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New York may ban noncompete employment agreements and Wall Street is not happy

fortune.com

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Re: New York may ban noncompete employment agreements and Wall Street is not happy

#101

Post by bradleyjg »

GuB-42 wrote: post #78

The article doesn't address what I think is the most important aspect of noncompete agreements: compensation. In France, and I believe in many other places as well, you can't have a noncompete without proper compensation. Compensation is relative to how it will affect the former employee career, it is usually less than a full wage, but it can be that if it makes finding a new job particularly difficult. There have be…

This is a problem in the tech industry but not on Wall Street.

The norm there is paid time off between jobs (“gardening leave”). Everyone knows it is part of the system and that a mid level or senior hire can’t start right away. They also buy out still vesting bonuses and the like.

It’s quite a civilized system and I think the law ought to leave it alone, while addressing abusive ones like we have in tech.

Re: New York may ban noncompete employment agreements and Wall Street is not happy

#102

Post by danuker »

GuB-42 wrote: post #78

The article doesn't address what I think is the most important aspect of noncompete agreements: compensation. In France, and I believe in many other places as well, you can't have a noncompete without proper compensation. Compensation is relative to how it will affect the former employee career, it is usually less than a full wage, but it can be that if it makes finding a new job particularly difficult. There have be…

> they would be laughed off by the judge.

Still useful for taking advantage of employees not in the know.

Re: New York may ban noncompete employment agreements and Wall Street is not happy

#103

Post by ElevenLathe »

cj wrote: post #29
ajb wrote: post #9

After noncompetes, they should go after non-solicitation. Entire teams that work well together should be able to defect from shitty employers. It kind of happens anyway but on the quiet, inefficiently - I'd love to see a job website where you can list an entire team.

Non-solicits also include not soliciting customers. Which is particularly relevant at consultancies where the product is a service. If you join a consultancy group, and 2 months later quit with the client roster... is it really OK to poach all their clients to start your own consultancy? All of these contracts are time limited, FWIW. E.g. non-solicitation doesn't mean you can never work your your colleagues again. It…

> If you join a consultancy group, and 2 months later quit with the client roster... is it really OK to poach all their clients to start your own consultancy?

Seems fine to me. If the only value the "company" brings to the table is a client list, maybe they should just be in the business of selling leads.

Re: New York may ban noncompete employment agreements and Wall Street is not happy

#104

Post by acdha »

cj wrote: post #57
izacus wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you join a consultancy group, and 2 months later quit with the client roster... is it really OK to poach all their clients to start your own consultancy? Yes. It's called free market competition and it's great for the society and economy. NYC bankers should be first in line to understand that.

What you’re advocating for is normalizing the stealing of company IP. The way you solicit clients from a prior company is downloading the client list, exporting to a personal drive, quitting, then using the list to poach. I’m fine if that’s your intention, but let your employer know upfront that you won’t protect confidential company data.

> What you’re advocating for is normalizing the stealing of company IP.

This is categorically untrue – if some past employer told you that, you might want to ask what their motives for lying to you were. Your knowledge of who you worked for is not corporate IP.

The actual legal standards vary from state to state but in some states it come down to three things: does that list have economic value on its own, would it be hard to recreate, and does the company make an effort to keep it secret? That probably won’t apply to your personal memory of who you worked for since that's highly unlikely to be an independently valuable resource - typically that would be a big list of non-public information like people who signed up to preorder a product, people with a certain need or interest, etc. – and it definitely wouldn’t include anything listed on their website, press releases, or someone’s C.V. If you dump the CRM on the way out, yes, you might be in trouble but there’s no legal standard expecting you to be mind-wiped on the way out.

Re: New York may ban noncompete employment agreements and Wall Street is not happy

#105

Post by cj »

izacus wrote: post #66
cj wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you’re advocating for is normalizing the stealing of company IP. The way you solicit clients from a prior company is downloading the client list, exporting to a personal drive, quitting, then using the list to poach. I’m fine if that’s your intention, but let your employer know upfront that you won’t protect confidential company data.

> What you’re advocating for is normalizing the stealing of company IP. I am not. > The way you solicit clients from a prior company is downloading the client list, exporting to a personal drive, quitting, then using the list to poach. Which part of this is "IP"? The whole concept of "stealing IP" is something that was lobbied in to prevent market competition and establish monopolies. Calling a list of clients that m…

> Which part of this is "IP"?

I should have said conditional customer data. (Client lists, phone numbers, email addresses - basically whatever you can export out of Salesforce)

In order to poach your old company’s customers, you’ll need confidential data from your prior employer, assuming that your employer doesn’t publish their client roster publicly.

