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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

#291

Post by BeetleB »

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…

>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 form of a large signing bonus, maybe 50k per year of non compete.

They already have a mechanism for that. It's called a contract - you promise to work for the company for 2 years.

Your argument could easily be twisted to support cartels.

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

#292

Post by tristor »

fmavituna wrote: post #268
tristor wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're describing isn't "intellectual property", it's experience. The company you work for has no legal claim to your experience. Your experience is a personal asset which has value in the market and is a direct reason why a company hires and compensates you to do that job.

And that's exactly my point. This is why non-compete makes sense. To repeat, because none of the stuff you have mentioned can replace what non-compete provides.

Yes, what non-compete provides is an attempted legal claim on something inherent in you as a person. This is unconscionable.

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

#293

Post by tehwalrus »

cableshaft wrote: post #263
tehwalrus wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad example: I'd expect prison for theft (the paints aren't re-usable afterwards.) Better example: borrowing a rular and giving it back, using a company car but paying for the fuel and a service yourself, etc.

...prison? Really? Considering the price of paint I would expect it to most likely be a civil case, at best.

A fine at best. Theft is criminal full stop. Civil cases are for slander and other civil offenses.

(At least that how it works in the UK. With regard to the US, I remain astonished at the scene in the West Wing where someone advises Josh Liman to sue the people who shot him.)

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

#294

Post by eli_gottlieb »

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…

>So how is this good for anyone but John? If you think this kind of stuff doesn't happen and all this kind of advancements are public domain anyway, you are wrong. There are many niche fields where competing advantage comes from technical excellence and understanding couple of key things better than your competition.

This is good for society, because society gets more competitive labor markets and more competitive video-encoding markets. This encourages the spread of high-quality products and technical knowledge at low prices.

Remember: companies exist to supply a product efficiently. You are not entitled to get rich by rentiering on ideas.

If you want to keep John from working for a competitor, just agree to pay him his salary for two years after he stops working for you, while he goes on vacation around the world. The amount of competition and poaching you want to avoid should be priced in terms of years of salary you're willing to pay in exchange for non-labor.

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

#295

Post by ig1 »

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…

You're imagining IP to be things like the coca-cola recipes, but the reality is much more complex than that especially in tech where the valuable IP is learnings.

Say you ran the marketing campaign at X and through extensive testing you discovered what works in the space X is in, now you go to competitor Y. Are you going to cleanse your brain of everything you learnt at X or are you going to apply the learnings at Y ?

The reality is the reason Y hired you is to get the learnings that you got from X, what you learnt could save them years of work and reduce the competitive edge that X has.

The exact same thing applies to developers. Say you built a ML model for driving cars at Google and now you're working for Apple on a similar project. You're not going to copy and paste the code you built at Google but you're 100% not going to go down the dead-ends that Google went down because you know they don't work.

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

#296

Post by MaxfordAndSons »

Spooky23 wrote: post #238
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…

Business owners have widely varying interpretations of what trade secrets consist of. For example, a local Jimmy John's was successfully sued for it's non compete with sandwich makers. https://consumerist.com/2016/06/22/jimmy-johns-to-stop-using... "Employee covenants and agrees that, during his or her employment with the Employer and for a period of two (2) years after … he or she will not have any direct or indirec…

That is fucking unbelievable - it's basically contractual extortion. Though the 3 mile clause makes it an entirely different beast than a tech noncompete. Which makes me wonder - are noncompetes ever enforced internationally? Or rather, are there countries that explicitly and reciprocally enforce US noncompetes?

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

#297

Post by ahlatimer »

driverdan wrote: post #208
ahlatimer wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also live in Texas and recently signed a non-compete after talking to my attorney. The general gist is that, yes, they are enforceable. The legislature keeps pushing for them, and the courts have, at various times, pushed back against them. There are limitations on them, but you'd have to talk to an attorney to figure out what they are -- I don't remember exactly what my attorney said. I do know that my attorney sa…

Why did you sign it? Why didn't you refuse this time?

Because it was for a position where I felt it was more justified (cofounder), as compared to a run of the mill developer or team lead position, which is what I've been in the past and where I've refused to sign them.

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

#298

Post by cableshaft »

cmdrfred wrote: post #275
cableshaft wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 compen…

Well it doesn't stop just about every company from adding it into their employee contracts. Out of the last six jobs I've had here in Illinois, five of them had non-compete agreements, including two startups, one small business, one major corporation, and a contracting company (TekSystems).

The one job that didn't have a non-compete was a student job I held at the university while I was taking classes there.

None of them offered to pay me extra outside of the salary for 'consideration'. I've ended up switching which industry I work for with pretty much every job I've had (still software dev though), so it hasn't been an issue so far.

That being said, knowing that they're there has affected my decision making, including holding back on releasing games I developed in my spare time, to the point where I've been tempted to move to California to escape such bullshit.

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

#299

Post by dustinmr »

This seems to miss how companies will react if enacted. If there's a freer flow on the talent side, corporations will want a freer flow as well. I would expect this to accelerate the current trend of converting more and more positions to contract or temporary positions rather than employment.

I think that's a good thing.

I'm not sure the White House would agree.

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

#300

Post by ghaff »

losteverything wrote: post #274

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 busines…

In other words, a landlord decided not to renew a lease and opened their own business.

On the one hand, it's a bit sleazy to attempt to cash in on the previous shop's customer relationships. But I have trouble calling this "stolen." Presumably, if it were a Starbucks that were opened instead, it wouldn't be so objectionable even though the net effect on the previous store owners is largely the same.

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