6 ms·

I would like this with a salary floor (or ceiling, whatever) I think below some certain salary, non competes are obviously terrible. I also think if I pay eno

I would like this with a salary floor (or ceiling, whatever) I think below some certain salary, non competes are obviously terrible. I also think if I pay enough whatever enough is, I should damn well be able to make sure the person I hire doesn’t take everything they learned from me and turn around and play for another team. This is off the cuff. I have no idea what that ceiling would even be, or whether this is a terrible idea.

jostmey 4y ago
Sure, you can pay that person enough so that they won’t leave. You can retain people without a non-compete
TylerE 4y ago
No need for that complexity. You want to keep me from working for someone else? Keep me in payroll.
- tptacek 4y ago
  That's typical in finance, right? They want a 1-year noncompete, so you get "garden leave": can't work for a competitor, but still on the payroll.
wewtyflakes 4y ago
Who is to say that they learned it from you, though? Presumably you hired a high-salary person because they knew what they were doing.
OkayPhysicist 4y ago
You can do that by paying more than the competition is willing to. Not that complicated.
ideamotor 4y ago
Should a doctor who learned a lot about perfecting a surgery in one job not be able to apply that at a new job? They shouldn’t be able to steal equipment for example, but learning through your career is exactly what you should do and is what makes you valuable.
- mlyle 4y ago
  There's some edge cases. E.g. a type rating for a business jet might cost $150k or more to obtain. If a firm pays for a type rating for a pilot, that pilot is immediately more valuable to every other employer with that jet. The optimal strategy from a game theoretical point of view would be to let another employer pay for the rating, and then pay the pilot say $40k/year more than the original employer could afford to pay. So reasonable terms that require repayment of pro-rata portion of genuine training, etc, for some small number of years can make sense.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    If that's a real issue, the firm can just not pay for type rating training, and pay a higher salary to keep the job desirable despite the higher bar of entry. Or, be honest about the whole deal and make it an overt loan to the pilot. That's how it works with my employer -- if I want to get trained in a specialty that benefits my employer, they will partially cover the cost and extend me a loan for the rest. If I leave employment before I've repaid the loan, I'm still on the hook to repay it -- but I have not been turned into an indentured servant.
    - mlyle 4y ago
      > Or, be honest about the whole deal and make it an overt loan to the pilot. That's how it works with my employer -- if I want to get trained in a specialty that benefits my employer, they will partially cover the cost and extend me a loan for the rest. Sure-- these terms have to be disclosed to be binding. So you can say-- we'll pay for your type rating but if you voluntarily leave within 3 years you must pay back the pro-rata portion of the training. (This is better for the employee than a straight loan because if they are e.g. laid off they can just walk away).
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    Type ratings are rarely significantly over $30K and can be as little as $10K for a second type on a simple jet.
SteveNuts 4y ago
Can you articulate why though? My kneejerk reaction is that I disagree but I can't explain why and that's not a good enough reason. Maybe more people should be contractors and this would be written in as part of the agreement.
- ziftface 4y ago
  I think it's just crossing a line to expect to own someone for a given amount of time because of invested training, despite the economic implications. I think it comes down to a personal freedom thing. I think it probably is more beneficial economically to have these noncompetes but it comes down to what values you prioritize.
lolinder 4y ago
Why are nondisclosure agreements not sufficient for this kind of concern? If the concern is taking what they learned from you, why do you need a non-compete instead of requiring them not to share what they learned? To me it seems that non-competes are a very blunt instrument to lazily solve problems that could be solved more focused solutions.
- duskwuff 4y ago
  Because an NDA can only prevent the disclosure of proprietary information. You can't place general knowledge under an NDA. For example, let's say a company hires an employee and pays for them to learn how to drive a forklift (or whatever). They can't place "how to drive a forklift" under NDA to prevent that employee from driving a forklift at another company.
  - lolinder 4y ago
    Okay, but I'm quite unsympathetic to trying to protect "I taught him to drive a forklift" with a non-compete. If there is substantial training involved you could require them to pay back a chunk of their training costs, but if it's incidental then I think it's just the cost of doing business.
Province1108 4y ago
