331–340 of 421 posts
While I don't agree with non-competes, I don't understand how it's even slightly ok to allow a government to decide private business policies.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is sensible but its a lot easier just to make non competes go away entirely.
In the end if there is no compete clause in your contract, you can just not take it...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
1) deontological: freedom to contract is always a good thing. It is a human right, and government has no legitimate moral power to remove that right from people. That's not a strong argument either. You could substitute "contract" with anything. I say this as a staunch libertarian. Government restrictions aren't bad because "government", but because restrictions. The free market works best when government restricts t…
>>[...] restricts the freedom to restrict freedom [...] That's a great turn of phrase. I'll try to use it the next time somebody asks me to summarize the GPL, which has similar restrictions built in as per Stallman's original intent.
I don't understand why there's so many people in the comments defending non-competes. They have literally no value to society, or to individual employees. They are a tool of restrictive coercion to stifle an employees freedom of movement in the job market. Trade secrets, IP, secret sauce: covered by NDA and IP assignment agreements Client lists, contract terms, sales strategies, reported metrics, financials: covered…
A non-compete allows a company to make an investment in you (in the form of training) with some assurance that you will not immediately turn around post-training and go work for a direct competitor. NDAs/IP assignment agreements do not address this need. If it weren't for non-competes, that investment would be infeasible and we would all be paying our employers for the training we get – either directly, in the form of course fees, or indirectly, in the form of depressed wages during the course of the training.
Edit: For a deeper dive on this, see Paul H. Rubin and Peter Shedd, "Human Capital and Covenants Not to Compete," available at https://www.jstor.org/stable/724227?seq=1#page_scan_tab_cont....
I don't understand why there's so many people in the comments defending non-competes. They have literally no value to society, or to individual employees. They are a tool of restrictive coercion to stifle an employees freedom of movement in the job market. Trade secrets, IP, secret sauce: covered by NDA and IP assignment agreements Client lists, contract terms, sales strategies, reported metrics, financials: covered…
From a macro level, non-competes are awful. The economy as a whole does much better (is more productive) when the best labor is free to chase the most productive uses of capital. (And vice versa) Successful companies are constrained by the existence of non-competes, because they have a reduced pool of employees to hire. They may still do them for their own employees, but they can't take the step without everyone else taking it too. (A variation of prisoner's dilemma)
I'm generally a small-government low-regulation person, but this may be an instance where companies need to be nudged as a group to accept something that will help them in aggregate.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but companies deserve the right to protect their IP Sure. What I have in my head isn't the companies IP though, it's my experience. "IP" is often confused with "the collective experience of your employees". IP is physical artifacts such as code, drawings, patents etc. The memory of having written that code is not part of the IP, nor is the capability of doing it again in a fraction of the time.
"What I have in my head isn't the companies IP though, it's my experience." Again - 100% false. A lot of 'what is in your head' is the IP of the company you worked for. Clearly, you grasp this, because you people seem to accept that NDA's are valid. So - that yo accept and 'NDA' is valid, means you accept that 'what is in your head' can be the property of the company. These 'I'm paid for labour' arguments are naive.…
I consider most of it "experience". How would you draw the line between what is "experience" and what is "IP"?
> you people seem to accept that NDA's are valid.
> 'NDA' is valid, means you accept that 'what is in your head' can be the property of the company
Well it rather means that I can't disclose things to certain people at certain times. I accept that e.g. for unreleased products and other secrets.
> to keep information about the company private - indefinitely.
Not sure what that means? If I work for ABC corp to develop over 10 years some advanced tech for ad targeting, and I have a non-compete that doesn't let me go to google for a year. For that full year they pay me full salary. That is the non-compete. I accept that (only with full salary). While at ABC, I had an NDA. That's cool.
After that year I can clean room implement something similar. I might have to avoid making the exact same system I did at ABC corp if there are IP issues such as patents. Note that this IP (patents) is not secret. I don't necessarily agree with software patents of most kinds however.
I develop the similar system at google in 1 year. That's what experience does: I take none of the dead ends I did at ABC corp. That's why google can pay me a load of money: I have experience. Is that experience in large part the SAME as ABC corps "IP"? yes. Of course. Do they "own" all of that experience? No. They still have their product. They own that. Google will have a product too, which they own. I wrote both.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Once again they paid for a finite duration of your time and labor not the contents of your brain. For you to somehow by dint of experience BECOME employer property in whole or in total is a truly bizarre perspective. If you can't own them forever as slaves then preventing them from freely applying their learned skills for a period of time isn't coherent and logical.
