Send Noncompete Agreements Back to the Middle Ages
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Send Noncompete Agreements Back to the Middle Ages
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Re: Send Noncompete Agreements Back to the Middle Ages
#2non competes are incompatible with free Enterprise, and incompatible with social democracy. yeah send them back
Re: Send Noncompete Agreements Back to the Middle Ages
#3In 2016, there was a White House initiative to ban non-compete agreements. The comment thread there from my parent is still the most active comment thread I've participated in on HN. It may be worth reading for a re-hashing of all the various sides of the debate. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12795119
Re: Send Noncompete Agreements Back to the Middle Ages
#4> But the history of these covenants suggests that there’s a strong economic case for banning them entirely
This is an example of starting to make a good point and carrying to an extreme that makes it unreasonable. Non-competes exist for a reason, and saying they need to be deleted is a silly argument. "This common business practice could use modification" generates less clicks, I suppose.
Re: Send Noncompete Agreements Back to the Middle Ages
#5If I work for an employer based outside of CA but work out of a CA-satellite office, am I still subject to any non-compete?
Re: Send Noncompete Agreements Back to the Middle Ages
#6> But the history of these covenants suggests that there’s a strong economic case for banning them entirely This is an example of starting to make a good point and carrying to an extreme that makes it unreasonable. Non-competes exist for a reason, and saying they need to be deleted is a silly argument. "This common business practice could use modification" generates less clicks, I suppose.
They're mostly bad but the paper referenced also isn't that convincing. There was something of a shifting of the tech center of gravity from the East to the West coast. But, as the paper even notes, there were a lot of differences in business practices between east and west (long-term employment vs. job-hopping) that were at most only somewhat correlated to non-compete law. (I worked for one of the big "Route 128" companies for many years and never had a non-compete until acquired by EMC.)
There is a lot of research that suggests knowledge transfer among companies increases innovation but it's not clear how much non-competes retard that transfer in practice.
As a sidenote, Massachusetts finally put significant restrictions on non-competes over the past year or so.
Re: Send Noncompete Agreements Back to the Middle Ages
#7If I work for an employer based outside of CA but work out of a CA-satellite office, am I still subject to any non-compete?
It's complicated. Here you go: https://www.businessjustice.com/is-my-out-of-state-noncompet...
But a satellite office would almost certainly be considered a California-business and be actionable against.
Re: Send Noncompete Agreements Back to the Middle Ages
#8> But the history of these covenants suggests that there’s a strong economic case for banning them entirely This is an example of starting to make a good point and carrying to an extreme that makes it unreasonable. Non-competes exist for a reason, and saying they need to be deleted is a silly argument. "This common business practice could use modification" generates less clicks, I suppose.
What, to your mind, are good reasons for non-competes? To me it just looks like rent-seeking.
Do you see any negative consequences in states that have banned them almost entirely, such as California?
Re: Send Noncompete Agreements Back to the Middle Ages
#9If I work for an employer based outside of CA but work out of a CA-satellite office, am I still subject to any non-compete?
In general, no, but it's complicated (https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=60a2afec-34c8...).
Re: Send Noncompete Agreements Back to the Middle Ages
#10One of the most insidious portions of non-competes IMO is that they are often non-enforceable. Depending on how wide or restricted the target of the non-compete is it can be ruled invalid. A lot of the more questioning people have probably discovered this but consider that there are probably janitors laid off by amazon who read their non-competes as the word of law and end up suffering hardships because of it.
Also, as an aside, a non-compete is not required to prevent corporate espionage, it's just easier to prove violation of. A lot of the sales teams worried about losing leads when team members departed could have pursued them with law suits focusing on the theft of corporate resources, it's regrettable non-competes have even gotten this far.