You can do a paid non-compete, which is basically X years garden leave w/ pay. Many finance / trading firms do this.
- nuclearnice3 4y ago
  As far as I can tell, the regulation would ban all non-competes paid or unpaid. They do specifically request comments on how to handle highly paid or highly skilled workers.
esotericimpl 4y ago
[dead]
elbigbad 4y ago
It is illegal to steal software or proprietary technology, and will continue to be. Outside of this, anting to stop someone from using skills they acquired to practice their desired profession is an awful take.
luckylion 4y ago
> I also think if I pay enough whatever enough is, I should damn well be able to make sure the person I hire doesn’t take everything they learned from me and turn around and play for another team. I agree in general, but it should probably be in X% of reasonably achievable total compensation (i.e. at least the blocked industry's average, or matching the offer if the former employee has one), where X >= 100, since you'd be essentially blocking someone from working in the industry they're experienced in.
twblalock 4y ago
Silicon Valley has worked fine without noncompetes. (Actually, the California economy as a whole has done fine without them, to the extent that it is one of the largest in the world.) People leaving to play for other teams has led to beneficial competition and innovation, starting from the very beginning with Fairchild spawning AMD, Intel, and a ton of other companies. You don't buy people and you don't own their skills. You pay them enough to stay, or you let them leave. Stealing trade secrets is already illegal and that isn't going to change.
d4mi3n 4y ago
I'm not sure the salary matters much in practice here. What we should avoid are scenarios that force folks out of their livelihood when they're subject to a non-compete through lawsuit or threat of one. I'd love to see them go the way of the Dodo, but failing that I'd at least like for some hard requirements on what forms non-competes may take so that they could be more equitable for employees: 1. Require non-competes compensate the employee for the salary they've been denied when enforced. If someone with key knowledge is a big enough issue to sue over and an organization hasn't done the work to retain said employee, the employee shouldn't have to bear the burden of extended unemployment for valuable skills or knowledge they may have. 2. Require non-competes have maximum durations. A non-compete for more than 6 - 12 months is likely excessive and can used to discourage job mobility. 3. Require non-competes be scoped to knowlege, know-how, or skills specific to that employee. Many non-competes I've seen say something along the lines of "you can't work for a competitor" without elaboration. If you work at a large organization or one with subsidiaries in multiple industries, "competitor" becomes a large swathe of potential industries you could feasibly work at. This also prevents one from working at a similar company in a completely different role. I get the desire to discourage job hopping, but that is rarely what these agreements are used to do in effect and there are better ways to take legal action in cases where proprietary info or know-how is stolen.
- OkayPhysicist 4y ago
  Noncompetes have no good reason to exist. If you want to pay me to do nothing, you can outbid other employers. That is to say, you're employing me with my job duties being "do whatever I want, except work for a competitor" subject to the exact kind of at-will employment that companies fought so hard to achieve.
JohnFen 4y ago
I'm with the others here. Noncompetes are just bad. Nondisclosures should cover you for any knowledge unique to your business. General skill improvement, though? Not so much. Noncompetes don't really address that anyway. It's not like the employee will have forgotten what they've learned by the end of the noncompete, and it's not like the noncompete compensates you. It's just a bit spiteful. Also, every employer benefits from what their employees have learned at the companies prior anyway. Presumably, that's part of why experienced people command higher salaries. So in that view, it's a bit of a wash.
steele 4y ago
Free agency shouldn't be salary dependent. No amount of compensation turns employees into chattel.
michaelmrose 4y ago
Society as a whole is worse off if we let you buy or rent people. So badsically society shouldn't care what you want.
jen20 4y ago
That already exists: it’s called gardening leave and it must be compensated.
OkayPhysicist 4y ago
Noncompetes are already illegal in California. Facebook, Google, Apple, Intel and the rest of the 14% of the country's GDP demonstrate that you can innovate and build a business just fine without them. Using noncompetes is a sign of a lousy business, that doesn't deserve to survive the market.
- lovich 4y ago
  Massachusetts also has them illegal without having garden leave, which in practice means they don't happen 99% of the time. Just to bump up that GDP percentage for your argument

jostmey 4y ago

Sure, you can pay that person enough so that they won’t leave. You can retain people without a non-compete

