Laws barring noncompete clauses spreading

If you spend $20K on an MBA that I initiated and I quit, totally fair to have an arrangement where I have to pay some of that back.

If you fire me? No obligation.

If you send me to some series of certifications because you want me to have them? Also no obligation.

Unfortunately, this is a coordination problem, and those are what humanity sucks at.

> This mentality has never made sense to me. Why would a business invest so much money into training someone, then fail to spend the money needed to retain the (more valuable) trained employee??

It didn't and doesn't to me either. It's very similar to the disturbingly common case of a company cheaping out on office chairs, computer hardware, etc. when the total cost of creating a comfortable working environment for an employee is less than the company pays them for a month of work!

Or, related, and perhaps even more common in tech: skimping on infra (be it physical or virtual), despite again wasting more money in lost productivity than they save. Like e.g. at one place, I used to regularly complain about the amount of build bots we had for the team, and the resources allocated to them. The response was always that it's as much as we can get from the company cloud, to which I'd reply, why not buy more compute? Never got a straight answer to that. Sure, more and beefier machines cost some money, but when the CI is running at capacity at all times, and you have several well-paid devs sitting there and getting distracted while waiting for their jobs to finish... Penny-wise, pound-foolish was the saying?

In fact, I'd happily spend a fraction of my salary to buy a beefy PC to use as a compilation server. And another one to lend to the team's CI infra. But I can't do that, because procedures and company IP protection and whatnot. In the end, I was left with the feeling that the company just wants to make it hard for me to do the very job they're paying me for.

You'd think that management and finance education would let the company do the obvious math, but apparently, it doesn't. But then, the whole problem seems eerily similar to what's apparently a Business Wisdom today (and to me is total insanity): always being focused on acquiring new customers, and not paying attention to retaining existing ones. Maybe the reasons are similar, whatever they are?

Pay your employees well, listen to their problems and fix them, and they won't leave the company for a competitor.

People leave for a handful of main reasons to competitors:

1. Money - this is the most obvious. Most employers simply don't want to give pay rises, to the point where they would rather hire a new person at 50-100% higher than your current salary, to do the same job, than to give you a 25-30% raise.

2. Bad management - second most common reason I see people leave, even for lesser paying jobs, just to be rid of bad managers. And for some reason most companies would rather hire _yet another_ manager to "fix things" rather than listen to the actual workers' problems. So the worker leaves when all they see is manager upon manager upon manager getting paid 2-3-5x as much as they are, who either don't do jackshit, or are overbearing micro-managers. Oh and of course these managers often claim any success of their managed people, while pushing any blame on them simultaneously.

3. No way to progress, either professionally, or within the company hierarchy. A lot of professionals end up doing the exact same job for years upon years, without going anywhere. They don't get promoted to a new position (but get new responsibilities continuously, without any financial renumeration of course), they can't go to another project, they're stuck in one place. And nobody likes feeling stuck.

Overall, a company can easily ensure that people they invest in, stay with the company to use those skills - just freaking listen to them. Not the managers, not some external "corporate coach", the people you invested in. Make sure they're happy, and they'll stay with you.

Oh, also, let's debunk that whole "I invested money in you therefore you can't work for my competitors" bullshit - all that investment, that's actually net zero for the company, since they can do tax writeoffs on those, as an expense. So at the end, that argument is pure BS, and restricting (ex) employees from working for the competition is pure pettiness.