371–380 of 407 posts
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Unemployment in eg the US is fairly low. So you can pick companies which have less stringent non-competes (or non at all).
When I go back to the US, I pick states by which have limited non-competes.
I've heard about a good compromise option existing in a country in Europe: noncompete agreements are not banned completely but are limited to last just half a year after the employee leaves the company. It can also last much longer in case the employer agrees to keep paying half the salary to the former employee.
Sounds like a terrible compromise to me. Why do I need to spend 6 months without pay and then more time with only 50%?
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Right, and you don't need a non-compete to go after former employee stealing your IP.
Non-competes and NDAs are literally the mechanisms that companies try to protect their trade secrets. Patents, copyrights, etc cover publically disclosed IP. The OP was about how non-competes make sense in an IP-intensive field, like quant finance. The reason is that these contracts help protect the IP by explicitly stating their case. Your comment goes against the very foundation of IP law: creating reasonably fair…
Non-competes have always been interesting: "We are hiring you because you already know how to swing a hammer in our industry, but you may not use a hammer for any other company who may also have hired you for knowing how to swing a hammer"
They make sense where there are specific internal secrets, it's not just about IC skillset necessarily. But it's true they're definitely overused.
What one company may consider a trade secret and whether it is can be another thing altogether.
Customer lists or sales processes for example definitely can fall under the proprietary category.
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Sounds like you are, in "broad strokes", longing after 1870s or something. I think you forgot how crony (or crappy?) it was. What I am saying, if you really want this "traditional capitalism", which never really existed, you need some mechanism of how to avoid rich getting richer and becoming cronies (as they always did). I don't think you have an idea what such a mechanism should be.
To clarify, crony capitalism is when "regulation" and "oversight" are euphemisms for thumb-on-the-scale rules that result in a less than level playing field. The winners? The cronies. And back to my previous point about The Fed, etc. We're told that those are "for the greater good" (words) but - and to your point - the rich are not only getting riche (actions),the rate of that wealth transfer (to the top) is accelera…
You seem to be similar to naive communists, who, in the face of communism turning totalitarian, tried to "save" the idea of planned economy (for instance) by claiming that totality isn't what they wanted. Ignoring the fact that the totality was put up to prevent bad behavior of people and companies, to which the planned economy led to.
Similarly, here you complain about natural consequences of laissez-faire capitalism, without admitting that the latter is the cause.
I am not saying that good ideas in capitalism (or communism) are unsalvageable. But then you need to detail the mechanism of how to prevent the natural course of action (empirically observed) to take place.
(My personal preference would be to replace free market for labor with worker democracy, while leaving most other things up to free market. Although such a system could hardly be called capitalism anymore.)
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We're talking about employees making 5x median salary vs companies making how many times median company profit ?
In an ideal world companies would share profits with employees. In an ideal world, employees would also share in the losses when companies aren’t profitable (forgo a paycheck). …everyone wants the first scenario, but absolutely not the 2nd! When will people realize that one of the value props of working for a company (as opposed to starting your own) is you’re guaranteed a stable income regardless of whether profits…
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…
But for SW devs, the non-competitive agreements in Finance industry isn’t really the same kind of bondage as for Quants. If Quant changes company - his options are very much limited to other companies doing trading, thus directly covered by non-competitive agreement. If SW Dev changes the company - he can choose the company working in other industries not related to finance, and then he is free as a bird.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Non-competes and NDAs are literally the mechanisms that companies try to protect their trade secrets. Patents, copyrights, etc cover publically disclosed IP. The OP was about how non-competes make sense in an IP-intensive field, like quant finance. The reason is that these contracts help protect the IP by explicitly stating their case. Your comment goes against the very foundation of IP law: creating reasonably fair…
You are arguing with straw man since no one in this thread argued to bad NDAs. To me personally NDA seems to be a reasonable concept while NCA is just a wage depression tool.
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Are quant firms positive sum for society? I can imagine that some trading leads to goods being priced more efficiently or w/e but I doubt the level of alpha these firms are chasing has positive externalities. If not, you should shouldn't really care about this hurting their industry.
You highlight a more general problem: the social/economic function of finance is to be a service industry to ensure there is liquidity available (that other people can use for their purposes). What bugs me is that somehow society lionizes people in the money industries over those doing equivalent service jobs like gardening, lawyering, much less more important ones like garbage collection.
If gardeners were paid 500k/year, they would be exalted. It has nothing to do with the work or the value provided to society.
People just love money and praise those that have it.