Bonus is a very significant component (often the majority) of comp that gets cut when you're under a noncompete in these kinds of jobs. Yes I understand that's a "world's smallest violin" problem at these scales.
Seriously? HN and the tech news sector have exhaustively covered the abuse and exploitation of noncompetes inside and outside of tech for the past decade. They protect employers at the expense of employees, consistently fail to provide reasonable compensation for lengthy agreements, and are regularly exploited by bad actors to harm current and former employees by making them accept lower wages and worse working conditions.
Even fifteen minutes of casual reading through old threads here should answer this question for you. The only supporters of non-competes tend to be those who do not view employees as people, but as proprietary property.
If your company information is so sensitive that losing a worker would leave you vulnerable, then the solution is to compensate that employee well enough that they don’t see the need to leave and take on that additional risk.
> If your company information is so sensitive that losing a worker would leave you vulnerable, then the solution is to compensate that employee well enough that they don’t see the need to leave and take on that additional risk.
Yes, this is what I think people are missing: non-competes harm the free labor market.
Labor is a resource like any other, and as such there's a market. If the labor is highly valuable that means we should value it as such, in dollars. If we're not doing that then that means something is distorting or otherwise breaking the free market.
I would never expect to buy a car for 5,000 dollars. But, for some reason, with labor, everyone's expectations of how a market works suddenly need not apply. Why is that?
The problem is if we forcibly lower wages via non-competes then that harms the labor market as a whole. Yes, companies get to save a few bucks, but in exchange the expectations are broken. This is actually self-destructive. Why? Because companies, as much as labor, relies on those expectations. Now, you can't hire better workers for more money because we've detached monetary value from the actual value of labor. Oops! You want the best of the best? You can't do that do anymore.
On the surface, non-competes appear to benefit companies, but they don't. It's an illusion, and a seductive one.
The freedom not to sign is not the same as the liberty to pass up an opportunity for survival. Your snippy quip just makes you sound like an ignorant fool who can’t defend their position, let alone coherently argue against others.
If I walk across the desert and find a house on an oasis and the owner offers me water on the condition that I first put a chain on my ankle that is tethered to the property, do I really have the option to say no?
What if all the houses are following the “standard industry practice” of chaining anyone who asks for water? What if refusing to follow this practice means that you can’t obtain funding to build a house?
> This is limited to industry category and employee’s keep their current pay. How is this bad?
I don't know... former communist countries had restrictions precisely like this one, it was an integral part of their regulations.
Former feudal countries too, maybe a bit harsher.
The land of the serfs and category 5 hurricanes - sounds sweet.
> and employee’s keep their current pay
Oh yeah, inflation is just starting - to pay for the big bubblegum bill, in real terms that pay is going down 10%/yr, and the serfs cannot renegotiate.