The debate is being dragged from poaching customers to how IP protections enable monopolies. That’s too big of a leap to be relevant in this thread (sorry for saying IP rather than confidential data)

Re: New York may ban noncompete employment agreements and Wall Street is not happy

#106

Post by cj »

fsloth wrote: post #82
cj wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you’re advocating for is normalizing the stealing of company IP. The way you solicit clients from a prior company is downloading the client list, exporting to a personal drive, quitting, then using the list to poach. I’m fine if that’s your intention, but let your employer know upfront that you won’t protect confidential company data.

You are thinking about stealing the rolodex. That would be probably theft. But personal relations and reputation is NOT company IP. If you steal the rolodex, it's questionable for sure. If you leverage your network and reputation, that's something that free market should never limit.

Agreed. I misspoke, should have said confidential data (like a Rolodex) rather than IP.

Re: New York may ban noncompete employment agreements and Wall Street is not happy

#107

Post by chiefalchemist »

js8 wrote: post #42
chiefalchemist wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To your point, it's ironic that firms who push a free market ethos don't actually want to compete. Instead, they want a thumb on the scale that tilts the advantages in their direction. Welcome to Crony Capitalism (which should not be confused with traditional capitalism).

The absence of "traditional capitalism" from history makes it really hard not to confuse it with "crony capitalism". Perhaps you mean liberalism, as an ideology of capitalism.

Perhaps. But, for example, we didn't always have The Fed. We didn't always have WS. We didn't always have "too big to fail". We didn't always have taxpayer financed bailouts. We didn't always have a top heavy (Fed) government (that has more influence than it has common economic sense).

At yet all those entities verbally champion "free markets" and "capitalism being a superior economic paradigm", Etc. Minds get lulled into the repetition of the words and stop checking the action. Reminders to turn on your BS detectors add some balance. Not much, but some.

Fwiw, I'm speaking freely and in broad strokes. If liberalism would be a better word then sure, whatever helps cut through the BS. Thanks.

Re: New York may ban noncompete employment agreements and Wall Street is not happy

#108

Post by felipelemos »

cj wrote: post #29
ajb wrote: post #9

After noncompetes, they should go after non-solicitation. Entire teams that work well together should be able to defect from shitty employers. It kind of happens anyway but on the quiet, inefficiently - I'd love to see a job website where you can list an entire team.

Non-solicits also include not soliciting customers. Which is particularly relevant at consultancies where the product is a service. If you join a consultancy group, and 2 months later quit with the client roster... is it really OK to poach all their clients to start your own consultancy? All of these contracts are time limited, FWIW. E.g. non-solicitation doesn't mean you can never work your your colleagues again. It…

> If you join a consultancy group, and 2 months later quit with the client roster... is it really OK to poach all their clients to start your own consultancy?

If the clients prefer to leave with the then 2 month-old employee, then the consultancy is doing something very wrong.

Re: New York may ban noncompete employment agreements and Wall Street is not happy

#109

Post by epc »

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #25

What’s a New York noncompete look like? In australia as far as I can tell it discusses associated entities - I can’t go and work for my employers major client directly if I was involved with that client during my tenure, but if I’ve had no association, I think I can. There’s also caveats around ‘right to earn a living’ if your skillset or specialty limits you to people associated with your employer, but as far as I c…

I’ve been under two. One prohibited working with any existing clients for a calendar year after my termination date. A second prohibited working in a similar role in the US for a year. Both applied to employment and not other actions one might do such as shorting the former employer’s stock.

Re: New York may ban noncompete employment agreements and Wall Street is not happy

#110

Post by felipelemos »

cj wrote: post #105
izacus wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What you’re advocating for is normalizing the stealing of company IP. I am not. > The way you solicit clients from a prior company is downloading the client list, exporting to a personal drive, quitting, then using the list to poach. Which part of this is "IP"? The whole concept of "stealing IP" is something that was lobbied in to prevent market competition and establish monopolies. Calling a list of clients that m…

> Which part of this is "IP"? I should have said conditional customer data. (Client lists, phone numbers, email addresses - basically whatever you can export out of Salesforce) In order to poach your old company’s customers, you’ll need confidential data from your prior employer, assuming that your employer doesn’t publish their client roster publicly. The debate is being dragged from poaching customers to how IP pro…

My email is not your confidential data. My phone number is not your confidential data.

If your company can only exist by blocking other companies from competition with your customer, then your company should not exist in first place.

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