20 ms·

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. The

by tristor 10y ago

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 by NDA and in some cases SEC regulations about insider trading. Etc. The only thing a non-compete does is say that Employee A cannot work in their chosen field for some period of time after they are fired or quit. In doing so it offers no consideration or compensation typically in the contract. So your employer underpays you by 40% and treats you badly? You want to leave for greener pastures at that hip new startup that offered you a Senior Engineer gig? Well, sorry to say you have a mortgage, a wife, and 2 kids and that non-compete says you are only legally allowed to be a burger flipper for two years after quitting, that software engineering is verboten. Totally fair right? If you don't sit on the board of a Fortune 500 company, you have literally no incentive to support non-competes. There is no rational basis to argue in their favor. Please learn the difference between NDAs, IP assignment agreements, and non-competes before lending non-competes some mystical powers they don't have.

masklinn 10y ago
> The only thing a non-compete does is say that Employee A cannot work in their chosen field for some period of time after they are fired or quit. In doing so it offers no consideration or compensation typically in the contract. Many (if not most) EU countries require compensation for non-competes to be valid (usually at least 30% gross), and the non-compete can still be challenged in court if e.g. it applies to too large a geographical area (e.g. the entire state/country) or if it's broad enough to prevent the employee from finding work in the field.
- Fiahil 10y ago
  Yes, and it's rarely enforced. Most of the time its activation is at the employer's discretion.
  - masklinn 10y ago
    It's not just that it's rarely enforced it's that it's rare at all, there's no point in putting one in the contract when there's 95% chance you'll get big fat middle finger in whatever labor court has jurisdiction if you try to activate it, and inane contractual obligations are a risky bet for the contract itself.
    - dllthomas 10y ago
      > there's no point in putting one in the contract when there's 95% chance you'll get big fat middle finger in whatever labor court has jurisdiction if you try to activate it. There's potentially plenty of point if you don't expect your employees to understand that (or be able to count on it)
      - cmdrfred 10y ago
        That's how it works in the US, most of the time a non-compete is entirely unenforceable.
        cableshaft 10y ago
        Depends on the state. I live in Illinois. It's been enforced plenty of times here. They tend to argue over what is a 'reasonable' restriction, and it goes back and forth. For example: http://www.w-p.com/Articles/Illinois-Non-Compete-World-Now-Easier-for-Employers.shtml http://www.w-p.com/Articles/Illinois-Non-Compete-World-Now-E... And in 2013, the TekSystems recruitment company sued its former employee (a recruiter) over a noncompete and it got upheld in Illinois court: http://paulporvaznik.com/court-can-shorten-overly-broad-non-compete-in-recruiting-business-dispute/1604 http://paulporvaznik.com/court-can-shorten-overly-broad-non-...
        cmdrfred 10y ago
        It seems that the same standard applies there, even if the judges in Illinois seem take liberties with it. From the first link: "3. Question: Does an employer still need to have "adequate legal consideration" in a non-compete agreement? Answer: Yes" It appears they have to compensate you for the agreement. Federal courts have ruled that your wage is compensation for your regular duties and thus the non-compete compensation has to be a separate payment that is negotiable. A contract is not valid if a party receives nothing in return for it. "Consideration to create a legally enforceable contract entails a bargained for, legal detriment incurred by the promisee OR a legal benefit to the promisor. Under the notion of "pre-existing duties", if either the promisor or the promisee already had a legal obligation to render such payment, it cannot be seen as consideration in the legal sense." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consideration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consideration
- DavidHm 10y ago
  Yeah. Germany is a big one on this. If ask you for a non compete, they have to basically pay you for the full duration of it. As a consequence, almost no one ever does, except for very high level executives.
tjic 10y ago
> 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. To go meta for a moment: I think that this sort of statement exposes a flaw that many of us have in debates. It's related to the "argument from ignorance" fallacy, but is not exactly the same thing. I take it as one of my priors that people at news.yc are intelligence. When lots of intelligent people argue for X, and X makes no sense at all for you, you should ponder with some real seriousness that perhaps N intelligent people are not insane, but, instead, you are missing something. In this case, you say "They have literally no value to society". This is not an argument. This is a conclusion, or an axiom. Let me explain why I think non-competes are a good thing: 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. 2) Hayekian / information theoretic: I have local knowledge regarding both my costs and my benefits from signing a non-compete contract. Government legislators and bureaucrats, at some great remove, has almost no knowledge of either my costs or benefits. 3) pragmatic (overlaps #2): perhaps I am desperate to break into career field X and would pay almost anything to get in. Or perhaps my skills are much lower than other competitors. What can I offer employers that my peers can not? My willingness to sign a non-compete. Or perhaps I know that I will be moving in three years, and thus a geographic non-compete has no downside to me. Etc. > you have literally no incentive to support non-competes...There is no rational basis...mystic powers Your entire approach here is quite arrogant. Consider, for a moment, that the other people on news.yc are not idiots.
- nothrabannosir 10y ago
  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 the freedom to restrict freedom. That's why cartels being illegal is good (they restrict competition), bans on insider trading are good (they restrict fair competition), etc. Non-compete restricts the freedom on the labor markets. If you let people do anything they want because freedom, you don't actually get freedom.
jaredklewis 10y ago
In theory, I see nothing wrong with them. Non-competes ask employees to give up something extremely significant: freedom to work there they choose. Which I have no problem with if they get something significant in exchange. Let's an employer wants some insurance that I won't go work elsewhere because there is going to be a long training period or what not. I expect significant compensation for that, ideally in the form of a large signing bonus, maybe 50k per year of non compete. Don't want to pay 50k in cash up front per year of non compete? Take out the non compete. Simple negotiation. I guess the problem in practice is that employees just sign their employment contract no matter what it says, which is unfortunate.
- raverbashing 10y ago
  Correct. You want me to "non compete" with you? Pay me either a bonus or a salary (90% is fine) during the non-compete period Apart from that please shove your non-compete there
- omouse 10y ago
  > I guess the problem in practice is that employees just sign their employment contract no matter what it says, which is unfortunate. In other words, the problem is that they are coercive. Employees usually sign because the company has more legal power and can be intimidating or because they could be homeless.
