

As I stated elsewhere, we should also consider the DOJ's angle on this. Prosecutors want to make a name for themselves and it's in their interest to portray all of their defendants as scoundrels. They want to blow open a big public scandal. They want to leave a legacy before the next president comes in and restocks the department with his own people. The prosecutor's job is practically to convince everyone that the defendants are evil, but in cases like this, it's rarely true. We need to acknowledge these perverse incentives as we read about this case, too.

>what you're seeing (some have stated this explicitly) is backlash against business folk who are so concerned about the high-level game being played that they've forgotten that the pieces on the board are people.

I don't think that's a fair characterization either. An executive's concern for everyone on his staff causes him to act in the best interest of the company as a whole, and not just the best interest of a specific individual or a specific type of employee that may be in greater demand. If bidding wars and poaching becomes disruptive, it's natural to seek a remedy. Catmull states several times in these articles that poaching is "bad for everyone" and seems sincere in that belief. He believes it's bad for executives, employees, competing studios, etc., and one can see the logic in that belief. He tried to stop a practice that he viewed as parasitic. In Catmull's view, even if an animator got poached with a big raise, this practice is still a net negative, presumably because it destabilizes the industry and potentially decreases the longevity of that career.

Maybe he was wrong and maybe he broke the law. But it doesn't mean that he forgot that his employees were real people.

I appreciate the rest of your post, which acknowledges that Catmull is probably not irredeemably evil.

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.

The easy (and legal!) way to do this is to get people under contract. Executive teams do this among themselves all the time, so it's not as though they're unfamiliar wit the principle or the practice. Sports teams do it too, as do a lot of creative fields where the particular people involved make all the difference.

The obvious downside (from the perspective of the suits) is that they end up paying more for talent than otherwise would. Every dollar going to the staff is a dollar that isn't available to the executive team. It's a zero sum game, and the guys on top were playing dirty to get what they'd never be able to get if they kept it clean.

I've personally tried to negotiate a contract in an at-will employment state with a company when I accepted a directorship there. They refused to budge on it. It was at-will or nothing, and their excuse was "We've only ever heard of that kind of thing for C-levels". I would've been giving up a lot of flexibility too, and most employees wouldn't be ready for that or willing to do it.

>Every dollar going to the staff is a dollar that isn't available to the executive team.

That's not how corporate structure works, especially corporate structure in a progressive startup like Pixar used to be. Yes, there are performance bonuses for executives, but there are also profit sharing bonuses and stock options for rank-and-file employees, which creates an interest in the company's welfare beyond the universal "I don't want to lose my job". It's silly to act like there's a direct inverse correlation between dollars spent on wages and dollars forwarded to executives' personal bank accounts.

At this point I'm convinced this thread is just an anti-capitalist, anti-business crusade by misguided justice warriors. Pretty disappointing for a platform that's supposed to be intended for entrepreneurs.

Well, nobody except yourself, of course.

Like you said a moment later, "I've personally tried to negotiate a contract in an at-will employment state with a company when I accepted a directorship there."

I don't know about you, but if I typed something that flatly contradicted a statement I'd made not two lines prior I'd think twice about hitting "publish". As the old saw says, 'It's better to say nothing and be though a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt'.

And as it turns out, there are lots of people who recognize the unwelcome risk built into an agreement that allows their employment to be terminated with or without notice, with or without cause, at any time, and without any compensation. (That's the definition of "at-will" for those of you unfamiliar with the precise legal construction.)

Typically, this is far more beneficial to employers than it is to employees and it shouldn't be hard to figure out why. Indeed, most people's reasons for wanting a contract are probably similar to your own reasons for doing precisely what you did. So before you embarrass yourself any further, take a moment and just...think.

I've done a reasonable amount of interviewing and hiring in my time, and I never had a candidate propose a long-term contract. I know some of the people I hired would probably think it sounds good at the outset, but they would be quite upset when the employer doesn't do the "polite" thing and let them out of their contracts whenever they want to go somewhere else. They would then come on HN and try to name and shame this company that hates its employees and resents their professional development, and is keeping developers in iron shackles while they have to pass up opportunities to make way more money! Then a bunch of social justice warriors will call the corporate heads monsters, claim their actions violate obscure elements of obscure laws, burn effigies, etc.

Others are like me and almost always want the freedom to leave when things start to go awry. There's no need to stay aboard a sinking ship any longer than necessary.

Almost nobody really wants employment-by-contract.

* 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.

Try back-loading the employee's contract with increasingly large incentives in the latter stages of the project. Any steps you take that limit the employee's career mobility and agency without employee agreement and compensation are suspect.

