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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

#311

Post by takeda »

cmdrfred wrote: post #226
tjic wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You assume that "freedom to contract" means that both parties enter with equal knowledge and equal bargaining power. No, it doesn't. I'm Hayek-friendly, so I don't think two entities EVER have the same knowledge. "Freedom to contract" no more implies equal knowledge than "freedom to drink" implies equal knowledge of brewing, or "freedom to date" implies equal attractiveness.

I have been told by a lawyer friend of mine that for a contact to be valid both parties must have the ability to negotiate it. He said that is why most non-competes are unenforceable in the first place as you don't really have the leverage to negotiate that for most jobs. I took his advice and advantage of his letterhead and told a previous employer to pound sand when they wanted me to not work for a competitor. Work…

I'm not a lawyer, but from what I understand is it depends where are you. In many states non compete is valid, it can't be enforced in California for example. My current company does have non compete agreement, but they have exceptions for California and in the end it translates to that I supposed to let them know where I will be working next.

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

#312

Post by eli_gottlieb »

nickff wrote: post #111
greglindahl wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You said "My first piece of evidence" and now "I didn't provide any evidence at all". Given all the downvotes you've gotten, I recommend that you sharpen your debating tactics. You'll probably get better engagement that way.

Ah I'm sorry, I got confused thinking that we had gone back to my comment on taneq's last parent of this branch. I attribute the downvotes to the unpopularity of non-complete clauses on HN. In addition to that, most of the libertarian and right-leaning users seem to be in North America, so I can count on less sympathy from ~4-12 GMT. It is also possible that my writing has gotten substantially worse in the last few h…

Mostly you're getting downvoted because you want to make legal policy based on what you suppose or imagine, rather than what you can demonstrate actually happens.

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

#313

Post by ghaff »

ig1 wrote: post #295
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 issue is with lumping all learnings and knowledge transfer with protectable intellectual property that belongs to someone. (Hence the "property" part.)

Of course there's overlap. But the issue that people have with non-competes (especially broad ones) is that they effectively try to limit all knowledge transfer that may benefit a competitor directly or indirectly. Especially when this gets to a point of prohibiting people from working in a given profession or role for anyone else without any compensation, this seems wrong.

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

#314

Post by pauldix »

LinuxBender wrote: post #289
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…

AFAIK and from my own experience, non-competes are not enforceable in most states, or have little to no legal teeth. Anyone concerned should consult with an attorney. Somewhat related, where folks usually get into trouble is reuse of intellectual property or derivative works. IP laws actually have teeth and are enforced in numerous countries.

In our system it actually doesn't matter if they have no legal teeth. If your former employer wants to spend money to take you to court to attempt to enforce a non-compete, you'll be forced to spend tens of thousands of dollars (if not hundreds) defending yourself.

It doesn't matter if they'll eventually lose. Just as long as they can play legal chicken with you and get you to give up because you don't want to waste all your money on lawyers defending yourself.

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

#315

Post by drakonandor »

falcolas wrote: post #220
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. There are many "temporarily embarrassed" entrepreneurs that read HN who can't stomach the thought of their future tech lead stealing their idea. I personally worked for one such person, whose startup was so new that employees were being paid only with shares, but still had about 10 pages of legal documentation for new employees to…

The 'temporarily embarrassed' phrase is a trope used to belittle those who aren't sore losers about other people being more successful than them.

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

#316

Post by ghaff »

jomamaxx wrote: post #262
flukus wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you work at DWAVE for 5 years and learn everything you know about Quantum Computing there - and go to Google to work on Quantum Computing - then there is basically a 100% chance that you are passing on 'know how' and 'trade secrets' - otherwise - Google would not hire you. That isn't trade secrets, it's experience.

"That isn't trade secrets, it's experience" No. 100% false. If that information is key to the nature and success of a product, then it's called 'know how' and it's both legally and rationally protectable. You people need to grow up and grasp that fact that once you go to a company and they teach you what they have spent $100 Million dollars on developing, that you cannot walk across the street and spill the beans on…

There's clearly a gray area. Knowledge does get transferred when people move from company to company. If someone developed experience in, say, running retail marketing campaigns for millennials at company X (to remove this discussion from the technical domain) and they take a job at competing company Y, OF COURSE they're bringing over both know how and negative know how developed at their prior employer.

That said, it doesn't mean that it's either ethical or necessarily legal for them to go to company Y and immediately do a core dump of every marketing campaign they ran and what the results were. But there's a fuzzy line between doing that and saying "Oh, millennials really respond well to this sort of language, but be careful not to say this."

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

#317

Post by ViViDboarder »

smokedoutraider wrote: post #307

While I don't agree with non-competes, I don't understand how it's even slightly ok to allow a government to decide private business policies.

Typically to prevent abuse of employees, who often have far less power than a company does. That is unless they are organized as a group to heighten their bargaining power.

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

#318

Post by talmand »

jomamaxx wrote: post #269
alkonaut wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but companies deserve the right to protect their IP Sure. What I have in my head isn't the companies IP though, it's my experience. "IP" is often confused with "the collective experience of your employees". IP is physical artifacts such as code, drawings, patents etc. The memory of having written that code is not part of the IP, nor is the capability of doing it again in a fraction of the time.

"What I have in my head isn't the companies IP though, it's my experience." Again - 100% false. A lot of 'what is in your head' is the IP of the company you worked for. Clearly, you grasp this, because you people seem to accept that NDA's are valid. So - that yo accept and 'NDA' is valid, means you accept that 'what is in your head' can be the property of the company. These 'I'm paid for labour' arguments are naive.…

An NDA and a non-compete are not the same thing. What you are describing is an NDA. It is quite possible for someone to change jobs, even in the same industry, and still abide by an NDA.

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

#319

Post by teh_klev »

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 entire approach here is quite arrogant.

Seriously? There's nothing arrogant about the OP's post which expresses dismay that others as employees (not founders or CEO's) would support having such restrictions put on their careers.

> Consider, for a moment, that the other people on news.yc are not idiots

Parent didn't accuse anyone of being idiots, nor did they frame their concern in terms of intelligence or likewise..

Your post is thought provoking, but you ruin it in those last two sentences.

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

#320

Post by talmand »

justinlardinois wrote: post #104
jomamaxx wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It doesn't matter how much R&D was created. That's the role of patents to deal with that thing." I'm beginning to think none of you have ever worked in companies that actually produce IP. First off - that's not what patents are for. Patents protect publicly known information - not trade secrets. And they don't do it very well. There are very few things you can defend with a patent. What companies are concerned with…

> I'm beginning to think none of you have ever worked in companies that actually produce IP. All software companies produce intellectual property.

My company has IP, I guess I'll never get to work with HTML, CSS, and Javascript ever again if I leave.
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