141–150 of 189 posts
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It's similar in Washington. If you make less than $116k, no non-competes. Otherwise, get fucked. https://lni.wa.gov/workers-rights/workplace-policies/non-com...
How dare quants get paid $5m to sit on their couches for two years after leaving their firms! Congress must act!
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> How would a previous employer know what a former employee is telling their current employer... They don't. What I learned while working for your company isn't your company's property any more. Good ideas almost always eventually spread in our industry. And I think thats a good thing for software as a whole! You can protect your data, and your code. But you can't really stop someone quitting a job at your company, w…
>You can protect your data, and your code. But you can't really stop someone quitting a job at your company, working somewhere else and reimplementing a software system that worked well. It might take years to do it, but probably not decades. I don't even think this case is undesirable. If we were welders, it would be absurd to be prevented from using a welding technique we learned on the job at a new employer. Syste…
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Why do you believe employers should be able to control who you work for when they're no longer paying you? One easy test for contract fairness I learned from my lawyer is, "Would it make sense if it were symmetric?" So, e.g., would your employer also agree not to go after clients that your next employer has? Or would they agree not to hire any engineers you consider competitive with yourself while you're there and fo…
Can anyone shed light as to why the push for symmetric non-competes isn't a movement?
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Trade secrets are already strongly and strictly protected at national and state level regardless of non compete agreements. You are never allowed to steal trade secrets or use them elsewhere even if you didn’t sign any agreement about it. An NDA isn’t even technically required. There are state and national laws which blanket ban using trade secrets outside of the company you worked for.
How would a previous employer know what a former employee is telling their current employer about what they know from their former employer? Not saying anything is right or wrong, just that when something is illegal doesn't mean it prevents that crime.
Where trade secrets really leak (in tech), in my experience, is engineer to engineer. A chat between friends over beers about some technical problem. It is nearly untraceable and it doesn’t involve anyone leaving their job.
As a fun example, database tech is buried in trade secret restrictions and has been for decades. There is a classic problem in cache replacement algorithms that has no solution in literature. Nonetheless, an astonishingly elegant solution exists — the kind that you can’t believe you never thought of it yourself after you learn it — that has been selectively passed around informally among practitioners for (at least) a decade or two. No one knows who invented it but it was likely developed at one of the old database research powerhouses like Oracle, IBM, et al that have severe trade secret regimes. A trade secret that leaks isn’t a trade secret, but there are enormous punitive consequences if anyone knows who leaked it.
This kind of trade secret leakage happens even under non-compete regimes and it is pretty common. When it happens, the probability of figuring out how it happened is very low. It has to be part of your risk model.
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>You can protect your data, and your code. But you can't really stop someone quitting a job at your company, working somewhere else and reimplementing a software system that worked well. It might take years to do it, but probably not decades. I don't even think this case is undesirable. If we were welders, it would be absurd to be prevented from using a welding technique we learned on the job at a new employer. Syste…
If it were a genuinely innovative new technique, it should be patented, which will grant exclusivity for some period in exchange for it _not_ being a trade secret.
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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_California_Proposition_... Someone should compile a listicle of the "10 worst California propositions" or something like that
Fun fact: To be Prop 65 compliant, you just need the ubiquitous warning label, and there's no penalty for over warning, so just stick on everything and you're done. Speaking of which... Prop 65 Warning: This post contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.
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> The NY Department of Labor also doesn't handle complaints if you're salaried above a certain threshold. Source?
https://dol.ny.gov/system/files/documents/2021/03/ls223.2.pd... Labor Standards cannot accept every claim. Labor Standards will not accept claims if you: - Worked as an executive, administrative, or professional employee and earned over $900 per week
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It varies state by state since there are different rules by each on what clauses in non competes can be enforced. Some states like CA and MA straight up ban them.
Are you sure non-competes are banned in MA? Do you have a source for that?
https://www.upcounsel.com/non-compete-agreement-enforceabili...
Noncompetes should 100% require full-paid gardening leave to be enforceable. You don't want me ot work for a competitor for a year? Great. You get to pay me full pay and benefits for that year. Let's see how keen companies are to enforce a noncompete then. Even then they should be limited in scope but without paid gardening leave they should be utterly unenforceable.
Paid noncompete (gardening leave) is pretty common on Wall Street. It has gotten much more prevalent in the last 5-10 years, with companies ratcheting up the length and enforcing it on lower and lower level employees. Think - IC software engineers working on some random UI with no idea of current positions or trading strategies, making like $300k total being put on a 12 month leave. The problem even with paid noncomp…
How is this not an illusory contract?