That problem solves itself. No need for the employer to trample on the employee

If they never hired an applicant from a competitor, that'd be low. If they sabotaged their own employees' independent applications elsewhere, that'd be low.

But targeted outbound recruiting is a very specific activity – which is sometimes even viewed as harassment by the targets themselves. It's likely zero-sum for the industry, and possibly negative-sum – if it disrupts ongoing projects and deters investment in employee-specific enrichments.

A cutthroat bidding-war attitude – between competitors, and between employee short-term compensation and the enterprise's long-term value – isn't necessarily in the interest of all industries or even most of the employees. (It might, for example, reward superstars but at the expense of the bulk of employees seeking stability and meaning in their work. It's hard to say, and the rush-to-demonize crowd does not appear to have studied the tradeoffs as closely as Catmull and similar.)

Starting a cycle of incentivized poaching could be like starting a cycle of nasty-negative-advertising. A first-mover might get a temporary advantage, but once everyone responds, they're all worse off for having competed in that way. Even the stars who 'won' immediate compensation boosts might wind up losing, as projects fail and the industry underperforms.

It's hard not to sound like an asshole while you tell someone they're not good enough to be promoted while also having a handshake agreement with your direct competitors to nod along and make it easier for you to manage your profit margins.

The email seemed to reflect that Pixar had considered promoting the poached employee and hadn't done so for Good Reasons(TM). Catmull admitted she had potential and would probably grow into a promotion at Pixar, but stated she was lacking experience in a "major area" of the production cycle. That doesn't sound like an arbitrary "I hate employees, let's treat them like dirt" conclusion, it sounds reasonable to me. Sony was desperate enough to hire people that didn't have that experience, but Pixar wasn't, so she went to work for Sony. I don't see the problem.

Maybe at some places but I'd bet not at the vast majority. An employee that is worth more than they are paid will sometimes be given a raise that was not asked for. The employee may also ask for a raise and either be denied or accepted. Lastly, the employee may look elsewhere and be recognised for the new value that they can bring.

Of the 3, the last option is what I've noticed much more often. This isn't (always) the "fault" of the employee, but of the employer unwilling to recognise or pay for the value being delivered.

I imagine the thought process goes "they are delivering X for value Y, why would we give away our profits for value Z?". But just like companies that need to demonstrate profit growth, the employees will want to see their own profits grow especially when their experience should lead to increased value delivered.

> 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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

However, when an article has a more down votes than up votes, it is also made harder to read, and the bigger the difference, the harder to read it becomes. That makes pg's remark make little sense, unless HN is supposed to be a place where disagreeing with the majority is discouraged, which is not very hackerish. Some clarification from pg would be helpful here.

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.

I didn't say Catmull shouldn't face consequences. I didn't say what he did was super-cool. I'm trying to provide a more reasonable POV here, and indicate that there's nothing indicating mens rea up to this point, and most people are inferring there is. And even if there is, we should consider this in a dispassionate manner, and continue to value Catmull's contributions in reasonable proportion.

I don't understand why this community is so quick to demonize and trample people, especially people like Catmull or Eich who have long, long histories of stellar contribution and reputation. I think it has more to do with the witch hunters being unable to think outside of the constraints of the cast story if it hits their righteousness button on the way down. But this attitude of discarding people like trash because they make a conclusion that we don't like is ridiculous and damaging. I can't see how anyone would be excited to enter a field filled with such people.

For the same reason that you can't state that someone is lying without denigrating their character, you cannot point out that someone is representing an utterly amoral position without implying that they are a generally untrustworthy human being.

Let me put it this way: would you be comfortable having cookiecaper running HR for your company? I should hope not. But if you were, what would you tell a board member who came across a post like this an wanted to know why - exactly - a guy this demonstrably off-base was being allowed to fill a position that carried so much risk?

For what it's worth, people were just downvoting the guy. I think there's some value in seeing what he has to say in order to better understand that mindset that let to the moral implosion we're presently discussing.

Separately, I think the tone of condemnation is actually very important. I'm sure there are plenty of people here who have had damaging encounters with others who think and act like cookiecaper (e.g. anyone who has worked under Catmull). It's important to establish, in a very public fashion, that the values he displays are absolutely not okay.

That's what makes it out-of-bounds.

Looking back, you made no substantive comments on thread. You just opened by making a speaker the subject, and slurring that speaker. That's nasty.

