Lyndsey Gallant

I can think of a bad case of punching down where a gaming giant will sweep through an indie community and hoover up vital staff by offering huge salaries, that sucks and is devastating to small devs in isolated areas. Only defense is company culture as you’ve pointed out :)

Oh for sure. That said, I feel like at good companies a poach attempt becomes a conversation with the current employer (ie, "Hey I got this offer and it's tempting, can you match some more of my needs here?"). Also speaking for Toronto at least... AAA doesn't pay great either

hot take; employees aren't chattel.

In the past after quitting studio jobs, I had some people remark "Oh I would have hired you but I didn't want to make [your boss] mad!" like i aM a HuMaN BeInG

It’s very important to stablish a setting. My gamedev community is small (200 peps aprox) if another company swoops my programer i am done (same goes with my neighbors) so No, poaching in our case destroys the ecosystem. If we were bigger, yes, go for it.

So is that one programmer responsible to maintain a working situation they don't prefer for the good of "the ecosystem"? Do we want people to stay because they prefer it, or because it befits us to keep them in the dark about their options?

Konami's randomized rotating emails to avoid poaching is still one of the craziest things I've heard about in this industry.

I used to work at a place that wouldn't do credits because the CEO was afraid people would find out who did the work and steal us away.

Related: I once had to sign a form saying I wouldn’t disclose my salary to my colleagues. As if that is healthy and a great way to treat employees at all.