  - jaredklewis 10y ago
    If companies had that much leverage we would all work at minimum wage. I've seen non-competes in contracts with 150k+ compensation. Getting 150k to do something is not coercion, it's an exchange. As for people becoming homeless, I think welfare should be the duty of the government, not individual corporations. I agree that contracts can be intimidating, but they shouldn't be. Non competes, like most things, can be spelled out in totally ordinary English that anyone can comprehend. Rather than having to create 1 law against every possible employee-adverse thing an employer might put in a contract, I would much prefer a law that mandates employee contracts be easily understood by an average employee.
fmavituna 10y ago
> Trade secrets, IP, secret sauce: covered by NDA and IP assignment agreements As a developer pretty much none of these matter or protects anything. Imagine this scenario; - John has no idea about video encoding but a good developer. - John joins to a video encoding startup - This startup encodes videos 3 times faster than the competitor - After working on the core product for 2 years, John knows a lot about video encoding, because he's been trained. He also knows why they can do faster than anyone else. It's not one thing, bunch of things. - Then John receives an offer from the competitor with 50% more salary (obviously this is smart thing to do for competing company). He obviously leaves, because 50% more! All the know-how, experience etc. will be just automatically transferred to this competitor. NDA, copyright etc. nothing can prevent it. So how is this good for anyone but John? If you think this kind of stuff doesn't happen and all this kind of advancements are public domain anyway, you are wrong. There are many niche fields where competing advantage comes from technical excellence and understanding couple of key things better than your competition. Not to mention John will have inner knowledge of so many other non-technical but important details that can give obvious unfair competitive advantage. When non-competes are removed companies do need to treat their employees differently. "If I don't trust this employee enough I shouldn't give them the important bit of the source code, shouldn't train them on X know-how that we internally produced" etc. which is pretty bad for everyone.
- debaserab2 10y ago
  > So how is this good for anyone but John? How about the consumer/society as a whole who now widely benefits from advanced technology being proliferated through the industry instead of being hoarded by one company?
  - fmavituna 10y ago
    I agree, but if we want that we should start from demolishing "patents" and many other similar more basic issues first, but we all know why that's not going to happen. Secondly when you do that, aren't you actually killing commercial research? Why would I spend $10M to research something if one of my employees can just take that know-how and move to my competitor?
brightball 10y ago
Noncompetes are usually helpful in the service industry. If I hire you in my HVAC business and spend a year sending you on client jobs, then you leave, start your own HVAV business and start contacting all of my clients that I sent you to work on...that's a problem. Without a means of preventing that it's almost impossible to grow a service business.
- Eridrus 10y ago
  When I worked at a consultancy there was a separate non-solicitation clause about clients that was written into my contract and I'm pretty sure was written into the contract clients signed too to not poach consultants.
- tristor 10y ago
  Client lists are covered under NDA and you can add a non-solicitation clause which is different from a non-compete and seems both reasonable and fair. NDA + non-solicitation: You can't start your own HVAC company by handing your sales person a copy of my client list and calling everyone who currently works with me. Non-Compete: You can't start your own HVAC company. Full-stop. Do you see the difference? Do you understand why one is reasonable and fair and the other is not?
  - brightball 10y ago
    See whenever I've seen a noncompete like that it's specifically said "within 5 miles of this location, up to 2 years, cannot contact any clients of this business" I'm in a right to work state though and that means that noncompetes don't hold up at all unless they have a reasonable and non excessive scope. In a right to work state nobody can prevent you from earning a living so in order for a noncompete to hold it has to ensure that you have plenty of other options in your field in the area outside of the scope of that agreement. I think we are talking about the same thing just using different terms.
    - tristor 10y ago
      > "within 5 miles of this location, up to 2 years, cannot contact any clients of this business" What you just described is a textbook non-solicitation agreement. A non-compete would read something like: "You covenant and agree that, during the term of your employment with the Company and for twelve (12) months after the termination thereof, regardless of the reason for the employment termination, you will not, directly or indirectly, anywhere in the Territory, on behalf of any Competitive Business perform the same or substantially the same Job Duties." In a contract, terms like "Competitive Business", "Job Duties", "Territory", and "Company" would be previously defined. What this says in essence though is that for 1 year after your termination (either you quit or are let go) you cannot do the same job anywhere within the "Territory" which could be the city, state, country, region, or world-wide depending on how its defined in the contract. So, let's say in your HVAC example. A non-compete says you cannot work in HVAC at all for the term. A non-solicitation, like you says prevents contacting clients of the "Company".
sharemywin 10y ago
Sales is tricky because you build up a relationship with said client on the companies dime usually. poaching customers seems wrong to me.
- randall 10y ago
  This is a valid non compete reason, and also a TV news anchor who a company invests in marketing shouldn't be able to jump to a cross town rival. Out of market sure, but not cross town.
- JumpCrisscross 10y ago
  Non-solicitation clauses [1] cover this. [1] https://www.contractstandards.com/clauses/non-solicitation https://www.contractstandards.com/clauses/non-solicitation
- amyjess 10y ago
  And unless you're applying for an absolute entry-level position, nobody will hire you for a sales job if you don't have a fat, juicy contact list. A list of clients that you have an established relationship with is to sales what experience with a set of technologies is to software engineering. The sales industry relies on account executives being able to take their address books with them. If that stops happening, everybody loses.
falcolas 10y ago
> 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 sign.
- imglorp 10y ago
  As most readers here would agree, ideas are worth almost nothing but executing on them is the value.
  - falcolas 10y ago
    > As most readers here would agree And yet we are still confronted with NDAs just to listen to "Facebook for Farmers" pitches. Perhaps it's better to say those entrepreneurs are afraid of their implementers leaving with all of the domain specific knowledge; believing that it would allow them re-create the product and outmaneuver the entrepreneur. Of course it's never really that easy, but so few fears are rational.
    - Declanomous 10y ago
