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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

#61

Post by Paul-Craft »

cj wrote: post #59
Paul-Craft wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should I believe you? You don't offer an argument. It is entirely plausible that one could be faced with a situation of losing one's home, health insurance, ability to exist in modern life, and, oh, one's actual life due to unemployment. I know this because it happens. Non-competes, by definition, make this problem worse by reducing the number of jobs available to a person. What's your justification?

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.

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

#62

Post by [deleted] »

cj wrote: post #57
izacus wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you join a consultancy group, and 2 months later quit with the client roster... is it really OK to poach all their clients to start your own consultancy? Yes. It's called free market competition and it's great for the society and economy. NYC bankers should be first in line to understand that.

What you’re advocating for is normalizing the stealing of company IP. The way you solicit clients from a prior company is downloading the client list, exporting to a personal drive, quitting, then using the list to poach. I’m fine if that’s your intention, but let your employer know upfront that you won’t protect confidential company data.

[deleted]

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

#63

Post by jalapenos »

currymj wrote: post #55

i'll post one of my favorite related facts about noncompetes. Famously, California bans them, but this was not an intentional policy choice for the sake of entrepreneurship. It was done in the 19th century and almost by accident. David Dudley Field II was a jurist who drafted a code of laws which was adopted by New York state. After this, motivated by his study of English common law, he made an updated code of laws w…

Happy accident

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

#64

Post by [deleted] »

cj wrote: post #57
izacus wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you join a consultancy group, and 2 months later quit with the client roster... is it really OK to poach all their clients to start your own consultancy? Yes. It's called free market competition and it's great for the society and economy. NYC bankers should be first in line to understand that.

What you’re advocating for is normalizing the stealing of company IP. The way you solicit clients from a prior company is downloading the client list, exporting to a personal drive, quitting, then using the list to poach. I’m fine if that’s your intention, but let your employer know upfront that you won’t protect confidential company data.

[deleted]

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

#65

Post by vgatherps »

bachmeier wrote: post #39
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. So the solution is that employees should only be able to work for one employer in their career? I wouldn't disagree with this argument if the noncompete…

> So the solution is that employees should only be able to work for one employer in their career?

Yes, I very definitely made this anything remotely resembling this argument in my post.

Regardless, it would be a beyond-amazing deal for most employees if they got lifetime yearly TC from a quant firm only on the condition that they didn't work for a competitor. Mindblowingly, shockingly, amazing.

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

#66

Post by izacus »

cj wrote: post #57
izacus wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you join a consultancy group, and 2 months later quit with the client roster... is it really OK to poach all their clients to start your own consultancy? Yes. It's called free market competition and it's great for the society and economy. NYC bankers should be first in line to understand that.

What you’re advocating for is normalizing the stealing of company IP. The way you solicit clients from a prior company is downloading the client list, exporting to a personal drive, quitting, then using the list to poach. I’m fine if that’s your intention, but let your employer know upfront that you won’t protect confidential company data.

> What you’re advocating for is normalizing the stealing of company IP.

I am not.

> The way you solicit clients from a prior company is downloading the client list, exporting to a personal drive, quitting, then using the list to poach.

Which part of this is "IP"?

The whole concept of "stealing IP" is something that was lobbied in to prevent market competition and establish monopolies. Calling a list of clients that might choose to vote with their wallets for better service "IP" is one of the most ridiculous claims I've seen here lately and pretty much proof of how this term has become a problem for modern free market society.

While IP protection itself is critical for some innovation, the way you all wield it to defend monopolization and entrenchment is a main reason to rethink what IP and protection actually gives to american economy.

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

#67

Post by vgatherps »

blueboo wrote: post #38
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…

If it doesn’t make sense in California’s Silicon Valley, how can it be justified in NYC

Lack of noncompetes is the reason that most trading firms have opened offices everywhere except SF

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

#68

Post by izacus »

infecto wrote: post #56
saagarjha wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of sensitive IP do quants have? How is it different than the tech industry?

General strategies of trading on financial markets. Entirely different than working at Google.

And what benefit does the economy and society get by allowing monopolization of these strategies by a single company at the expense of basic right for workers to switch jobs to the ones that pay them the most?

It sounds so profoundly anti-capitalist - if the knowledge of certain strategy is so important, the employee should be retained by paying them more and giving them better perks instead of enforced labor contract.

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

#69

Post by vgatherps »

saagarjha wrote: post #37
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…

What kind of sensitive IP do quants have? How is it different than the tech industry?

Most tech work is not particularly novel at a technical level. Very few services have any sort of massive advantage in the technical IP. Some of them might have advantage in customer/data analytics, but most advantage is in the idea itself as well as being gaining the market and brand. Another firm can't just go "Ah, today we'll knock out X new app and take 50% of the market"

This is not true in trading. If I go take my strategy/forecast and go to a competitor, I can just outright take the same opportunities that the other desk was taking (to a fairly good approximation). There's no real branding/network effect - it's a pure quality of execution business.

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

#70

Post by jawns »

vachina wrote: post #51

Sorry if this is a stupid question, how does a noncompete gets enforced anyway? Unless you’re a person legally required to make public your job, I don’t see how any private entities can trace your work history.

Companies and government agencies routinely hire PIs to follow people receiving disability benefits to gather evidence that might indicate they're not as disabled as they attest. You can bet that if they're willing to track people over disability checks, they're going to use those same tools to enforce non-competes.
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