To Compete Better, States Are Trying to Curb Noncompete Pacts

Re:To Compete Better, States Are Trying to Curb Noncompete P... by majormajor on Wednesday June 29, 2016 @12:43AM (#11999542)

Isn't that an example where the market alone could solve that problem, without needing a noncompete? If you were paid 500K to build it, and what you learned makes you worth 1M to a competitor, how are you not worth 1M+ to your current employer?

If all your current employer wanted was to get a head start in the market, they let you walk for the 1M. If you're still providing them great value and/or letting their competitor in on it would be worth more than that to them, they can beat the offer.

Maybe you'd have separate reasons for wanting to leave (though "I want to reimplement the thing I just built again" doesn't seem to be the most common reason to leave a place), but in that case why are the company's reasons more important than your own, to the point that they should be legally protected?

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Re:To Compete Better, States Are Trying to Curb Noncompete P... by bryondowd on Wednesday June 29, 2016 @01:55PM (#12003327)

Just for the sake of argument, imagine you aren't the only one with the knowledge the competition wants. Say there's a 10-person team where each shares the knowledge. The competition only needs one to rapidly close the gap. That would mean the company would have to pay 10x what the competition is willing to pay for that knowledge in order to keep all ten employees faithful. The competition can make a $1 mil offer to each employee, one at a time, that the company would then have to beat. That gets ugly pretty fast.

That said, this does seem to be an edge case, where the general rule causes more harm than good.

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Re:To Compete Better, States Are Trying to Curb Noncompete P... by st3v3r on Wednesday June 29, 2016 @03:17PM (#12003984)

Tough, I guess.

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