      I work at an organization with about 75 employees, and I'm the only person who can program. Half the time I go out for drinks with coworkers, someone corners me and wants to tell me about this awesome idea they have. Unfortunately, they can't tell me anything because I haven't signed an NDA yet. So they spend a few hours being coy, and I spend a few hours trying to politely decline. It's always an iPhone app too. I've never worked on mobile development or Apple products before. This does not discourage them in the least. Half the reason I want increased computer science education is because I'd like this madness distributed across more people.
      - sbjustin 10y ago
        THIS!
microcolonel 10y ago
>They are a tool of restrictive coercion to stifle an employees freedom of movement in the job market. This is why they are a valuable part of an agreement. Including a non-compete means that your contract is lower risk for the employer, which can mean higher salary or better retention. Early termination terms exist for the same reason. That said, a non-compete which prevents you entirely from practicing your craft would be a hard one to enforce, I've certainly never seen a contract like that. If there are non-compete clauses in entry-level food service jobs, I hardly think they would bother to enforce them. The loss of a burger flipper from a McDonalds to a Burger King is less than the cost of lawyering them into a pit of despair.
- cableshaft 10y ago
  > If there are non-compete clauses in entry-level food service jobs, I hardly think they would bother to enforce them. Well at least one fast food company forced employees to sign non-competes up until earlier this year: Jimmy John's sandwiches: http://fortune.com/2016/06/22/jimmy-johns-non-compete-agreements/ http://fortune.com/2016/06/22/jimmy-johns-non-compete-agreem...
Spooky23 10y ago
Business owners have widely varying interpretations of what trade secrets consist of. For example, a local Jimmy John's was successfully sued for it's non compete with sandwich makers. https://consumerist.com/2016/06/22/jimmy-johns-to-stop-using-noncompete-clauses-in-employee-contracts/ https://consumerist.com/2016/06/22/jimmy-johns-to-stop-using... "Employee covenants and agrees that, during his or her employment with the Employer and for a period of two (2) years after … he or she will not have any direct or indirect interest in or perform services for … any business which derives more than ten percent (10%) of its revenue from selling submarine, hero-type, deli-style, pita and/or wrapped or rolled sandwiches and which is located with three (3) miles of either [the Jimmy John’s location in question] or any such other Jimmy John’s Sandwich Shop."
- MaxfordAndSons 10y ago
  That is fucking unbelievable - it's basically contractual extortion. Though the 3 mile clause makes it an entirely different beast than a tech noncompete. Which makes me wonder - are noncompetes ever enforced internationally? Or rather, are there countries that explicitly and reciprocally enforce US noncompetes?
  - Spooky23 10y ago
    Not sure. The geographic ones are crazy though... my sister in law (who is a PA) was initially told that she couldn't practice in a 16 county region. Fortunately, PAs are in enough demand that she was able to get it modified to a 20 mile radius and scoped to a particular aspect of the practice.
  - GeneralMayhem 10y ago
    Not being allowed to work within 3 miles of a Jimmy Johns can rule out working in fast food in an entire city.
    - madcaptenor 10y ago
      For an illustration of this, take a look at the Jimmy John's noncompete map, which maps out everything that's within 3 miles of a Jimmy John's: http://sigacts.com/jimmy-johns-non-compete-zones/ http://sigacts.com/jimmy-johns-non-compete-zones/ .
koheripbal 10y ago
Sales oriented companies derive a majority of their accounting book value from their client list. When a salesman leaves, they can solicit clients and thereby the value of the company can rapidly diminish. Fair is fair, right? What's best for the customer is best for the economy, right? ...well, now imagine an industry where sales oriented companies have essentially no stable book value. They cannot get loans securitized by the value of their book, and therefor cannot invest in growth or innovation. In the end it is a race to the bottom. A reasonable balance exists whereby employees are bound by a 2-3 year non-compete clause that prevents them from stealing clients. Markets are still competitive within 2-3 years, and since everyone has these clauses, employee value is retained.
savanaly 10y ago
>The only thing a non-compete does is say that Employee A cannot work in their chosen field for some period of time after they are fired or quit. In doing so it offers no consideration or compensation typically in the contract. I know you probably know this, but it doesn't have to be laid out explicitly to be compensated. The compensation would be present silently through higher wages, better perks, higher vacation etc. Workers evaluate the sum total of the costs and benefits of a job when deciding to work somewhere. It can be argued that workers don't always make the best decisions for themselves, so we should restrict their options, although to do that you have to show that the government makes better decisions for them which is sort of difficult.
- resonantjacket5 10y ago
  What about non competes for low wage workers like subway and mcdonalds? Cuz thats beeen starting to happen.
  - savanaly 10y ago
    That's a point in favor of banning it, because we have minimum wage laws and piling on disadvantages would allow employers to effectively get below the minimum wage. In practice that probably isn't necessary because the employer doesn't see much benefit from having a non-compete. Workers are no more qualified to work for their competitors after having worked for subway for a year than they were when they were first hired.
- logfromblammo 10y ago
  "Silent compensation" is no compensation at all. An ordinary person would rightly believe that 100% of their job compensation is in exchange for doing their job, and that any additional bonus compensation for doing something else must be explicitly laid out in a separate contract. In order for what you say to be true, jobs with non-compete agreements should in aggregate pay more than jobs without them. I do not have that data, but I believe that they actually pay less, due to the tautological competition-suppressing effect of non-competes.
throwaway2016a 10y ago
> So your employer underpays you by 40% and treats you badly? You want to leave for greener pastures at that hip new startup that offered you a Senior Engineer gig? Well, sorry to say you have a mortgage, a wife, and 2 kids and that non-compete says you are only legally allowed to be a burger flipper for two years after quitting, that software engineering is verboten. Whoah! Way too close to home. Only 1 kid and 70% underpaid.
georgespencer 10y ago
> Trade secrets, IP, secret sauce: covered by NDA and IP assignment agreements > Client lists, contract terms, sales strategies, reported metrics, financials: covered by NDA and in some cases SEC regulations about insider trading. This is largely unenforceable as I'm sure you're aware. The fact is that legally preventing someone from working at a competitor is simply the only effective way of deterring IP getting to a competitor.
- auntienomen 10y ago
  Exactly. It's the only verifiable option. That said, if your IP is so valuable that you want to prevent your employee from walking away with it, you'd better be prepared to pay them.
LinuxBender 10y ago
AFAIK and from my own experience, non-competes are not enforceable in most states, or have little to no legal teeth. Anyone concerned should consult with an attorney. Somewhat related, where folks usually get into trouble is reuse of intellectual property or derivative works. IP laws actually have teeth and are enforced in numerous countries.
