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A comment on Connecticut moves to help low-paid workers hurt by noncompete rules. Parent comment

Re:Connecticut moves to help low-paid workers hurt by noncom... by jeffdavis on Saturday April 13, 2019 @12:04AM (#19651068)
Bans are a big hammer and have unintended consequences in areas not given adequate consideration.

Requiring payment for the duration of the non-compete is perfect. You can tweak the specific requirements up/down as problems arise.

In most practical situations, requiring payment (of almost any amount) will eliminate non-competes, because employers generally don't like paying for labor they can't use.

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Re:Connecticut moves to help low-paid workers hurt by noncom... by ummonk on Saturday April 13, 2019 @03:43AM (#19651628)
Bans against non-competes in California work just fine and have contributed to creating a more dynamic innovative economy.
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Re:Connecticut moves to help low-paid workers hurt by noncom... by crdoconnor on Saturday April 13, 2019 @07:40AM (#19652394)
>have unintended consequences

What negative unintended consequences?

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Re:Connecticut moves to help low-paid workers hurt by noncom... by vkou on Saturday April 13, 2019 @12:39AM (#19651152)
Requiring employers to pay for non-competes will be functionally equivalent to a ban. Nobody in their right mind will pay tens of thousands of dollars to enforce one.
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Re:Connecticut moves to help low-paid workers hurt by noncom... by thedufer on Saturday April 13, 2019 @12:59AM (#19651195)
Not true. This is called "garden leave" in the financial industry and is quite common. I believe the theory is that a lot of a trader's knowledge becomes obselete quite quickly, and it is cheaper to pay a former employee for a year or two then to let them use their strategies at a competitor.
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Re:Connecticut moves to help low-paid workers hurt by noncom... by cco on Saturday April 13, 2019 @01:25AM (#19651254)
Then it sounds like it wasn't worthwhile to begin with if the only risk was tens of thousands of dollars.
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Re:Connecticut moves to help low-paid workers hurt by noncom... by omeze on Saturday April 13, 2019 @01:00AM (#19651199)
(I disagree with the downvotes here - this is a reasonable position if you have no context)

In practice, non-competes that pay out 200k+/yr are quite common in finance (think firms like 2 sigma, Jane Street). They will pay to keep people from going to competitors, mainly to keep their strategies and implementation details reasonably protected.

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