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

391–400 of 407 posts

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

#391

Post by eru »

acdha wrote: post #383
eru wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hear…

We can pile on anecdata, but the unemployment rate being near record lows points to this being a workers' market.

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

#392

Post by eru »

Paul-Craft wrote: post #61
cj wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not going to debate or justify non-competes. I’m also not advocating for them. All I’m doing is calling you out that when you join a company, you’re voluntarily signing all of the contracts. It’s not some kind of involuntary act of slavery. A responsible adult is presented a contract and chooses to sign it. That’s the opposite of involuntary. Your argument is it’s involuntary. That’s what we were debating. I wasn…

Absolutely none of that is necessarily voluntary. You have missed the point entirely. A choice between "X or die" is not a choice. That is a very real scenario, which you have not even acknowledge. Instead, you're saying I should be an expert in contracts. I am not making the situation "extreme," either. If anything, the situation is even more extreme than I am making it out to be.

The unemployment rate in the US is near record lows, so there are plenty of alternatives for most people. And: your government spent about 22.7% of GDP on social expenditures (in 2022, the latest year I have data for). See https://www.oecd.org/social/expenditure.htm

You have a hard time convincing anyone that the choice is "take this job or die" for most people.

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

#393

Post by shermozle »

bumby wrote: post #320
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.

Employees don't hold ownership of that intellectual property, though. You're speaking almost in terms of a moral right; IP rights are legal rights of convention. An employee isn't entitled to them in the same way.

You're suggesting that if an employee wants to change jobs, they should work in a field for which they have less expertise and thus get paid less. How is that reasonable?

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

#394

Post by caskstrength »

bumby wrote: post #390
caskstrength wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 thr…

> 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.

I disagree. Big tech companies often force employees to sign very broad non-competes ("You can't go to a company that competes with us in any market") which in case of such companies covers almost everything (which tech company doesn't compete with Amazon in some way?). Granted, as far as I know big tech rarely enforces non-competes in case of regular ICs, but I would still prefer NCAs to be unenforceable and let the quant firms argue in courts regarding inevitable disclosure for some specific narrow cases where it is applicable.

> 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).

I don't see why salary makes a difference here. Some random FAANG IC also shouldn't be forced to sign a NCA.

> Well-crafted laws don’t throw out the baby with the bath water

What baby? SV "baby" seems to be doing just fine in Cali with unenforceable non-competes.

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

#395

Post by eru »

sophacles wrote: post #135
neilwilson wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jobs on offer are fewer than number of unemployed. Therefore jobs are scarce. Only when there is a vast surplus of jobs will competition do the work. Until then you need regulation.

And regulators that dont cite "low unemployment" when they raise interest rates.

They actually do, from time to time.

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

#396

Post by caskstrength »

F-W-M wrote: post #309
caskstrength wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Living two years on half the salary sucks though.

It's a great start into freelancing though. They have to pay you 60% of your former salary upto 110% of it.

You know what would be even better? Them paying you 100% of your salary while you are freelancing ;)

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

#397

Post by Paul-Craft »

eru wrote: post #392
Paul-Craft wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely none of that is necessarily voluntary. You have missed the point entirely. A choice between "X or die" is not a choice. That is a very real scenario, which you have not even acknowledge. Instead, you're saying I should be an expert in contracts. I am not making the situation "extreme," either. If anything, the situation is even more extreme than I am making it out to be.

The unemployment rate in the US is near record lows, so there are plenty of alternatives for most people. And: your government spent about 22.7% of GDP on social expenditures (in 2022, the latest year I have data for). See https://www.oecd.org/social/expenditure.htm You have a hard time convincing anyone that the choice is "take this job or die" for most people.

Oh, so it's okay if it's voluntary for some people but not for others? I guess slavery in the 1800s was okay because most people weren't slaves, then.

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

#398

Post by bumby »

caskstrength wrote: post #394
bumby wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thr…

> 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. I disagree. Big tech companies often force employees to sign very broad non-competes ("You can't go to a company that competes with us in any market") which in case of such companies covers almost everything (which tech company doesn't compete with Amazon in some way?). Gra…

What you’ve highlighted is that you’re having a different discussion than the OP. That post specifically said there are use cases where NCAs protect IP. You highlighting when they are used elsewhere doesn’t negate that point. And there are significant cases on the news where an employee steals trade secrets and takes them to a competitor (see Levandowski among others). It comes across like you have an axe to grind rather than making a thoughtful point.

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

#399

Post by bumby »

shermozle wrote: post #393
bumby wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Employees don't hold ownership of that intellectual property, though. You're speaking almost in terms of a moral right; IP rights are legal rights of convention. An employee isn't entitled to them in the same way.

You're suggesting that if an employee wants to change jobs, they should work in a field for which they have less expertise and thus get paid less. How is that reasonable?

That is not what I’m implying. You can work in a similar industry without taking trade secrets, except in the case of inevitable disclosure. For example, if you quit writing for Coke you can still go work for Pepsi without disclosing the Coke recipe.

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

#400

Post by caskstrength »

bumby wrote: post #398
caskstrength wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I disagree. Big tech companies often force employees to sign very broad non-competes ("You can't go to a company that competes with us in any market") which in case of such companies covers almost everything (which tech company doesn't compete with Amazon in some way?). Gra…

What you’ve highlighted is that you’re having a different discussion than the OP. That post specifically said there are use cases where NCAs protect IP. You highlighting when they are used elsewhere doesn’t negate that point. And there are significant cases on the news where an employee steals trade secrets and takes them to a competitor (see Levandowski among others). It comes across like you have an axe to grind ra…

> That post specifically said there are use cases where NCAs protect IP. You highlighting when they are used elsewhere doesn’t negate that point.

I consider my position (employers can and should use other mechanisms to go after employees that _really_ stealing their IP instead of forcing NCAs on every random McDonalds employee or even junior tech IC) valid reply to position stated by OP. I stand by my words.

> And there are significant cases on the news where an employee steals trade secrets and takes them to a competitor (see Levandowski among others).

Levandowski example proves my point though since he did it in a state that doesn't enforce NCAs and Google found the way to go after him.

> It comes across like you have an axe to grind rather than making a thoughtful point.

That ad hominem was uncalled for.

Post reply on HN