- pauldix 10y ago
  In our system it actually doesn't matter if they have no legal teeth. If your former employer wants to spend money to take you to court to attempt to enforce a non-compete, you'll be forced to spend tens of thousands of dollars (if not hundreds) defending yourself. It doesn't matter if they'll eventually lose. Just as long as they can play legal chicken with you and get you to give up because you don't want to waste all your money on lawyers defending yourself.
  - LinuxBender 10y ago
    I completely agree that some businesses will play chicken. Fear of being dragged into court is a powerful thing.
ig1 10y ago
You're imagining IP to be things like the coca-cola recipes, but the reality is much more complex than that especially in tech where the valuable IP is learnings. Say you ran the marketing campaign at X and through extensive testing you discovered what works in the space X is in, now you go to competitor Y. Are you going to cleanse your brain of everything you learnt at X or are you going to apply the learnings at Y ? The reality is the reason Y hired you is to get the learnings that you got from X, what you learnt could save them years of work and reduce the competitive edge that X has. The exact same thing applies to developers. Say you built a ML model for driving cars at Google and now you're working for Apple on a similar project. You're not going to copy and paste the code you built at Google but you're 100% not going to go down the dead-ends that Google went down because you know they don't work.
- ghaff 10y ago
  The issue is with lumping all learnings and knowledge transfer with protectable intellectual property that belongs to someone. (Hence the "property" part.) Of course there's overlap. But the issue that people have with non-competes (especially broad ones) is that they effectively try to limit all knowledge transfer that may benefit a competitor directly or indirectly. Especially when this gets to a point of prohibiting people from working in a given profession or role for anyone else without any compensation, this seems wrong.
AnonymousFan9 10y ago
Non-competes allow employees to get training they otherwise would not get. 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_contents https://www.jstor.org/stable/724227?seq=1#page_scan_tab_cont....
- tristor 10y ago
  This need is best addressed by termed employment contracts. E.g., in consideration of us paying $10k for you to pursue training in blah we mutually agree that you will work for us in your existing position a minimum of 6 months after the training concludes. As an employer, after investing in training an employee you only need to ensure that you get an acceptable return on investment before the employee leaves. You want to prevent the employee leaving, so your agreement should specifically target that. Non-competes are overly broad here and this has the consequence of making them coercive and punitive, both completely unnecessary. The non-compete doesn't guarantee your ROI except as a knock-on effect of its coercive nature. It only prevents your (former) employee from working at all. A net negative for society and arguable for you as an employer.
mathattack 10y ago
It's a little extreme to say they have no value. It marginally helps an individual manager to know that their employees can't move. And if an employee wants to negotiate higher salary in return for signing a non-compete, who is to say that they legally can't do that? (Everyone knows that Bridgewater aggressively pursues onerous non-competes, but employees can retire young as a result if they stick around) 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.
wfo 10y ago
There are a number of legal constructions -- non-competes, mandatory binding arbitration, civil asset forfeiture, and even plea bargains -- that simply should never have been allowed to exist because they are obviously fraud/theft/abuse/coercion and it's mind boggling that the nearly all of the "esteemed" "scholarly" attorneys and judges who represent the elite of the elite in our society have worked themselves through the mental contortions required to simply accept that the status quo is essentially criminal from a moral perspective and that's okay because that's just how it is.
- SilasX 10y ago
  What's with the hate for plea bargains? Should every charge go to trial? In cases where a conviction isn't guaranteed, why shouldn't they split the difference between going free and the full penalty? Every time I've challenged someone on this point, their objection turns out not to be about plea bargains per se, but the (unrelated) fact that the law permits such severe punishments in the first place, defendants have insufficient resources to fight them, and prosecutors have therefore enough leverage to secure them at all. But that's not an argument against "plea bargains"; its disgust at the whole system and misattribution to one part.
  - wfo 10y ago
    Yes, anyone who is charged with something serious should go to trial. It's expensive, but you're locking a person in a cage with criminals for years of their life (incidentally to be repeatedly beaten and raped, but we can leave aside problems with the CJ system that aren't explicitly plea bargains for the moment), not choosing a floral arrangement. I agree the extreme and severe punishments exacerbate the problems with plea bargains but plea bargains are bad by themselves, in isolation, even if other punishments are fair. The government should NEVER be in the business of giving people special treatment and rewards for waiving their fundamental rights because it's more convenient for the government. Everyone has the right to a trial, but people who exercise it are punished. Which means people don't REALLY have a right to a trial. Imagine if the government promised it would tax people less if they chose to avoid engaging in political speech critical of the government. This case is identical to a plea bargain. Except it's less serious, since it's about money, not about jailing somebody. I'm okay with someone pleading guilty and throwing themselves at the mercy of the court and asking forgiveness. Then it's up to the human beings in the trial to decide how to handle it. Creating a formal system where you do this in exchange for something tangible? Before a trial? No. Innocence or guilt is too important to be bartered like that.
whybroke 10y ago
>I don't understand why there's so many people in the comments defending non-competes They are the large number of libertarians who believe all regulation is bad under all circumstances. Mental contortions follow to justify it in this case.
necessity 10y ago
It's not coercive, it's agreed upon. But some people are just itching to restrict other's freedom of association, I get it.
koheripbal 10y ago
Sales oriented companies derive a majority of their accounting book value from their client list. When a salesman leaves, they can solicit clients and thereby the value of the company can rapidly diminish. Fair is fair, right? What's best for the customer is best for the economy, right? ...well, now imagine an industry where sales oriented companies have essentially no stable book value. They cannot get loans securitized by the value of their book, and therefor cannot invest in growth or innovation. In the end it is a race to the bottom. A reasonable balance exists whereby employees are bound by a 2-3 year non-compete clause that prevents them from stealing clients. Markets are still competitive within 2-3 years, and since everyone has these clauses, employee value is retained.