Bear in mind that it was failures of reasoning like these - that is to say, ones grounded in distinctly personal shortcomings - that produced the situation at Pixar which we're discussing. Indeed, for those of us whose careers have taught us the importance of making suitably judicious assessments of the personal character of those we depend on, a discussion of the rhetorical hallmarks of people who defend illegal and abusive employment practices is vitally important. Spotting them quickly can be the difference between a really bad choice and a good one. So again, that's why I was saying there's value in cookiecaper's otherwise objectionable remarks: they're a case study in the kind of stuff you really do need to watch out for.

And within the specific social context I noted - i.e. people working in HR - remarks like cookiecaper's jolly well should him an untouchable outcast. For the same reason you don't want a person with a lax attitude about embezzling anywhere near your finance department, you don't want a person who thinks that contracts are "inconvenient" in a position where they're likely to conclude that violating the law "is just a lot faster and easier" than respecting it. (I'm paraphrasing, but that's the essence of the "reasoning" on display.)

Now perhaps you don't consider a frank characterization of the sub-par ethical traits that are the direct cause of problems like Pixar's to be "substantive". On that point I can only say that we sharply disagree.

I suppose your armchair snap-judgment blackballing would also extend to people like Catmull, Jobs, Schmidt and others themselves. All of them, a pox on the industry who should have never held leadership roles. Sure, right.

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.

Also, what about all the good things Hitler did? I think that's a historical perspective that's often lacking. It can be satisfying to paint people who've committed crimes as Satan incarnate, but that's not realistic, and selling a fantastical version of history as definitive can have serious long-term consequences.

None of the good deeds matter anymore once the level of bad deeds exceeds a moral threshold. Just as there is redemption for exceeding your past bad deeds with present and future good deeds, so there is damnation for doing the opposite.

Now, we can argue till we are blue in the face about what the moral threshold should be, but it varies from person to person, society to society and civilization to civilization. In this day and age, Ed Catmull (arguably with intent) conspired to harm other human beings' earnings, something that not only affects those humans directly, but indirectly their immediate families as well.

Correct me if I am wrong, but you appear to speak from the perspective of someone who is financially all set, without monetary concerns that can adversely affect your children's education (public vs private schooling, college vs no college), a family member requiring expensive healthcare (chronic disease, terminal care) or concerns about home ownership. In my mind, you being free of such burdens (for whatever reason), are free to take the other (higher/lower) road of thought. But just because you are not affected by someone artificially limiting your income, does not mean others who are affected should shut up and suck it in without calling out the perpetrator for what they did. In their mind, and for many here, Ed Catmull is now damned.

You are welcome to call it silly minded and simplistic, but that does not change the facts of this case.

Did you know there are real people living among us that don't agree with anti-trust law? They don't think it should exist, they think it's unfair legislation meant to disadvantage successful players. Are all of these people also "damned", to use your elegant and gracious terminology?

I'll reiterate, as I have many times up to this point, that Catmull may have been wrong, that he may have been breaking the law, and that his actions may have had the indirect side effect of suppressing overall industry wages (even if mens rea is eventually shown and an email wherein Catmull explicitly states that his goal is to depress employee wages emerges, the effect of the no-poach agreement would still be indirect). But there is another side to this story that people refuse to recognize because they now have it ingrained in their heads that this is a good v. evil, corporate bigwig v. innocent little guy case, and they won't allow themselves to empathize with the other side in fear that they may be considered guilty by association (as some in this thread have already done with me).

At its root, such feelings are the result of rhetorical tactic to win the case by shame. People will cast events like they could only be perpetrated by the dirtiest scoundrels alive, but it's not a reflection of reality. This kind of thing is the bread and butter of political pundits. We should be able to see through those tactics here, but over and over again, it's proven that most of us can't, as we lead witch hunts to drive industry luminaries away simply because people in this industry can't understand how to disagree in a civil manner. It's very discouraging.

I hope that you reconsider the case with a broader, kinder perspective.

[1]: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MoralEventHorizon

Why would he deserve such a defense and not some random other sociopath in a position of power? Or Rajat Gupta? Or Raj Rajaratnam? Or Steven A Cohen? According to your thesis (i.e. the fashionable disaffection of the have nots against the haves), none of their crimes are heinous enough to justify a slap on the wrist, leave alone jail time.

Did you know there are real people living among us that don't agree with anti-trust law? They don't think it should exist, they think it's unfair legislation meant to disadvantage successful players. Are all of these people also "damned", to use your elegant and gracious terminology?

Do these real people agree with the punishment meted out to the gentlemen I listed above? In all honesty, their crimes affected their "victims" less directly than the actions of Ed Catmull affected his employees and their families.

