5 ms·
What stops you from just publishing your secrets for free? Non-competes don't protect secrets, NDAs do. Nobody is suggesting to get rid of NDAs. Non-competes e
by DasIch 10y ago
What stops you from just publishing your secrets for free? Non-competes don't protect secrets, NDAs do. Nobody is suggesting to get rid of NDAs.
Non-competes exist to temporarily protect a company from a former employee taking advantage of the secret knowledge they have. The fair thing here is to pay employees for that time.
- marcoperaza 10y agoBecause the details of how you accomplished something inside the competitor's system are themselves secrets that your former employer cannot see. It's very difficult to enforce.
- acdha 10y agoIn the relatively rare cases where that's true they would also consider it worthwhile to pay someone to sit on the beach rather than work for the competition. Do you think Intel would blink twice at paying a top chip designer full salary to work on their golf game or volunteer somewhere rather than jump to AMD? The main objection is that you're expected to help protect their business without any compensation.
- marcoperaza 10y agoThe compensation is your salary. The noncompete is part of the terms. I agree these things are overused and need to be reigned in, but let's not oversimplify. >relatively rare I'd say it's the opposite. Only a small percent of trade secret theft has any chance of being directly enforced against.
- acdha 10y agoSalary is generally understood to be compensation for the work you've performed; attempting to redefine it that way would require them paying considerably over the normal unencumbered market rates. Those kind of deals do happen but they're rare: people with very specialized skills or connections do get paid for exclusives and the arrangement is formalized up front and comes at a hefty premium, not hidden in what otherwise looks and pays like an ordinary job. As for “relatively rare”, most claimed trade secrets aren't as sensitive (or hard to independently reinvent) as people like to think. When the cost is subsidized to almost nothing, people will claim everything is critical but as soon as they have to pay for it, they'll focus on things which actually matter.
- st3v3r 10y agoNo. Absolutely not. Once they stop paying the salary, they should have no say whatsoever on what I do. It is entirely unreasonable to expect someone to not be able to work for a period of time after leaving the company, and not being able to feed their family.
- ec109685 10y agoWhat would be the point of continuing to working at Intel if you could threaten to leave and get your salary plus golf on the beach?
- pyre 10y agoIt's not indefinite. There are already non-compete contracts that exist like this, and there doesn't seem to be a problem with people purposely using them as paid vacation.
- acdha 10y agoBeyond what pyre noted about a time limit, the kind of people who have those highly-important skills and knowledge tend to be the kind of people who are looking for new accomplishments. I'd expect some would go somewhere different (e.g. leave Intel to work at AWS learning more deeply about what people do with those chips before jumping back), be grossly underpaid helping their favorite charity, take classes/do research, etc.
- startling 10y agoYou get golf on the beach when you leave no matter how long you stay at Intel (in this hypothetical scenario). Leaving now doesn't get you more golf on the beach.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]