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White House urges ban on non-compete agreements for many workers

reuters.com

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Re: White House urges ban on non-compete agreements for many workers

#271

Post by biztos »

pzh wrote: post #200
dsr_ wrote: post #185

I'm perfectly OK with a non-compete agreement... as long as it pays me for my downtime. You think the information in my head is so valuable that you don't want me working for a competitor for three years after I leave? OK, pay me for three years. It's not worth that much to you? Well, how much is it worth?

How would you determine the cost of your downtime? If you're assuming that all you're going to do after you leave a company is become a wage slave at another one, then getting paid the same wage for a few years might be enough to compensate you. However, if you really aspire to start your own company that might become hugely successful (e.g. the next Facebook or Google), how would you be compensated for that? The poi…

Not to mention the opportunity cost for wage slaves.

If you're a programmer and are prevented from getting a new job right now, when it's a seller's market for talent, then you might be in a much worse situation in a year if the market changes.

Even getting 100% of your wage for that year could be a terrible deal.

Re: White House urges ban on non-compete agreements for many workers

#272

Post by eli_gottlieb »

tjic wrote: post #146
tristor wrote: post #139

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. 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…

>When lots of intelligent people argue for X, and X makes no sense at all for you, you should ponder with some real seriousness that perhaps N intelligent people are not insane, but, instead, you are missing something.

Intelligence is just the ability to precisely handle complex intellectual structures. It doesn't make those structures meaningful or accurate.

What's that quote again? Ah, googling found it.

“I make mistakes like the next man. In fact, being--forgive me--rather cleverer than most men, my mistakes tend to be correspondingly huger.”

Re: White House urges ban on non-compete agreements for many workers

#273

Post by omouse »

jedrek wrote: post #224
nothrabannosir wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) deontological: freedom to contract is always a good thing. It is a human right, and government has no legitimate moral power to remove that right from people. That's not a strong argument either. You could substitute "contract" with anything. I say this as a staunch libertarian. Government restrictions aren't bad because "government", but because restrictions. The free market works best when government restricts t…

The logical conclusion of a regulation-free system is of corporations large enough to destroy competition before it starts.

That's not the logical conclusion.

Have you ever seen a large corp and how inefficient they are? The only reason they can remain large is because they can afford to buy politicians and legislation to keep their competitors small. Big Corp creates new regulations to protect their business, the most clear examples are in telecommunications and the music/movie/copyrightable industries.

If we removed more regulations today, the big corps would try and place them back to destroy their competition.

Re: White House urges ban on non-compete agreements for many workers

#274

Post by losteverything »

Tragic story of a business. You decide if it was stolen. Happened a few years ago to a client friend.

Husband wife owns a florist. Has for decades in a county fourth highes per capita income in us.

Built a nice life but it was time to retire and sell the business.

They did not own their building.

New landlord buys building ( shop in nice main street area.) raises rent to outrageous amount. Too much to run the business.

Husband wife team can't sell florist before New lease starts and they do not sign lease.

The very Next week !!!! Next week - building owner puts up new sign for a new florist.

The owners lost everything. They owned some things like coolers - and got $$ for those.

Re: White House urges ban on non-compete agreements for many workers

#275

Post by cmdrfred »

cableshaft wrote: post #251
cmdrfred wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's how it works in the US, most of the time a non-compete is entirely unenforceable.

Depends on the state. I live in Illinois. It's been enforced plenty of times here. They tend to argue over what is a 'reasonable' restriction, and it goes back and forth. For example: http://www.w-p.com/Articles/Illinois-Non-Compete-World-Now-E... And in 2013, the TekSystems recruitment company sued its former employee (a recruiter) over a noncompete and it got upheld in Illinois court: http://paulporvaznik.com/court…

It seems that the same standard applies there, even if the judges in Illinois seem take liberties with it. From the first link:

"3. Question: Does an employer still need to have "adequate legal consideration" in a non-compete agreement?

Answer: Yes"

It appears they have to compensate you for the agreement. Federal courts have ruled that your wage is compensation for your regular duties and thus the non-compete compensation has to be a separate payment that is negotiable. A contract is not valid if a party receives nothing in return for it.

