4 ms·

Another way companies can stop their trade secrets from walking out the door is a confidentiality agreement. I tell all of my prospective employers that I don'

Another way companies can stop their trade secrets from walking out the door is a confidentiality agreement. I tell all of my prospective employers that I don't sign non-competes, but I will sign a confidentiality agreement. A non-compete is professional suicide, in my opinion. There is no upside to the employee at all.

dhimes 15y ago
A non-compete should be accompanied by a commensurate severance package in order to be taken seriously by a prospective employee.
- nvarsj 15y ago
  Agreed. In the finance industry this is the norm in my experience - 100% salary for duration of the non-compete and a severance package.
- mattm 15y ago
  Also agreed. If an employer is hindering you from working for X amount of time, they should be paying you for that time.
jamesbkel 15y ago
Completely agree. I was in a very similar to the woman in the article. I started at a Boston Medical/Life-science research LLC as a statistical programmer. The intention was to bring me on as the head of stats/quant work since they had been farming it for the past few years. After 2 months they decided they didn't actually have enough work to justify paying me (can't blame them for that, it reached a point where I literally was walking up to fellow employees asking if there was anything I could do to pitch in since I had NOTHING to do and I also don't consider "killing time on facebook/youtube etc." acceptable when I'm on their dollar). Point being, I did not sign their boilerplate non-compete. They were actually fine with that as long I signed a confidentiality agreement... and that's only fair.