by tristor 10y ago

masklinn 10y ago

> The only thing a non-compete does is say that Employee A cannot work in their chosen field for some period of time after they are fired or quit. In doing so it offers no consideration or compensation typically in the contract. Many (if not most) EU countries require compensation for non-competes to be valid (usually at least 30% gross), and the non-compete can still be challenged in court if e.g. it applies to too large a geographical area (e.g. the entire state/country) or if it's broad enough to prevent the employee from finding work in the field.

Fiahil 10y ago
Yes, and it's rarely enforced. Most of the time its activation is at the employer's discretion.
- masklinn 10y ago
  It's not just that it's rarely enforced it's that it's rare at all, there's no point in putting one in the contract when there's 95% chance you'll get big fat middle finger in whatever labor court has jurisdiction if you try to activate it, and inane contractual obligations are a risky bet for the contract itself.
  - dllthomas 10y ago
    > there's no point in putting one in the contract when there's 95% chance you'll get big fat middle finger in whatever labor court has jurisdiction if you try to activate it. There's potentially plenty of point if you don't expect your employees to understand that (or be able to count on it)
    - cmdrfred 10y ago
      That's how it works in the US, most of the time a non-compete is entirely unenforceable.
      - cableshaft 10y ago
        Depends on the state. I live in Illinois. It's been enforced plenty of times here. They tend to argue over what is a 'reasonable' restriction, and it goes back and forth. For example: http://www.w-p.com/Articles/Illinois-Non-Compete-World-Now-Easier-for-Employers.shtml http://www.w-p.com/Articles/Illinois-Non-Compete-World-Now-E... And in 2013, the TekSystems recruitment company sued its former employee (a recruiter) over a noncompete and it got upheld in Illinois court: http://paulporvaznik.com/court-can-shorten-overly-broad-non-compete-in-recruiting-business-dispute/1604 http://paulporvaznik.com/court-can-shorten-overly-broad-non-...
        cmdrfred 10y ago
        It seems that the same standard applies there, even if the judges in Illinois seem take liberties with it. From the first link: "3. Question: Does an employer still need to have "adequate legal consideration" in a non-compete agreement? Answer: Yes" It appears they have to compensate you for the agreement. Federal courts have ruled that your wage is compensation for your regular duties and thus the non-compete compensation has to be a separate payment that is negotiable. A contract is not valid if a party receives nothing in return for it. "Consideration to create a legally enforceable contract entails a bargained for, legal detriment incurred by the promisee OR a legal benefit to the promisor. Under the notion of "pre-existing duties", if either the promisor or the promisee already had a legal obligation to render such payment, it cannot be seen as consideration in the legal sense." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consideration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consideration
DavidHm 10y ago
Yeah. Germany is a big one on this. If ask you for a non compete, they have to basically pay you for the full duration of it. As a consequence, almost no one ever does, except for very high level executives.

tjic 10y ago

> 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. To go meta for a moment: I think that this sort of statement exposes a flaw that many of us have in debates. It's related to the "argument from ignorance" fallacy, but is not exactly the same thing. I take it as one of my priors that people at news.yc are intelligence. When lots of intelligent people argue for X, and X makes no sense at all for you, you should ponder with some real seriousness that perhaps N intelligent people are not insane, but, instead, you are missing something. In this case, you say "They have literally no value to society". This is not an argument. This is a conclusion, or an axiom. Let me explain why I think non-competes are a good thing: 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. 2) Hayekian / information theoretic: I have local knowledge regarding both my costs and my benefits from signing a non-compete contract. Government legislators and bureaucrats, at some great remove, has almost no knowledge of either my costs or benefits. 3) pragmatic (overlaps #2): perhaps I am desperate to break into career field X and would pay almost anything to get in. Or perhaps my skills are much lower than other competitors. What can I offer employers that my peers can not? My willingness to sign a non-compete. Or perhaps I know that I will be moving in three years, and thus a geographic non-compete has no downside to me. Etc. > you have literally no incentive to support non-competes...There is no rational basis...mystic powers Your entire approach here is quite arrogant. Consider, for a moment, that the other people on news.yc are not idiots.

nothrabannosir 10y ago
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 the freedom to restrict freedom. That's why cartels being illegal is good (they restrict competition), bans on insider trading are good (they restrict fair competition), etc. Non-compete restricts the freedom on the labor markets. If you let people do anything they want because freedom, you don't actually get freedom.

jaredklewis 10y ago

In theory, I see nothing wrong with them. Non-competes ask employees to give up something extremely significant: freedom to work there they choose. Which I have no problem with if they get something significant in exchange. Let's an employer wants some insurance that I won't go work elsewhere because there is going to be a long training period or what not. I expect significant compensation for that, ideally in the form of a large signing bonus, maybe 50k per year of non compete. Don't want to pay 50k in cash up front per year of non compete? Take out the non compete. Simple negotiation. I guess the problem in practice is that employees just sign their employment contract no matter what it says, which is unfortunate.

