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From a practical standpoint, does anyone actually enforce the noncompetes against regular employees? It never struck me as worth the money and bad press to enfo
by jonathankoren 7y ago
From a practical standpoint, does anyone actually enforce the noncompetes against regular employees? It never struck me as worth the money and bad press to enforce something like this against an intern or regular line engineer or manager.
- kasey_junk 7y agoIt’s fairly common to enforce non-competes in trading.
- geofft 7y agoOn the other hand it's fairly common to pay people during their garden leave - at least their base salary, if not their bonus.
- wikibob 7y agoFYI, the bizarre practice of “garden leave” as well as contractual notice periods is limited to the U.K. market. In the USA no significant tech company has any contractual notice period, and the social norm is to provide two weeks notice. In fact, at Google the policy is that the maximum period an employee may continue is three weeks once they have handed notice of resignation. I believe bizarrely long notice periods, commonly three months now, are a large contributing factor to the depressed wages in technology in the U.K. When friction is applied to the labor market, it’s to the detriment of the employees.
- kasey_junk 7y agoIt is common in US trading firms to enforce non-competes also frequently via payed ‘garden leaves’.
- microDude 7y agoMy former employer threatened me in Oregon (started as an intern, software engineer). I had to pay a lawyer $4000 to help avoid going to court. Basically they were trying to scare other employees from leaving.
- jonathankoren 7y agoSo you’re both of some money, but in the end, nothing was actually enforced, and their reputation is trashed? This is exactly what I thought would happen at worse. Meh. Next time, have the new employer cover the legal costs. 5k is not much to spend when onboarding a new employee. That’s basically IT costs.
- cwbrandsma 7y agoFor small tech companies it is a nuclear option. Unless everyone hates the employee it will only go badly. For instance: a tech company I used to work for, a well liked employee left to go work for a company he used to consult for. The owner threatened hard to sue. It made the papers, the lawsuit alone would have ended us, but now local companies didn’t want to sign either because our reputation tanked, and many of the employees threatened to quit.
- jonathankoren 7y agoThat’s kind of my point. It seems like it will on backfire, thus leaving it at a lot of bluster, but no one actually enforcing it, which then just encourages everyone else to leave as well, and then the threat is revealed to be a paper tiger.