←back to thread

416 points throwarayes | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.488s | source

Just a note of warning from personal experience.

Companies don’t really need non-competes anymore. Some companies take an extremely broad interpretation of IP confidentiality, where they consider doing any work in the industry during your lifetime an inevitable confidentiality violation. They argue it would be impossible for you to work elsewhere in this industry during your entire career without violating confidentiality with the technical and business instincts you bring to that domain. It doesn’t require conscious violation on your part (they argue).

So beware and read your employment agreement carefully.

More here https://www.promarket.org/2024/02/08/confidentiality-agreeme...

And this is the insane legal doctrine behind this

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inevitable_disclosure

Show context
kelnos ◴[] No.44341581[source]
So tired of this garbage. I think non-competes (and the legal concept of inevitable disclosure) should just be banned completely. Sure, some things (like taking customer lists when you leave a company) are messed up and should be barred, but companies should just be required to accept the fact that their employees will take some "proprietary" knowledge/information with them to their next job.

I don't even think that non-competes should be allowed for higher level employees/executives. Everyone deserves the right to change jobs whenever they want to.

replies(1): >>44341673 #
1. sircastor ◴[] No.44341673[source]
> Sure, some things (like taking customer lists when you leave a company) are messed up and should be barred

Is it messed up? If you're a salesperson, and you've built the relationships with these customers is their loyalty to you, or to the company that you worked for? I had a personal trainer for a little while and he took all his clients to a new gym when he decided to contract with a different gym.

I don't know the answer to this. But it doesn't seem as clear cut to me.

replies(1): >>44341848 #
2. kelnos ◴[] No.44341848[source]
Yeah, that's a fair interpretation.

But I think the way I look at it is in a sort of "work product" type way. If I'm employed by a company to write software, I'm the one who wrote it, but I agree that the software I write is the property of the company, and I can't take it with me when I leave.

Is a salesperson's "work product" those relationships, and does that make them the "property" of the company? I don't think it's reasonable to say that those relationships are solely between the customers and the salesperson; those relationships wouldn't work out in that way if the salesperson's company was selling garbage, or even just a product that those customers didn't want. That is, the good customer-salesperson relationship is both a function of the salesperson's personal skills, and of the good fit between the company's products and the customer.

Ultimately, though, whatever you agree to in writing when you start the job is what you should honor. I'm fine with the law protecting people from predatory practices by employers (of which I think non-competes qualify, and employees shouldn't be able to sign away a right to change jobs like that), but if an employee signs something that says any customer relationships belong to the company, then that seems like a reasonable thing to me.