raverbashing 10y ago
Correct. You want me to "non compete" with you? Pay me either a bonus or a salary (90% is fine) during the non-compete period Apart from that please shove your non-compete there
omouse 10y ago
> I guess the problem in practice is that employees just sign their employment contract no matter what it says, which is unfortunate. In other words, the problem is that they are coercive. Employees usually sign because the company has more legal power and can be intimidating or because they could be homeless.
- jaredklewis 10y ago
  If companies had that much leverage we would all work at minimum wage. I've seen non-competes in contracts with 150k+ compensation. Getting 150k to do something is not coercion, it's an exchange. As for people becoming homeless, I think welfare should be the duty of the government, not individual corporations. I agree that contracts can be intimidating, but they shouldn't be. Non competes, like most things, can be spelled out in totally ordinary English that anyone can comprehend. Rather than having to create 1 law against every possible employee-adverse thing an employer might put in a contract, I would much prefer a law that mandates employee contracts be easily understood by an average employee.

fmavituna 10y ago

> Trade secrets, IP, secret sauce: covered by NDA and IP assignment agreements As a developer pretty much none of these matter or protects anything. Imagine this scenario; - John has no idea about video encoding but a good developer. - John joins to a video encoding startup - This startup encodes videos 3 times faster than the competitor - After working on the core product for 2 years, John knows a lot about video encoding, because he's been trained. He also knows why they can do faster than anyone else. It's not one thing, bunch of things. - Then John receives an offer from the competitor with 50% more salary (obviously this is smart thing to do for competing company). He obviously leaves, because 50% more! All the know-how, experience etc. will be just automatically transferred to this competitor. NDA, copyright etc. nothing can prevent it. So how is this good for anyone but John? If you think this kind of stuff doesn't happen and all this kind of advancements are public domain anyway, you are wrong. There are many niche fields where competing advantage comes from technical excellence and understanding couple of key things better than your competition. Not to mention John will have inner knowledge of so many other non-technical but important details that can give obvious unfair competitive advantage. When non-competes are removed companies do need to treat their employees differently. "If I don't trust this employee enough I shouldn't give them the important bit of the source code, shouldn't train them on X know-how that we internally produced" etc. which is pretty bad for everyone.

debaserab2 10y ago
> So how is this good for anyone but John? How about the consumer/society as a whole who now widely benefits from advanced technology being proliferated through the industry instead of being hoarded by one company?
- fmavituna 10y ago
  I agree, but if we want that we should start from demolishing "patents" and many other similar more basic issues first, but we all know why that's not going to happen. Secondly when you do that, aren't you actually killing commercial research? Why would I spend $10M to research something if one of my employees can just take that know-how and move to my competitor?

brightball 10y ago

Noncompetes are usually helpful in the service industry. If I hire you in my HVAC business and spend a year sending you on client jobs, then you leave, start your own HVAV business and start contacting all of my clients that I sent you to work on...that's a problem. Without a means of preventing that it's almost impossible to grow a service business.

Eridrus 10y ago
When I worked at a consultancy there was a separate non-solicitation clause about clients that was written into my contract and I'm pretty sure was written into the contract clients signed too to not poach consultants.
tristor 10y ago
Client lists are covered under NDA and you can add a non-solicitation clause which is different from a non-compete and seems both reasonable and fair. NDA + non-solicitation: You can't start your own HVAC company by handing your sales person a copy of my client list and calling everyone who currently works with me. Non-Compete: You can't start your own HVAC company. Full-stop. Do you see the difference? Do you understand why one is reasonable and fair and the other is not?
- brightball 10y ago
  See whenever I've seen a noncompete like that it's specifically said "within 5 miles of this location, up to 2 years, cannot contact any clients of this business" I'm in a right to work state though and that means that noncompetes don't hold up at all unless they have a reasonable and non excessive scope. In a right to work state nobody can prevent you from earning a living so in order for a noncompete to hold it has to ensure that you have plenty of other options in your field in the area outside of the scope of that agreement. I think we are talking about the same thing just using different terms.
  - tristor 10y ago
    > "within 5 miles of this location, up to 2 years, cannot contact any clients of this business" What you just described is a textbook non-solicitation agreement. A non-compete would read something like: "You covenant and agree that, during the term of your employment with the Company and for twelve (12) months after the termination thereof, regardless of the reason for the employment termination, you will not, directly or indirectly, anywhere in the Territory, on behalf of any Competitive Business perform the same or substantially the same Job Duties." In a contract, terms like "Competitive Business", "Job Duties", "Territory", and "Company" would be previously defined. What this says in essence though is that for 1 year after your termination (either you quit or are let go) you cannot do the same job anywhere within the "Territory" which could be the city, state, country, region, or world-wide depending on how its defined in the contract. So, let's say in your HVAC example. A non-compete says you cannot work in HVAC at all for the term. A non-solicitation, like you says prevents contacting clients of the "Company".

sharemywin 10y ago

Sales is tricky because you build up a relationship with said client on the companies dime usually. poaching customers seems wrong to me.

randall 10y ago
This is a valid non compete reason, and also a TV news anchor who a company invests in marketing shouldn't be able to jump to a cross town rival. Out of market sure, but not cross town.
JumpCrisscross 10y ago
Non-solicitation clauses [1] cover this. [1] https://www.contractstandards.com/clauses/non-solicitation https://www.contractstandards.com/clauses/non-solicitation
amyjess 10y ago
And unless you're applying for an absolute entry-level position, nobody will hire you for a sales job if you don't have a fat, juicy contact list. A list of clients that you have an established relationship with is to sales what experience with a set of technologies is to software engineering. The sales industry relies on account executives being able to take their address books with them. If that stops happening, everybody loses.

falcolas 10y ago

> 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 sign.

