I knew a 23-year old customer success rep who had a non-compete enforced against her. She’d been with the company for less than a year and had no “trade secrets” or clients that she’d take with her. The company really tried to scare her too.
Without a ban, these are gonna get enforced in ridiculous situations.
It feels like simple regulation could just be:
- non-competes must be paid at the max of your past 3 years earnings, including benefits.
- minimum $100k/year.
- maximum 12 months.
Assuming companies need to enforce them, they'll have a mechanism to (this is similar to what hedge funds do).
Good. Noncompetes stifle innovation, entrepreneurship, and advancements in technology and ideas.
California has banned non competes for just over 150 years.
Any "bad for business" opposition to this rule would be interesting to see.
If this passes, California (especially the SF Bay Area) will lose one of its biggest advantages.
It’s already been losing it’s nice climate over the years.
Let me predict the next 3 years:
FTC will pass some watered down version of the law.
Big corporations will throw a fit and lobby Republican states to fight it.
Republican states' AGs will sue the government to block it.
Lower courts will side with the government.
Case will go up to the Supreme Court.
Law will be overturned in a 5-4 verdict.
Just curious: assuming this passed, how would companies circumvent? While I think it's totally bullshit to have for most of jobs, I can see it's still "needed" for some niche professions.
I think you should be able to take clients.
I want to see companies competing on product. An employee shouldn’t be able to take clients anywhere if the product isn’t better.
So here's the part I am most confused about. Why is it the FTC regulating this? And I don't mean that in a "they shouldn't be doing this way" but more of a "how the hell did we get so dysfunctional that some random agency responsible for stocks and markets end up being the one having to implement this?" Why isn't the bearu of labor or anyone else getting involved it seems like at this point random beaurecrats are the ones having to address things because the legislative framework has completely broken down.
Matt Stoller has written extensively on this topic:
- https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/antitrust-enforcers-to-ba...
- https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/non-compete-agreements-an...
So FTC can, albeit rarely, do good things. Nice.
Hope this gets into effect immediately.
This still allows for noncompetes that prevent you from for example working at AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud at the same time.
Anyone know what this means for non disclosure agreements?
Big discussion at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34260577
Big discussion of this exact document 5 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34931362
And several other discussions too: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...