TylerE 4y ago

No need for that complexity. You want to keep me from working for someone else? Keep me in payroll.

tptacek 4y ago
That's typical in finance, right? They want a 1-year noncompete, so you get "garden leave": can't work for a competitor, but still on the payroll.

wewtyflakes 4y ago

Who is to say that they learned it from you, though? Presumably you hired a high-salary person because they knew what they were doing.

OkayPhysicist 4y ago

You can do that by paying more than the competition is willing to. Not that complicated.

ideamotor 4y ago

Should a doctor who learned a lot about perfecting a surgery in one job not be able to apply that at a new job? They shouldn’t be able to steal equipment for example, but learning through your career is exactly what you should do and is what makes you valuable.

mlyle 4y ago
There's some edge cases. E.g. a type rating for a business jet might cost $150k or more to obtain. If a firm pays for a type rating for a pilot, that pilot is immediately more valuable to every other employer with that jet. The optimal strategy from a game theoretical point of view would be to let another employer pay for the rating, and then pay the pilot say $40k/year more than the original employer could afford to pay. So reasonable terms that require repayment of pro-rata portion of genuine training, etc, for some small number of years can make sense.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  If that's a real issue, the firm can just not pay for type rating training, and pay a higher salary to keep the job desirable despite the higher bar of entry. Or, be honest about the whole deal and make it an overt loan to the pilot. That's how it works with my employer -- if I want to get trained in a specialty that benefits my employer, they will partially cover the cost and extend me a loan for the rest. If I leave employment before I've repaid the loan, I'm still on the hook to repay it -- but I have not been turned into an indentured servant.
  - mlyle 4y ago
    > Or, be honest about the whole deal and make it an overt loan to the pilot. That's how it works with my employer -- if I want to get trained in a specialty that benefits my employer, they will partially cover the cost and extend me a loan for the rest. Sure-- these terms have to be disclosed to be binding. So you can say-- we'll pay for your type rating but if you voluntarily leave within 3 years you must pay back the pro-rata portion of the training. (This is better for the employee than a straight loan because if they are e.g. laid off they can just walk away).
- sokoloff 4y ago
  Type ratings are rarely significantly over $30K and can be as little as $10K for a second type on a simple jet.

SteveNuts 4y ago

Can you articulate why though? My kneejerk reaction is that I disagree but I can't explain why and that's not a good enough reason. Maybe more people should be contractors and this would be written in as part of the agreement.

ziftface 4y ago
I think it's just crossing a line to expect to own someone for a given amount of time because of invested training, despite the economic implications. I think it comes down to a personal freedom thing. I think it probably is more beneficial economically to have these noncompetes but it comes down to what values you prioritize.

lolinder 4y ago

Why are nondisclosure agreements not sufficient for this kind of concern? If the concern is taking what they learned from you, why do you need a non-compete instead of requiring them not to share what they learned? To me it seems that non-competes are a very blunt instrument to lazily solve problems that could be solved more focused solutions.

duskwuff 4y ago
Because an NDA can only prevent the disclosure of proprietary information. You can't place general knowledge under an NDA. For example, let's say a company hires an employee and pays for them to learn how to drive a forklift (or whatever). They can't place "how to drive a forklift" under NDA to prevent that employee from driving a forklift at another company.
- lolinder 4y ago
  Okay, but I'm quite unsympathetic to trying to protect "I taught him to drive a forklift" with a non-compete. If there is substantial training involved you could require them to pay back a chunk of their training costs, but if it's incidental then I think it's just the cost of doing business.