imglorp 10y ago
As most readers here would agree, ideas are worth almost nothing but executing on them is the value.
- falcolas 10y ago
  > As most readers here would agree And yet we are still confronted with NDAs just to listen to "Facebook for Farmers" pitches. Perhaps it's better to say those entrepreneurs are afraid of their implementers leaving with all of the domain specific knowledge; believing that it would allow them re-create the product and outmaneuver the entrepreneur. Of course it's never really that easy, but so few fears are rational.
  - Declanomous 10y ago
    I work at an organization with about 75 employees, and I'm the only person who can program. Half the time I go out for drinks with coworkers, someone corners me and wants to tell me about this awesome idea they have. Unfortunately, they can't tell me anything because I haven't signed an NDA yet. So they spend a few hours being coy, and I spend a few hours trying to politely decline. It's always an iPhone app too. I've never worked on mobile development or Apple products before. This does not discourage them in the least. Half the reason I want increased computer science education is because I'd like this madness distributed across more people.
    - sbjustin 10y ago
      THIS!

microcolonel 10y ago

>They are a tool of restrictive coercion to stifle an employees freedom of movement in the job market. This is why they are a valuable part of an agreement. Including a non-compete means that your contract is lower risk for the employer, which can mean higher salary or better retention. Early termination terms exist for the same reason. That said, a non-compete which prevents you entirely from practicing your craft would be a hard one to enforce, I've certainly never seen a contract like that. If there are non-compete clauses in entry-level food service jobs, I hardly think they would bother to enforce them. The loss of a burger flipper from a McDonalds to a Burger King is less than the cost of lawyering them into a pit of despair.

cableshaft 10y ago
> If there are non-compete clauses in entry-level food service jobs, I hardly think they would bother to enforce them. Well at least one fast food company forced employees to sign non-competes up until earlier this year: Jimmy John's sandwiches: http://fortune.com/2016/06/22/jimmy-johns-non-compete-agreements/ http://fortune.com/2016/06/22/jimmy-johns-non-compete-agreem...

Spooky23 10y ago

Business owners have widely varying interpretations of what trade secrets consist of. For example, a local Jimmy John's was successfully sued for it's non compete with sandwich makers. https://consumerist.com/2016/06/22/jimmy-johns-to-stop-using-noncompete-clauses-in-employee-contracts/ https://consumerist.com/2016/06/22/jimmy-johns-to-stop-using... "Employee covenants and agrees that, during his or her employment with the Employer and for a period of two (2) years after … he or she will not have any direct or indirect interest in or perform services for … any business which derives more than ten percent (10%) of its revenue from selling submarine, hero-type, deli-style, pita and/or wrapped or rolled sandwiches and which is located with three (3) miles of either [the Jimmy John’s location in question] or any such other Jimmy John’s Sandwich Shop."

MaxfordAndSons 10y ago
That is fucking unbelievable - it's basically contractual extortion. Though the 3 mile clause makes it an entirely different beast than a tech noncompete. Which makes me wonder - are noncompetes ever enforced internationally? Or rather, are there countries that explicitly and reciprocally enforce US noncompetes?
- Spooky23 10y ago
  Not sure. The geographic ones are crazy though... my sister in law (who is a PA) was initially told that she couldn't practice in a 16 county region. Fortunately, PAs are in enough demand that she was able to get it modified to a 20 mile radius and scoped to a particular aspect of the practice.
- GeneralMayhem 10y ago
  Not being allowed to work within 3 miles of a Jimmy Johns can rule out working in fast food in an entire city.
  - madcaptenor 10y ago
    For an illustration of this, take a look at the Jimmy John's noncompete map, which maps out everything that's within 3 miles of a Jimmy John's: http://sigacts.com/jimmy-johns-non-compete-zones/ http://sigacts.com/jimmy-johns-non-compete-zones/ .

koheripbal 10y ago

Sales oriented companies derive a majority of their accounting book value from their client list. When a salesman leaves, they can solicit clients and thereby the value of the company can rapidly diminish. Fair is fair, right? What's best for the customer is best for the economy, right? ...well, now imagine an industry where sales oriented companies have essentially no stable book value. They cannot get loans securitized by the value of their book, and therefor cannot invest in growth or innovation. In the end it is a race to the bottom. A reasonable balance exists whereby employees are bound by a 2-3 year non-compete clause that prevents them from stealing clients. Markets are still competitive within 2-3 years, and since everyone has these clauses, employee value is retained.

savanaly 10y ago

>The only thing a non-compete does is say that Employee A cannot work in their chosen field for some period of time after they are fired or quit. In doing so it offers no consideration or compensation typically in the contract. I know you probably know this, but it doesn't have to be laid out explicitly to be compensated. The compensation would be present silently through higher wages, better perks, higher vacation etc. Workers evaluate the sum total of the costs and benefits of a job when deciding to work somewhere. It can be argued that workers don't always make the best decisions for themselves, so we should restrict their options, although to do that you have to show that the government makes better decisions for them which is sort of difficult.

resonantjacket5 10y ago
What about non competes for low wage workers like subway and mcdonalds? Cuz thats beeen starting to happen.
- savanaly 10y ago
  That's a point in favor of banning it, because we have minimum wage laws and piling on disadvantages would allow employers to effectively get below the minimum wage. In practice that probably isn't necessary because the employer doesn't see much benefit from having a non-compete. Workers are no more qualified to work for their competitors after having worked for subway for a year than they were when they were first hired.
logfromblammo 10y ago
"Silent compensation" is no compensation at all. An ordinary person would rightly believe that 100% of their job compensation is in exchange for doing their job, and that any additional bonus compensation for doing something else must be explicitly laid out in a separate contract. In order for what you say to be true, jobs with non-compete agreements should in aggregate pay more than jobs without them. I do not have that data, but I believe that they actually pay less, due to the tautological competition-suppressing effect of non-competes.

throwaway2016a 10y ago

> So your employer underpays you by 40% and treats you badly? You want to leave for greener pastures at that hip new startup that offered you a Senior Engineer gig? Well, sorry to say you have a mortgage, a wife, and 2 kids and that non-compete says you are only legally allowed to be a burger flipper for two years after quitting, that software engineering is verboten. Whoah! Way too close to home. Only 1 kid and 70% underpaid.

georgespencer 10y ago

> Trade secrets, IP, secret sauce: covered by NDA and IP assignment agreements > Client lists, contract terms, sales strategies, reported metrics, financials: covered by NDA and in some cases SEC regulations about insider trading. This is largely unenforceable as I'm sure you're aware. The fact is that legally preventing someone from working at a competitor is simply the only effective way of deterring IP getting to a competitor.

auntienomen 10y ago
Exactly. It's the only verifiable option. That said, if your IP is so valuable that you want to prevent your employee from walking away with it, you'd better be prepared to pay them.

