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.
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.