Just look at Meta's current poaching spree. Whatever secrets OpenAI has will slowly but inevitably diffuse into other companies. Bad for OpenAI but strongly positive for literally everyone else.
Maybe, but it's clear that even statute doesn't prevent bad behavior: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
How confident are you about that? Given how small the compensation was, does this really represent much victory? Do you really think class action lawsuits as they stand present much disincentive?
Which is a big problem with a lot of companies, and frankly a common bias in human thinking: hyper fixation on the present. I find this ironic given that one of our greatest skills that has led to our success as a species is foresight.
There's a ton of inefficiencies going on right now because of this fixation. As a simple example, the best way for a worker to get a raise is to change jobs. Frequently the last person in has the highest pay (or rather it tends upwards). So older employees leave. But those employees leaving mean a bigger loss because they have institutional knowledge and newer employees are less valuable because they need to be trained. It's cheaper on the long run to readjust your current employee salaries to keep them rather than hide people's salaries and hope they don't jump ship. But the latter strategy is definitely cheaper in the short term.
You can probably think of tons of examples and even more if you start to include natural coalitions with others[0]
[0] there's frequent psych experiments that are along the lines of "would you rather get $10 and other person get $10 or you get $50 and other person gets $100?" The former is frequently chosen because it's "more fair" despite being a worse option for yourself
I can see why small companies might want non-competes to prevent their employees from being poached by hyperscaler monopolies.
If non-competes continue to exist, they should be pared down to small-scoped work descriptions only, eg. not "AI" broadly, but rather something like "AI diffusion for skeletal movement". The non-competes shouldn't have durations longer than a year, and the companies enacting the contract should be required to pay departing employees a salary (or some large percentage of a salary) if they want to enforce the non-compete.
Non-competes should also only be used to prevent employees from joining larger companies, not smaller ones. And they should never prevent work at a startup or new venture.
Personally, I think banning non-competes probably does reduce the amount of investment in education that companies make, but it's a tradeoff worth making to improve overall labor market efficiency and better guarantee personal freedom.
That's fresh.
If your employees immediately jump ship after training, it means you're underpaying them, or mistreating them, or, in the case of the US military, probably both.
I largely work for Californian companies and by and large the benefits have been excellent. While I wish more money was put into training overall, I feel this is driven more by short term financial planning than things like non-competes.
What have you seen or encountered that led you to the conclusion that non-competes would lead to more educational investment?
My assumption is that they’re more useful when a non-compete reduces the amount of people with key skills from a market—it seems counter-intuitive to do this and then disseminate those skills via training programs.
You actually can't speak about this as a whole because there's various programs that involve education and they all have nuances.
The one people run into the most is the GI Bill which is not and has not been taxpayer funded. It's self-funded by veterans and unlocked by 4 years of active service or 8 years of reserve service. You unlock it by paying into it.
The next most well known program is the Naval Medical Corps and Naval JAG Corps which offer to put already qualified candidates the rest of the way through school or pay their school bills for four years of honorable service. It's probably the single most high value deal the military offers.
The last is aviation school which (usually, depending on what you get chosen to fly) has very little overlap with civilian aircraft. Pilots usually have a minimum service of 10 years but they're not exactly locked into being a pilot. For instance, Marine Corps pilots are trained infantry officers so they can go on to serve in the infantry as an Air Officer.
Other than the GI Bill scenario in each scenario you're paid a six digit salary and largely treated like a god in the military due to rank.
Again, the desire here is to stop Meta or a trillion dollar company from destroying a research-oriented startup's key staff. The idea isn't to encumber people's freedoms. It's to block large economy altering giants from making market distorting moves absorbing key talent from small disruptors.
I suppose the counter argument is that a fast growing startup could afford to make counter offers. Perhaps that's so. But these big companies always seem to threaten smaller companies if they don't accept buyout offers.
Watching Meta hire ten people for millions while simultaneously laying off thousands is wild. It feels market distorting. If they're going to poach these folks, the losing teams should get a buyout too. That's what happens in sports.
Now having to pay back training or education if you leave before Z months seems reasonable.
If I leave or am fired from your company, then you are not allowed to hire anybody who works in my field for at least one year.
It's possible that other factors might be more important in driving California's economic success...
That doesn't help the economy, but it helps the businesses.
In the Silicon Valley show, this is why Big Head and the other folks "office" on the roof. They are segregated from the other employees while they continue to get paid.
They're related but they are different things. You can't go work for Coke, learn the secret formula, then go work for Pepsi and tell them the secret formula.
You're right, it is about protection. A nondisclosure only goes so far. You have to prove in court that the nondisclosure was violated. Because how do you prove that a prior employee gave that knowledge as opposed to Pepsi just reverse engineering it?[1] A noncompete is an extra layer of protection because the barrier for proof is lower. You don't have to prove they violated the NDA, you just have to prove they work for the competition.
You recognize that these are different things, right? I stressed that it can be subtle, but if you're having a hard time recognizing they are different then please give it a little more thought.
A noncompete *also* means your previous employee isn't taking institutional knowledge and training with them. These won't be covered by a NDA! As an employer you invested in an employee by training them, right?[2] So you lose that investment?
The reason I put so much stress on this second part is because it is exactly what the above conversation has been about. The employer is thinking in the instant and narrowly, not more broadly. Yes, you lose employees you invested in, but you can also get employees you didn't invest in. That's the bigger picture. Plus, you can... you know... pay your existing employees more than you pay new employees with similar skills. Instead of threatening them against leaving incentivize them to stay. You get a bigger return on your investment anyways
[0] personally, I don't think it justifies having them but we can still understand the reasoning, right?
[1] this is something most people with an undergraduate education in chemistry could probably do. So good luck
[2] I stressed this above
What about anything I've stated makes you think I don't understand the difference between a non-compete and a non-disclosure? I see no reason for you think I'm a moron and need to mansplained to here. I have not confused these at all, and you seem to want to preach about something but the choir ain't having it. So now you're left with the internet posts. I'm really confused here.
> I see no reason for you think I'm a moron and need to mansplained to here.
This is why Google has a dozen different applications that all do the same thing. Google didn't want high-level talent competing with them, so they just hired as many of the top developers as they could, and then paid them enough for them to be content working on miscellany.
What if the 100% is of a competing offer?
can't speak to other orgs but I know people who basically were given 80% of salary + health insurance coverage to politely fuck-off from the job market for ~2 years. Very specific list of orgs and roles they cannot do, otherwise anything is game.
My buddy basically took his time off and did a Master's, worked part time doing handyman work / light farm stuff, and then jumped back into a 6 figure gig.
Which is why we have “elites” who want to bring back chattel slavery and feudalism. The very wealthy will see us all dead before they give up a single iota of power.