LinuxBender 10y ago

AFAIK and from my own experience, non-competes are not enforceable in most states, or have little to no legal teeth. Anyone concerned should consult with an attorney. Somewhat related, where folks usually get into trouble is reuse of intellectual property or derivative works. IP laws actually have teeth and are enforced in numerous countries.

pauldix 10y ago
In our system it actually doesn't matter if they have no legal teeth. If your former employer wants to spend money to take you to court to attempt to enforce a non-compete, you'll be forced to spend tens of thousands of dollars (if not hundreds) defending yourself. It doesn't matter if they'll eventually lose. Just as long as they can play legal chicken with you and get you to give up because you don't want to waste all your money on lawyers defending yourself.
- LinuxBender 10y ago
  I completely agree that some businesses will play chicken. Fear of being dragged into court is a powerful thing.

ig1 10y ago

You're imagining IP to be things like the coca-cola recipes, but the reality is much more complex than that especially in tech where the valuable IP is learnings. Say you ran the marketing campaign at X and through extensive testing you discovered what works in the space X is in, now you go to competitor Y. Are you going to cleanse your brain of everything you learnt at X or are you going to apply the learnings at Y ? The reality is the reason Y hired you is to get the learnings that you got from X, what you learnt could save them years of work and reduce the competitive edge that X has. The exact same thing applies to developers. Say you built a ML model for driving cars at Google and now you're working for Apple on a similar project. You're not going to copy and paste the code you built at Google but you're 100% not going to go down the dead-ends that Google went down because you know they don't work.

ghaff 10y ago
The issue is with lumping all learnings and knowledge transfer with protectable intellectual property that belongs to someone. (Hence the "property" part.) Of course there's overlap. But the issue that people have with non-competes (especially broad ones) is that they effectively try to limit all knowledge transfer that may benefit a competitor directly or indirectly. Especially when this gets to a point of prohibiting people from working in a given profession or role for anyone else without any compensation, this seems wrong.

AnonymousFan9 10y ago

Non-competes allow employees to get training they otherwise would not get. 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_contents https://www.jstor.org/stable/724227?seq=1#page_scan_tab_cont....

tristor 10y ago
This need is best addressed by termed employment contracts. E.g., in consideration of us paying $10k for you to pursue training in blah we mutually agree that you will work for us in your existing position a minimum of 6 months after the training concludes. As an employer, after investing in training an employee you only need to ensure that you get an acceptable return on investment before the employee leaves. You want to prevent the employee leaving, so your agreement should specifically target that. Non-competes are overly broad here and this has the consequence of making them coercive and punitive, both completely unnecessary. The non-compete doesn't guarantee your ROI except as a knock-on effect of its coercive nature. It only prevents your (former) employee from working at all. A net negative for society and arguable for you as an employer.

mathattack 10y ago

It's a little extreme to say they have no value. It marginally helps an individual manager to know that their employees can't move. And if an employee wants to negotiate higher salary in return for signing a non-compete, who is to say that they legally can't do that? (Everyone knows that Bridgewater aggressively pursues onerous non-competes, but employees can retire young as a result if they stick around) 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.

wfo 10y ago

There are a number of legal constructions -- non-competes, mandatory binding arbitration, civil asset forfeiture, and even plea bargains -- that simply should never have been allowed to exist because they are obviously fraud/theft/abuse/coercion and it's mind boggling that the nearly all of the "esteemed" "scholarly" attorneys and judges who represent the elite of the elite in our society have worked themselves through the mental contortions required to simply accept that the status quo is essentially criminal from a moral perspective and that's okay because that's just how it is.

SilasX 10y ago
What's with the hate for plea bargains? Should every charge go to trial? In cases where a conviction isn't guaranteed, why shouldn't they split the difference between going free and the full penalty? Every time I've challenged someone on this point, their objection turns out not to be about plea bargains per se, but the (unrelated) fact that the law permits such severe punishments in the first place, defendants have insufficient resources to fight them, and prosecutors have therefore enough leverage to secure them at all. But that's not an argument against "plea bargains"; its disgust at the whole system and misattribution to one part.
- wfo 10y ago
  Yes, anyone who is charged with something serious should go to trial. It's expensive, but you're locking a person in a cage with criminals for years of their life (incidentally to be repeatedly beaten and raped, but we can leave aside problems with the CJ system that aren't explicitly plea bargains for the moment), not choosing a floral arrangement. I agree the extreme and severe punishments exacerbate the problems with plea bargains but plea bargains are bad by themselves, in isolation, even if other punishments are fair. The government should NEVER be in the business of giving people special treatment and rewards for waiving their fundamental rights because it's more convenient for the government. Everyone has the right to a trial, but people who exercise it are punished. Which means people don't REALLY have a right to a trial. Imagine if the government promised it would tax people less if they chose to avoid engaging in political speech critical of the government. This case is identical to a plea bargain. Except it's less serious, since it's about money, not about jailing somebody. I'm okay with someone pleading guilty and throwing themselves at the mercy of the court and asking forgiveness. Then it's up to the human beings in the trial to decide how to handle it. Creating a formal system where you do this in exchange for something tangible? Before a trial? No. Innocence or guilt is too important to be bartered like that.

whybroke 10y ago

>I don't understand why there's so many people in the comments defending non-competes They are the large number of libertarians who believe all regulation is bad under all circumstances. Mental contortions follow to justify it in this case.

necessity 10y ago

It's not coercive, it's agreed upon. But some people are just itching to restrict other's freedom of association, I get it.

koheripbal 10y ago