Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

fortune.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 407 posts

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

#321

Post by aussieguy1234 »

vgatherps wrote: post #26

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…

I read a story in this article about a person being sued after they found another job after they were laid off.

There should be exemptions for non competes when it's the company firing or laying off the employee. When a company decides to do that, they need to be willing to bear the consequences of their decision.

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

#322

Post by bumby »

caskstrength wrote: post #312
hamandcheese wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"Secret" should be covered by NDA and/or patented.

That's the point. If it's covered by an NDA and the state declares NDAs unenforceable, there are no NDA-covered "secrets." I can get hired, learn all your secrets, and then sell my employment to your competitors. That system doesn't really work.

In practice, trade secrets are protected by other mechanisms. Patents are one of them because, by definition, patents are public knowledge so they are no longer secret.

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

#323

Post by bumby »

akira2501 wrote: post #306
hamandcheese wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Are you speaking towards the employee or towards the quant firm? If the employee has no standing to claim value, then why does the underlying business get to?

Because they own the trade secret. For example, they have the legal right to license a trade secret; an employee does not. It's about legal ownership of intellectual property.

As a corollary, you may read a patent and now have the knowledge of a product. But you don't have the same legal right to create and sell that product. That right is protected by the patent owner.

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

#324

Post by Drakim »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #246
Drakim wrote: 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.

It is happening, Walmart was doing it to their cashiers, and why shouldn't they? It's a huge boon to companies to make it difficult and expensive for people to quit their jobs in favor of something better, it means they can push wages down further, give worse working conditions, without needing to worry about people quitting.

Back when it was allowed, some companies would pay in fake company money called "scrip" that you could only use in their company store to buy food. They also owned the houses so you could only rent if you were an employee. Wanna quit your job? Good luck also losing your house and not having actual money to go anywhere else.

You gotta understand that if you have something that can be abused for profits, then it will be abused for profit. Even if a company is has a heart of gold and decides not to do this, they will be out-competed by companies who are willing to do evil things and thus be more profitable. Abuse will happen by logical necessity.

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

#325

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

bumby wrote: post #323
akira2501 wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you speaking towards the employee or towards the quant firm? If the employee has no standing to claim value, then why does the underlying business get to?

Because they own the trade secret. For example, they have the legal right to license a trade secret; an employee does not. It's about legal ownership of intellectual property. As a corollary, you may read a patent and now have the knowledge of a product. But you don't have the same legal right to create and sell that product. That right is protected by the patent owner.

Of course, that line of thinking involves the inevitable follow up: when is something a “copy” vs a “genuine invention”. If company has a patent on making widget A, how different does a previous employee who leaves and makes widget B have to be before it’s not considered a violation?

I am no expert here but my understanding is that the case law around this is much more well trodden in patent land than it is for noncompetes

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

#326

Post by master_crab »

bumby wrote: post #323
akira2501 wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you speaking towards the employee or towards the quant firm? If the employee has no standing to claim value, then why does the underlying business get to?

Because they own the trade secret. For example, they have the legal right to license a trade secret; an employee does not. It's about legal ownership of intellectual property. As a corollary, you may read a patent and now have the knowledge of a product. But you don't have the same legal right to create and sell that product. That right is protected by the patent owner.

That’s not a very good example. A patent is available to read specifically because the discoverer has entered an agreement with the government to share the relevant information in return for exclusive use for a set period of time.

If they had not patented whatever it is they had, anyone could replicate the information/item in question with no penalty.

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

#327

Post by davorak »

hamandcheese wrote: post #225
caskstrength wrote: post #201

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.

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

If it did not provide value to tell the employee the secret then it follows that company would/should not tell the employee the secret.

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

#328

Post by diob »

matwood wrote: post #71
vgatherps wrote: post #26

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…

Non-competes have only ever made sense where the employee is compensated for signing. Codifying this change would immediately make companies stop with blanket non-competes, and only have them on key people. While not impossible, non-competes without compensation are already hard to enforce as judges don't look kindly on preventing people from earning a living. The problem is the asymmetry of power let companies bully…

Yeah, they should be obligated to pay for the length of the non-compete. 1 year? Okay, you're paying me for a year.

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

#330

Post by norir »

vgatherps wrote: post #26

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…

> It's an extremely IP sensitive industry

I know this will not resonate with some, but on some level I do not really subscribe to the idea of intellectual property. My personal belief is that the brain is more like a radio receiver. The ideas are floating out there for anyone to pull down. The more sensitive among us are able better able to hear what is there and report it back to the rest of us. To claim ownership of an idea is to me like claiming ownership of the note A or the pythagorean theorem. Of course there should be some rewards for introducing novel ideas to the world but to me the real reward is the creative experience of bringing something into the world that was previously unknown.

In an ideal world, I do not think that hedge funds (or most fintech) would even exist. It sort of offends me that we would waste our civic resources legally enforcing ip rights. But I also understand that my position is far from universal.

Post reply on HN