Province1108 4y ago

You can do a paid non-compete, which is basically X years garden leave w/ pay. Many finance / trading firms do this.

nuclearnice3 4y ago
As far as I can tell, the regulation would ban all non-competes paid or unpaid. They do specifically request comments on how to handle highly paid or highly skilled workers.

esotericimpl 4y ago

[dead]

elbigbad 4y ago

It is illegal to steal software or proprietary technology, and will continue to be. Outside of this, anting to stop someone from using skills they acquired to practice their desired profession is an awful take.

luckylion 4y ago

> I also think if I pay enough whatever enough is, I should damn well be able to make sure the person I hire doesn’t take everything they learned from me and turn around and play for another team. I agree in general, but it should probably be in X% of reasonably achievable total compensation (i.e. at least the blocked industry's average, or matching the offer if the former employee has one), where X >= 100, since you'd be essentially blocking someone from working in the industry they're experienced in.

twblalock 4y ago

Silicon Valley has worked fine without noncompetes. (Actually, the California economy as a whole has done fine without them, to the extent that it is one of the largest in the world.) People leaving to play for other teams has led to beneficial competition and innovation, starting from the very beginning with Fairchild spawning AMD, Intel, and a ton of other companies. You don't buy people and you don't own their skills. You pay them enough to stay, or you let them leave. Stealing trade secrets is already illegal and that isn't going to change.

d4mi3n 4y ago

I'm not sure the salary matters much in practice here. What we should avoid are scenarios that force folks out of their livelihood when they're subject to a non-compete through lawsuit or threat of one. I'd love to see them go the way of the Dodo, but failing that I'd at least like for some hard requirements on what forms non-competes may take so that they could be more equitable for employees: 1. Require non-competes compensate the employee for the salary they've been denied when enforced. If someone with key knowledge is a big enough issue to sue over and an organization hasn't done the work to retain said employee, the employee shouldn't have to bear the burden of extended unemployment for valuable skills or knowledge they may have. 2. Require non-competes have maximum durations. A non-compete for more than 6 - 12 months is likely excessive and can used to discourage job mobility. 3. Require non-competes be scoped to knowlege, know-how, or skills specific to that employee. Many non-competes I've seen say something along the lines of "you can't work for a competitor" without elaboration. If you work at a large organization or one with subsidiaries in multiple industries, "competitor" becomes a large swathe of potential industries you could feasibly work at. This also prevents one from working at a similar company in a completely different role. I get the desire to discourage job hopping, but that is rarely what these agreements are used to do in effect and there are better ways to take legal action in cases where proprietary info or know-how is stolen.

OkayPhysicist 4y ago
Noncompetes have no good reason to exist. If you want to pay me to do nothing, you can outbid other employers. That is to say, you're employing me with my job duties being "do whatever I want, except work for a competitor" subject to the exact kind of at-will employment that companies fought so hard to achieve.

JohnFen 4y ago

I'm with the others here. Noncompetes are just bad. Nondisclosures should cover you for any knowledge unique to your business. General skill improvement, though? Not so much. Noncompetes don't really address that anyway. It's not like the employee will have forgotten what they've learned by the end of the noncompete, and it's not like the noncompete compensates you. It's just a bit spiteful. Also, every employer benefits from what their employees have learned at the companies prior anyway. Presumably, that's part of why experienced people command higher salaries. So in that view, it's a bit of a wash.

steele 4y ago

Free agency shouldn't be salary dependent. No amount of compensation turns employees into chattel.

michaelmrose 4y ago

Society as a whole is worse off if we let you buy or rent people. So badsically society shouldn't care what you want.

jen20 4y ago

That already exists: it’s called gardening leave and it must be compensated.

OkayPhysicist 4y ago

Noncompetes are already illegal in California. Facebook, Google, Apple, Intel and the rest of the 14% of the country's GDP demonstrate that you can innovate and build a business just fine without them. Using noncompetes is a sign of a lousy business, that doesn't deserve to survive the market.

lovich 4y ago
Massachusetts also has them illegal without having garden leave, which in practice means they don't happen 99% of the time. Just to bump up that GDP percentage for your argument