California is one of the few states that doesn't honor out of state non-competes.
White House urges ban on non-compete agreements for many workers
161–170 of 421 posts
Re: White House urges ban on non-compete agreements for many workers
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
From your comments I gather you might not understand the problem. Were Soft Engs simply to do 'work' then you would be absolutely right. But in a world of IP ... it's a different story. Company ABC brings you in, trains you on their know-how and core IP, which took a lot of struggle, $, and R&D to create - then you leave, go to a competitor, and effectively communicate and give away ABC Corps. most valuable asset. No…
On the other hand, you work at a company for most of your professional life, and become an expert in a field you love. One day you are no longer employed for some reason, but due to non-compete there is no way to get a job you want, since your expertise is somewhat niche. So you are forced to build websites or sell coffee for two years. Or drop your life in US and work some other place. If the person from your quantu…
so go work for a company in CA
Re: White House urges ban on non-compete agreements for many workers
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
An NDA would suffice in that case. Not being able to work work in the same field for up to 2 years (non-compete) and not disclosing internal ip, processes, etc when you go work at another company (NDA) in the field are much different. Preventing someone from working in a field and not disclosing or sharing secrets/ip are two different animals. NDAs are useful and I use them myself when contractors work with us, but n…
My first exposure to non-competes was from a guy I did some work for. He was a network firmware/driver guy back in the 80's/90's. Took a six month contract with a European company. After the contract ended his recruiter got him another gig. When the original company found out they threatened to sue him. Because they said he had signed a five year non-compete.
5 years lol no way is that enforceable
Re: White House urges ban on non-compete agreements for many workers
#164Anyone know how these work in practice in Japan? The constitution here guarantees the right to work where you want yet I've witnessed people being asked to sign them upon leaving a job.
Re: White House urges ban on non-compete agreements for many workers
#165I don't understand why there's so many people in the comments defending non-competes. They have literally no value to society, or to individual employees. They are a tool of restrictive coercion to stifle an employees freedom of movement in the job market. Trade secrets, IP, secret sauce: covered by NDA and IP assignment agreements Client lists, contract terms, sales strategies, reported metrics, financials: covered…
> I don't understand why there's so many people in the comments defending non-competes. They have literally no value to society, or to individual employees. To go meta for a moment: I think that this sort of statement exposes a flaw that many of us have in debates. It's related to the "argument from ignorance" fallacy, but is not exactly the same thing. I take it as one of my priors that people at news.yc are intelli…
The fact that the grandfather comment is the top-rated comment (as of this writing) in the thread to me suggests that a great number of people agree with him/her, which sort of contradicts your "argument from ignorance" point.
Just because thousands of HN readers are intelligent engineers, founders, scientists, marketers, etc. doesn't make them legal experts, or political experts.
You assume that "freedom to contract" means that both parties enter with equal knowledge and equal bargaining power. In an environment with high unemployment (like we were not to long ago) it could mean that employees would jump at any job they were offered, out of necessity, even if it came with a nasty non-compete.
Government regulators can look at an overall picture and see that, statistically, in great numbers, there are overarching problems with the non-competes, like their being used with employees who don't have trade secrets.
Re: White House urges ban on non-compete agreements for many workers
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're raising the spectre of artificially nonfungible conditions, and ignoring power differentials between employers and employees, as well as game theory leading to non-optimal equilibria.
I don't understand what you mean when you say that I am "raising the spectre of artificially nonfungible conditions"; I described a possible situation, and asked whether you agreed that it was possible that non-compete bans could be 'anti-employee' per your definitions. I agree that I am ignoring many things, as this is a limited discussion, and I am only addressing the impact of a law on a single employee, and its e…
Its possible in theory for employers to offer additional pay to work in conditions wherein the employee will be slowly poisoned where such additional pay is cheaper than proper safety equipment. Its even possible that the employer will find people dumb/ignorant enough to take this it doesn't mean its reasonable economically for the society to allow this sort of transaction.
Your earlier scenario made no sense as their would be no reason to suspect that the 2 employers respective pay and conditions were related you have just presented it as such. Imagine the law were changed tomorrow? Would the high paying non compete using employer suddenly start paying smaller wages? Would they have any employees tomorrow if they did? A freer labor market would be MORE competitive not less there is no reason to suspect that they wouldn't have to pay more not less to retain the same talent.
Re: White House urges ban on non-compete agreements for many workers
#167Why can't congress do something about this? Non-competes are clearly terrible for workers, and should at the least be illegal without a severance agreement. If a company wants to keep me from working they should pay for the privilege. Workers also need to start refusing to sign egregiously bad non-compete agreements.
"If a company wants to keep me from working they should pay for the privilege." They are paying you. You join the company on those terms. If you don't want to join, then don't join. What they don't want you dong is taking all their IP, walking off and passing it onto a competitor. It would be extremely naive to not understand that this happens all the time. It's a tricky and nuanced problem, but it's real.
Once again they paid for a finite duration of your time and labor not the contents of your brain. For you to somehow by dint of experience BECOME employer property in whole or in total is a truly bizarre perspective.
If you can't own them forever as slaves then preventing them from freely applying their learned skills for a period of time isn't coherent and logical.
Re: White House urges ban on non-compete agreements for many workers
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What they don't want you dong is taking all their IP, walking off and passing it onto a competitor. Bullshit, that's what NDAs are for.
"Bullshit, that's what NDAs are for." Totally false and completely naive. Most knowledge and know-how is not explicit - they are often learned. For example - suppose you worked at Nuance, and helped develop their new AI/Neural Network speech recognition system. Everything you know about Speech + AI you learned from them, in that language specific setting. If you went to work on Google's new Speech Recognition, which…
> The application-specific skills are basically IP.
No. Those application-specific skills are called experience.
Re: White House urges ban on non-compete agreements for many workers
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You can sue people for not working at their job? There are many people who simply stop accomplishing tasks when they want to be laid off or fired. Then let them quit and go somewhere else. NDA cover corporate secrets, non-compete are anti freedom, anti competition and should be illegal. If your employee stops working then perhaps you should question the way you do business and how you manage your work environment.…
The parent was commenting on fairness, I was positing a situation that was unfair to the employer. Please stop fighting the hypothetical, it is unproductive to the discussion.[1] [1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/bwp/please_dont_fight_the_hypothetic...
It would be unfair for you to have to pay them for shoddy or nonexistent work it is similarly unfair to keep them from doing said shoddy work at your competitor. I'm not seeing any problem.
Re: White House urges ban on non-compete agreements for many workers
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't understand why there's so many people in the comments defending non-competes. They have literally no value to society, or to individual employees. To go meta for a moment: I think that this sort of statement exposes a flaw that many of us have in debates. It's related to the "argument from ignorance" fallacy, but is not exactly the same thing. I take it as one of my priors that people at news.yc are intelli…
The fact that the grandfather comment is the top-rated comment (as of this writing) in the thread to me suggests that a great number of people agree with him/her, which sort of contradicts your "argument from ignorance" point. Just because thousands of HN readers are intelligent engineers, founders, scientists, marketers, etc. doesn't make them legal experts, or political experts. You assume that "freedom to contract…
My "argument from ignorance" comment seems pretty rock solid, given that the original comment began with the words "I don't understand why..."
That is literally the definition of an argument from ignorance.