"Consideration to create a legally enforceable contract entails a bargained for, legal detriment incurred by the promisee OR a legal benefit to the promisor. Under the notion of "pre-existing duties", if either the promisor or the promisee already had a legal obligation to render such payment, it cannot be seen as consideration in the legal sense."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consideration

Re: White House urges ban on non-compete agreements for many workers

#276

Post by JangleBarney »

YCode wrote: post #252
imglorp wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As most readers here would agree, ideas are worth almost nothing but executing on them is the value.

There is an argument to be made that a larger organization might be able to take your idea and run faster than you with it. In practice though, most of the time your idea is too small or too risky to be on the radar of those organizations. A bit like how when you wake up a dream you had makes perfect sense until you try to describe it to someone else.

You just defined Amazon.

Re: White House urges ban on non-compete agreements for many workers

#277

Post by omouse »

jaredklewis wrote: post #151
tristor wrote: post #139

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. 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…

In theory, I see nothing wrong with them. Non-competes ask employees to give up something extremely significant: freedom to work there they choose. Which I have no problem with if they get something significant in exchange. Let's an employer wants some insurance that I won't go work elsewhere because there is going to be a long training period or what not. I expect significant compensation for that, ideally in the fo…

> I guess the problem in practice is that employees just sign their employment contract no matter what it says, which is unfortunate.

In other words, the problem is that they are coercive. Employees usually sign because the company has more legal power and can be intimidating or because they could be homeless.

Re: White House urges ban on non-compete agreements for many workers

#278

Post by fmavituna »

heimidal wrote: post #228
fmavituna wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry I wasn't clear on the original comment, how can NDA stop a developer to use what he knows while writing code or creating procedures? If you are a developer and worked on a code for 2 years. NDA cannot cover what you know what you don't. Your know-how that you captured on that company can simply be replicated in another company. You'll write the code from scratch, and NDA or copyright, or even patent in majority…

If you replace "developer" with "general contractor" and "writing code" with "constructing a building", do you believe your argument holds up? How about "doctor" and "practicing medicine"? "Attorney" and "practicing law"? "Salesperson" and "selling effectively"? I could go on. While employed, a person necessarily learns skills in order to perform their duties; as an employer, it would be impossible to derive value fr…

My argument was about software development and I don't know how much it would hold up for other fields.

Employer pays the time for that employee to acquire the knowledge, employer serves the know-how that the employee might never ever able to learn by herself. How is it not reasonable to expect that knowledge to be used against the employer? Why is it one-way? I'm not talking about knowledge in a sense that "good code should include comment" kind of dev best practice. I'm talking about domain specific know-how that the employer came up with in many years by spending lots of money (R&D, trial & error, field studies etc).

Re: White House urges ban on non-compete agreements for many workers

#279

Post by bluecalm »

tjic wrote: post #146
tristor wrote: post #139

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. 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…

Your arguments could be used against worker protection laws as well: 14hours/day workdays, lack of safety regulations. You could even import some slaves from poor countries, many people will sign up as working on a plantation for food and shelter is better than starving.

I think history shows that this kind of thinking leads to bad outcomes. The main reason is that there is power unbalance between employers and would be workers. In natural state of the world the workers would just take resources by force and share. As we are guaranteeing that this won't happen (by enforcing property laws) we need to give something back as well to people in worse negotiating position (worker rights, minimum wage, some contracts being illegal are all example of it).

-

Re: White House urges ban on non-compete agreements for many workers

#280

Post by onion2k »

fmavituna wrote: post #171
tristor wrote: post #139

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. 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…

> Trade secrets, IP, secret sauce: covered by NDA and IP assignment agreements As a developer pretty much none of these matter or protects anything. Imagine this scenario; - John has no idea about video encoding but a good developer. - John joins to a video encoding startup - This startup encodes videos 3 times faster than the competitor - After working on the core product for 2 years, John knows a lot about video en…

Video encoding tech doesn't change very quickly, and a 3x improvement is huge, so a competitor might well be happy to ask John to take 6 months off and pay him a joining bonus to make up for it. If the improvement is big enough they might pay him to take a couple of years off.

So how long should John be banned from working for a competitor for exactly? 5 years? 10 years? Until his current employer says he can?

What if John leaves and starts an open source project doing the thing he's learned how to do really well? Should he be stopped from writing code in a particular domain as a hobby?

What if John leaves because he's had a brilliant idea that his current employer refuses to listen to? Should John be banned from starting his own competing company? Should an employer be able to restrict an idea from getting to market when they're not using it themselves?

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