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

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251–260 of 407 posts

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

#251
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s reasonably normal to be more like garden-leave where the employee is paid some high percentage of their base salary for some amount of time when they may not compete. Some would use that money and time to start a competing company :)

Lawyers will advise you not to do this. It exposes you to accusations of IP theft and barred competition.

It worked out for the traitorous 8

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

#252

Quant firms at least are one of the few places where noncompetes can make sense. It's an extremely IP sensitive industry with stupendously high pay where the employee is going to someone probably competing very directly with you, for the same/similar opportunities. Actual code + NDAs banning literal reimplementations of stuff aren't that valuable, the knowledge and ideas will stay in the head of the employees. The tw…

Isn't the same true for SV companies, and aren't they doing fine without noncompetes?

It's often stated as one of the reasons SV exists at all.

So many stories, start with thr traitorous 8

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

#253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes that's basically what everyone does.

No, it's what everyone should do.

Yeah, I'd still argue that a MAD system where highly paid (and presumably skilled) people need to take a year or two off between jobs is pretty inefficient. But if everyone knows that's the way things work, no one can say they were unaware of the rules.

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

#254
post #30

Quant firms at least are one of the few places where noncompetes can make sense. It's an extremely IP sensitive industry with stupendously high pay where the employee is going to someone probably competing very directly with you, for the same/similar opportunities. Actual code + NDAs banning literal reimplementations of stuff aren't that valuable, the knowledge and ideas will stay in the head of the employees. The tw…

Why does it make sense. Pay employees for their work and they’ll stick around.

Free market for me (to trade securities), but not for thee (to trade your skills).

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

#255
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you believe that buffers are a terrible system? Do you think that any significant piece of software could run without a buffer? If the answer is no, then you should reconsider thinking that garden leave is bad. It’s essentially a buffer that covers the switching cost for agents needing to decide which principal they work for. If you removed garden leave you’d have a higher up front cost for rational actors who nee…

Non-compete + garden leave = important resources siphoned off the economy [1] Remove non-competes, then there's no need for garden leave. If an industry insists it needs non-competes, the dept. of labor could issue exceptions with strong penalties (x3 wages (incld. expected bonuses) for the duration of the non/ -compete, etc) [1] an argument could be made that the more workers are put on garden leave the better it is…

>strong penalties

Sounds like a great incentive to quit the job and hang out for the duration of the non-compete. If I can make more money by working than not working, I know what I'm doing.

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

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like the solution is to force the company to pay full TC (average of previous years + inflation or something?) for the duration of the noncompete.

> I feel like the solution is to force the company to pay full TC (average of previous years + inflation or something?) for the duration of the noncompete. It absolutely has to be something like this at a bare minimum. The whole "We pay full base" argument is nonsense when the TC is multiples of base.

Even this doesn't work because its often the case that an employee leaves for a higher salary elsewhere. Instead of trying to add epicycles to a stupid system it makes more sense to shit can it. There are about 338 million people who would benefit whereas the people who truly have anything to gain from such a system could all attend an event together.

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

#257
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does it make sense. Pay employees for their work and they’ll stick around.

The argument against this is that a company spends millions of dollars in research to learn something valuable, and anyone who didn't spend that money can trivially outbid for the employee that knows the results, since they can pay the employee some significant portion of the cost of the research that they didn't have to do and still come out ahead. I'm not sure I entirely buy this, but it's a lot more nuanced than "…

this is the kind of noise you get when you decide that an idea is something that can be owned

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

#258
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what universe is it a good compromise that fast food workers aren't allowed to work at another fast food restaurant for 6 months after they quit, without any compensation? It incentivize companies to add it to their contract just because it makes it harder for employees to quit bad working conditions and low pays since they might not land a new job and be able to pay rent. It doesn't protect any sort of intellectu…

Well, it didn't even come to my mind that a fast food worker might have a noncompete agreement. I thought this only is about engineers, scientists, managers etc - people who actually have knowledge which is reasonable to prevent from leaking to a competing company too quickly. Applied to a fast-food worker any noncompete agreement sounds really wild. Do fast-food companies actually require this? Sounds crazy.

>Do fast-food companies actually require this?

It has happened although it's probably a "man bites dog" sort of thing that made it into the news.

I'm not sure it's good policy in general to discourage people from working--especially in the area they presumably have some expertise in.

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

#260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Quant firms at least are one of the few places where noncompetes can make sense. It's an extremely IP sensitive industry with stupendously high pay where the employee is going to someone probably competing very directly with you, for the same/similar opportunities. Cry me a river. If knowledge of some particular employees worth so much to the quant firms, then they should pay them not to leave accordingly.

Knowledge of a secret does not imply that you provide value.

clearly there's value in the secret if you're making them sign a noncompete.

The proposal is just to ask firms to put money where their mouths are.

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