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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

#371

Post by qaq »

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…

And if an employee came up with some novel way to do something you will own and exploit that IP to potentially produce unlimited gains. The situation is skewed in employers favor even without non-compete.

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

#372

Post by auntienomen »

georgespencer wrote: post #283
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 > Client lists, contract terms, sales strategies, reported metrics, financials: covered by NDA and in some cases SEC regulations about insider trading. This is largely unenforceable as I'm sure you're aware. The fact is that legally preventing someone from working at a competitor is simply the only effective way of deterring IP getting to…

Exactly. It's the only verifiable option. That said, if your IP is so valuable that you want to prevent your employee from walking away with it, you'd better be prepared to pay them.

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

#373

Post by SilasX »

wfo wrote: post #349
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…

There are a number of legal constructions -- non-competes, mandatory binding arbitration, civil asset forfeiture, and even plea bargains -- that simply should never have been allowed to exist because they are obviously fraud/theft/abuse/coercion and it's mind boggling that the nearly all of the "esteemed" "scholarly" attorneys and judges who represent the elite of the elite in our society have worked themselves throu…

What's with the hate for plea bargains? Should every charge go to trial? In cases where a conviction isn't guaranteed, why shouldn't they split the difference between going free and the full penalty?

Every time I've challenged someone on this point, their objection turns out not to be about plea bargains per se, but the (unrelated) fact that the law permits such severe punishments in the first place, defendants have insufficient resources to fight them, and prosecutors have therefore enough leverage to secure them at all.

But that's not an argument against "plea bargains"; its disgust at the whole system and misattribution to one part.

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

#374

Post by andrewfong »

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…

> 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 sign.

Startup law in a nutshell: Management completely disregards labor law but is very concerned about intellectual property.

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

#375

Post by Declanomous »

sammydavis wrote: post #351
Declanomous wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work at an organization with about 75 employees, and I'm the only person who can program. Half the time I go out for drinks with coworkers, someone corners me and wants to tell me about this awesome idea they have. Unfortunately, they can't tell me anything because I haven't signed an NDA yet. So they spend a few hours being coy, and I spend a few hours trying to politely decline. It's always an iPhone app too. I'v…

That was so on the money. This happens to me too. My financial advisor and his friend want me to build them an iphone app. Please save me.

I've got another good anecdote.

I went in for an in-person interview at a company. At the end of the interview process, the interviewer let me know I hadn't gotten the job, but told me I should connect with him on LinkedIn because he and his friend had a great business idea that needed a developer.

I guess I shouldn't have been surprised, since I've had interviewers reach out to me after I've been rejected to say the same thing. It seemed exceedingly strange that I was solicited to work on another project in person by the interviewer during the interview process.

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

#376

Post by clifanatic »

sammydavis wrote: post #351
Declanomous wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work at an organization with about 75 employees, and I'm the only person who can program. Half the time I go out for drinks with coworkers, someone corners me and wants to tell me about this awesome idea they have. Unfortunately, they can't tell me anything because I haven't signed an NDA yet. So they spend a few hours being coy, and I spend a few hours trying to politely decline. It's always an iPhone app too. I'v…

That was so on the money. This happens to me too. My financial advisor and his friend want me to build them an iphone app. Please save me.

> My financial advisor and his friend want me to build them an iphone app

You can get a new financial advisor. My _wife_ wants me to build her an iPhone app.

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

#377

Post by 0xffff2 »

hammock wrote: post #205

This comes one week after - and in contrast to - Donald Trump promising in his first 100 days in office a five-year ban on White House officials and Congressman from becoming lobbyists, and a lifetime ban on White House lobbyists from lobbying on behalf of foreign governments. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/...

a) How is this article in any way related to lobbying?

b) Even if we assume Trump somehow managed to implement his plan, how is it not going to be struck down immediately as a violation of the first amendment? Campaign finance and lobbying are incredibly broken right now, but they currently exist because of a legal framework that can only be changed by a constitutional amendment that (partially) exempts political speech from the promises of the first amendment.

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

#378

Post by amyjess »

nothrabannosir wrote: post #156
tjic wrote: post #146

Earlier 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…

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 free market works best when government restricts the freedom to restrict freedom. That's why cartels being illegal is good (they restrict competition), bans on insider trading are good (they restrict fair competition), etc. Non-compete restricts the freedom on the labor markets.

I'm reminded of the old adage "too much capitalism leads to too few capitalists".

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

#379

Post by amyjess »

sharemywin wrote: post #194
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…

Sales is tricky because you build up a relationship with said client on the companies dime usually. poaching customers seems wrong to me.

And unless you're applying for an absolute entry-level position, nobody will hire you for a sales job if you don't have a fat, juicy contact list.

A list of clients that you have an established relationship with is to sales what experience with a set of technologies is to software engineering.

The sales industry relies on account executives being able to take their address books with them. If that stops happening, everybody loses.

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

#380

Post by amyjess »

ekianjo wrote: post #11
Animats wrote: post #4

Note that this is being proposed as something states should do. Federal legislation is not being proposed. Worst case would be Federal legislation which was weak and pre-empted state legislation, weakening California's ban. California employment law prohibits non-compete agreements for employees, and has since 1872. California also prohibits any employee agreement which claims employer ownership of intellectual prope…

> California also prohibits any employee agreement which claims employer ownership of intellectual property developed on the employee's own time I have always wondered how could such a claim on ownership could exist in the first place. This reduces the employee to a mere company slave.

If you're an exempt salaried employee, then there is no real distinction between "your own time" and "the company's time".

I get paid the same no matter how many hours a week I work.

On rare occasion, I've connected to our VPN or sent some emails outside of normal hours because something came up, with no effect on my salary. I'm lucky in that these occasions are rare, but some people are not so lucky. In the other direction, we have a policy that PTO has to be billed in 4-hour increments, and anything that consumes less than that doesn't have to be reported, such as an early-morning doctor's appointment that takes one hour. Is that doctor's appointment "on company time" because it was too short to bill PTO for?

Does it count as being "on company time" if I'm looking at my phone when an email notification comes up because one of my co-workers CC'd me on something? Is it "on my own time" when I'm sharing memes back and forth with a coworker on our Slack?

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