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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

#381

Post by dudul »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #372
dudul wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a terrible compromise to me. Why do I need to spend 6 months without pay and then more time with only 50%?

Because I would never want to jump straight into a new job anyway, a good sabbatical seems a great idea if you can afford it (leaving an engineering/management job suggests you probably can). Being totally free from a job and still getting 50% of the salary for free also sounds like a dream - just move to a cheaper place and enjoy the life.

But that's not what you described. You talked about a 6 months non compete, and then potentially longer in exchange for 50% salary.

Not everybody wants/can move to a cheaper place.

Finally, as mentioned in any messages here, engineers are not the ones suffering the most from unfair non-compete. It's retail/restauration workers and more "vulnerable" demographics.

Your "compromise" comes out as completely disconnected from reality.

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

#382

Post by creer »

caskstrength wrote: post #201
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…

> 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.

For a large team, and finance, there is no amount of pay that could compare to the potential gain of creating your own firm to reimplement some specific idea you learned on the job.

The more likely response then would be to move the team somewhere that does allow non-competes?

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

#383

Post by acdha »

eru wrote: post #364
acdha wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is too simplified a position: 1. A company can usually go without hiring people than a worker can go without making mortgage payments or issuing rent. In the United States, that includes basic access to medical care. 2. Companies have large legal departments advising them on how to craft language and the boundaries of the law. Most workers don’t even want to pay a lawyer to review a contract knowing that they’ll…

A worker can very easily go without working for company A, and go work for company B. Especially at current low levels of unemployment.

That’s not true even if they are young, single and childless, have highly general skills, and live in a booming city, and the further you get away from that the less true it becomes. Many people live in an area where there are not that many options unless they want to move or deal with a worse commute, not everyone enjoys interviewing, and even those of us in high demand areas have been feeling some slack - I’ve heard more programmers talking about delays between jobs dragging out than any point since the 2009 bubble collapsed.

Again, my point wasn’t that the power is distributed 100:0 but that it varies a lot and only a small percentage of the workforce enjoys the odds being in their favor.

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

#384

Post by caskstrength »

bumby wrote: post #379
caskstrength wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The parent comment of the one I replied to was specifically referencing IP as a use case for NCA. You allude to “knowledge” of IP warranting higher pay. Besides, elsewhere it’s discussed how NDAs can act as de facto NCAs due to the inevitable disclose doctrine.

> Besides, elsewhere it’s discussed how NDAs can act as de facto NCAs due to the inevitable disclose doctrine.

And that is much better case than NCA since it would only apply in specific narrow cases and wouldn't prevent a McDonalds employee from working in fast food industry for a year, for example.

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

#385

Post by gumby »

firstplacelast wrote: post #380
gumby wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Society does not do that. They can extract more capital, so they’re considered more important. 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.

Worship of the rich is a sickness in society. Like I said, the value of banking is akin to the value of gardening, and worshipping the bankers just enables destructive distortions.

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

#386

Post by chiefalchemist »

js8 wrote: post #376
chiefalchemist wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think I understand what you're saying, but this has always been simply called "capitalism". The "fake" regulators are simply a response of people with power in the system to societal attempts to fix the most egregious flaws of liberalism (laissez-faire). 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 claim…

> I think I understand what you're saying, but this has always been simply called "capitalism".

Perhaps. But just because it's called that doesn't mean it is that. In fact, even crony capitalism is kinda a joke because it's such a perversion it's not even close to capitalism. Manipulation is the antithesis of free markets. Along the same lines, bails outs by defintion don't mean capitalism is a more successful paradigm. That just doesn't make sense.

My favorite way to reframe shameless newspeak is this: If your pet barked, would you still call it a cat? Of course not? So when there isn't a free market for miles, that's not capitalism.

My fav thing would be to see more co-ops. There's no reason why the more workers can't own a piece of the action.

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

#387

Post by phendrenad2 »

toasted-subs wrote: post #249

In California you cant legally enforce non-competes but the companies seem to do it illegally behind the scenes. Kind of behavior seems like it should result in government intervention.

> companies seem to do it illegally behind the scenes

How? Collusion between companies? Threatening lawsuits against the employee or the new company?

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

#388

Post by shortsunblack »

thatguysaguy wrote: post #267
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…

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.

They are really not. The growth of financialization coincides with economic stagnation in U.S. If anything, the data shows the opposite. Finance sector is more or less a parasite on the productive economy.

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

#389

Post by shortsunblack »

Coherence97 wrote: post #332
norir wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 o…

I think your viewpoint is great and poetic. However, since most people are not as mature as you, our societies are not as mature as you. Meaning that until this fact changes, I do not think it is realist to expect someone to give something for free when they could make billions with it. You have to be a saint or already have everything you could ever dream of

The only way the someone can make 'billions' is because of the state-given and enforced monopoly on production. Without this required threat of state violence, your ideas start being worth much less in the actually competitive markets.

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

#390

Post by bumby »

caskstrength wrote: post #384
bumby wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parent comment of the one I replied to was specifically referencing IP as a use case for NCA. You allude to “knowledge” of IP warranting higher pay. Besides, elsewhere it’s discussed how NDAs can act as de facto NCAs due to the inevitable disclose doctrine.

> Besides, elsewhere it’s discussed how NDAs can act as de facto NCAs due to the inevitable disclose doctrine. And that is much better case than NCA since it would only apply in specific narrow cases and wouldn't prevent a McDonalds employee from working in fast food industry for a year, for example.

I don’t disagree, but considering HN is mostly tech-focused for the purposes of this discussion it’s can be a distinction without a difference. Note how the original thrust of this sub-thread is about tech-heavy IP being grounds for preventing employment with a competitor. Also elsewhere I’ve mentioned how some jurisdictions provide caveats, like refusing to enforce NCAs when an employee earns less than a certain threshold (eg $75k). That covers most of your McDonalds employees while still holding true to the intent of NCAs as it comes to IP heavy industries. Well-crafted laws don’t throw out the baby with the bath water
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