"Once again they paid for a finite duration of your time and labor not the contents of your brain." + Absolutely false. Whenever you work for a company, you will gain knowledge that is their property - almost always. It doesn't matter who/what/when/how you work for - that knowledge is theirs. Even McDonald's workers are subject to private info such as operating details. + "For you to somehow by dint of experience BEC…
What is protected is defined in terms of patents, trade secrets, and non disclosure. It looks like the long term prospects of software patents is extremely grim and neither of the later items can be so broadly construed.
Your skills and experience can't be owned by your employer. It looks as if you actually understand that none of the above are so broad and want to use non competes to protect some sort of moral right.
The problem is that such employers are 0.0001% of the population the freedom of everyone else and in fact the efficiency of the labor market as a whole is vastly more important than some sort of moral right for Bob the employer to keep Jim the employee from learning the trade and using that experience down the road.
Your perspective is antiquited and based on a belief in an entire social framework of mutual employee employer loyalty that was always mostly imaginary and now practically fictional.
It's highly likely that you have personal issues heretofore unexpressed wherein you feel badly treated.
Maybe you should elaborate on THAT.
Non-competes, the most anti-innovation, anti-skilled worker, anti-free market, anti-business and anti-American thing in working today. Non-competes are protectionism for larger businesses over small/medium businesses. As a freelancer, contractor and self-employed business owner/worker, please make these illegal, tired of these. The worst part about non-competes is they are blanket protectionism usually and up to 2+ y…
A non-compete allows a company to make an investment in you (in the form of training) with some assurance that you will not immediately turn around post-training and go work for a direct competitor. NDAs/IP assignment agreements do not address this need. If it weren't for non-competes, that investment would be infeasible and we would all be paying our employers for the training we get – either directly, in the form of course fees, or indirectly, in the form of depressed wages during the course of the training.
For a deeper dive on this, see Paul H. Rubin and Peter Shedd, "Human Capital and Covenants Not to Compete," available at https://www.jstor.org/stable/724227?seq=1#page_scan_tab_cont....
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't understand why there's so many people in the comments defending non-competes. There are many "temporarily embarrassed" entrepreneurs that read HN who can't stomach the thought of their future tech lead stealing their idea. I personally worked for one such person, whose startup was so new that employees were being paid only with shares, but still had about 10 pages of legal documentation for new employees to…
As most readers here would agree, ideas are worth almost nothing but executing on them is the value.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you work at DWAVE for 5 years and learn everything you know about Quantum Computing there - and go to Google to work on Quantum Computing - then there is basically a 100% chance that you are passing on 'know how' and 'trade secrets' - otherwise - Google would not hire you. That isn't trade secrets, it's experience.
"That isn't trade secrets, it's experience" No. 100% false. If that information is key to the nature and success of a product, then it's called 'know how' and it's both legally and rationally protectable. You people need to grow up and grasp that fact that once you go to a company and they teach you what they have spent $100 Million dollars on developing, that you cannot walk across the street and spill the beans on…
All you care about is the profitability of the company, and you think forcing employees to sign away their ability to work in their field is an acceptable solution.
People are getting hired for 3-month contracts and then getting sued when they find a similar job a year later. People are getting laid off and then getting sued by the companies that laid them off for getting a job at a competitor.
Fuck that. The job market needs competition, not a focus on raw profits above all else.
If your employee leaves your company, joins your competitor, and then leaks your trade secrets, then sue them for that. Don't sue them for even getting a job at your competitor - that doesn't mean that they are leaking secrets.
And if you think that your employees are so untrustworthy that getting hired by a competitor is a guaranteed leak of trade secrets, then that probably explains why you are so terrified that they will leave you to find a new job. You're a terrible employer, and they would be better off with a different job.
But let's face it, you don't have any employees, because you aren't an employer. You're a "temporarily embarrassed" entrepreneur who is already convinced that someone will try to steal that million-dollar idea you haven't had yet. Well, I wouldn't work for you, nor should anyone else, so good luck with that idea once you have it.