We should be able to see through those tactics here, but over and over again, it's proven that most of us can't, as we lead witch hunts to drive industry luminaries away simply because people in this industry can't understand how to disagree in a civil manner.

We should also see through the cult of the personality that haunts the industry, at the same time and not excuse inexcusable behavior just because someone is accomplished or successful, in one way or another.

I hope that you reconsider the case with a broader, kinder perspective.

You are appealing to a sense of compassion that was completely, utterly and evidently absent in Ed Catmull and other members of the wage-supression cartel. Why do they deserve such kindness, when they showed neither that, nor remorse for their actions?

Again, you have not clarified the part about your perspective, wherein I asked if you, personally, would have been disadvantaged by the actions of Ed Catmull and friends? There, perhaps, lies the root of disagreement to begin with?

As for me, I was not directly affected, but I do wholeheartedly empathize with those who were.

An even-handed, rational discussion of the issues at hand. In my opinion, the discussion up to this point has been absolutely farcical. Actual comparisons to Hitler? Give me a break.

My hope is that my posts decrease the prevalence of that utterly ridiculous level of hyperbole. We should try to consider the perspectives of all parties involved, especially when the career and good name of a community member is on the line.

>Why would he deserve such a defense and not some random other sociopath in a position of power?

He deserves a defense because you're calling him a sociopath and the trial, if there is one, hasn't even started yet. Even if Catmull had already been convicted, "sociopath" is a clinical term that's not determined by legal proceedings, and it's not appropriate to misapply like this. That's absolutely inexcusable, unprofessional behavior.

Not all criminals are sociopaths. Not all people we disagree with are criminals.

>According to your thesis (i.e. the fashionable disaffection of the have nots against the haves), none of their crimes are heinous enough to justify a slap on the wrist, leave alone jail time.

Personally, I think many insider trading convictions are hogwash. It's possible that some aren't, and some of those guys had mens rea and deserve to be imprisoned for the theft they perpetrated, but I think we should assume good faith until disproven. Nothing in regard to the "Pixar cartel" has yet demonstrated mens rea, and even if such a thing existed, I wouldn't be prepared to demonize Catmull. I don't think we gain much of anything from that type of behavior.

>Do these real people agree with the punishment meted out to the gentlemen I listed above? In all honesty, their crimes affected their "victims" less directly than the actions of Ed Catmull affected his employees and their families.

I can't speak for everyone, but as all of your listed persons were convicted of insider trading, I can say there are definitely people that don't think that should be illegal either, or that believe only egregious cases should be prosecuted.

>We should also see through the cult of the personality that haunts the industry, at the same time and not excuse inexcusable behavior just because someone is accomplished or successful, in one way or another.

I completely agree that we shouldn't give people a pass on criminal activity based solely on their position in a company or government. We do need to have some baseline courtesy here though and recognize that people are innocent until proven guilty, that Catmull has a very long history of good deeds that is at odds with his characterization as an evildoer, and that the consequences of a witch hunt can be very serious and very sad. We have a legal system that handles these sorts of complaints in a fair and civilized manner, and we should at least let that flesh out before we start drawing conclusions, burning books, and arraying computer scientists trying to run a business in league with genocidal fascist dictators.

>You are appealing to a sense of compassion that was completely, utterly and evidently absent in Ed Catmull and other members of the wage-supression cartel. Why do they deserve such kindness, when they showed neither that, nor remorse for their actions?

This is the primary point of contention here. You are assuming that Catmull et al acted with evil intent, and you're applying vastly inappropriate labels even if that were the case. You refuse to acknowledge that a legitimate business purpose could have been addressed by the no-poach agreement, and you refuse to acknowledge that these legitimate business purposes could've been a motivation to the executive staff of the six major animation houses that were party to this agreement.

>Again, you have not clarified the part about your perspective, wherein I asked if you, personally, would have been disadvantaged by the actions of Ed Catmull and friends? There, perhaps, lies the root of disagreement to begin with?

I would have been. While I'm an entrepreneur and reasonably well-paid when all of my income is taken into account, I'm still a middle-class guy who has to work for a living. I couldn't go more than a few weeks without a paycheck of one kind or another (I have both W2 and 1099 income). As much as I'd like to be one of the insanely wealthy people who pop up on HN occasionally, it hasn't happened for me yet. Maybe someday.

I don't see how that's relevant to the overarching argument, though. I can perhaps empathize with Catmull more easily because I've had employees and I've directed organizations before, but I don't think that experience is pre-requisite to understanding that this activity doesn't make someone a monstrosity.

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.

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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7449737

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.