I have a buddy who worked for a place and built the book of business basically independently (1099). Even though he liked the place he was able to walk and make a lot more doing it himself. Luckily he didn't have a non-compete or anything else he would have been tied there when he did literally everything to build the thing and nobody else was doing that work. I hate that restrictive stuff.
Pricing models, contract terms and pricing with customers, vendors, etc., expansion strategies, acquisition targets/strategies, etc. The list has endless permutations depending on the industry. I don’t know what industry you work in, but think of your largest competitor, if you had free reign of their servers, what would you want to know that would help you compete? Obviously, you can’t lock someone out forever, but the hope is that the unfair competitive advantage of that information would give to a competitor goes stale after a year or two.
Yep, I get what Smoochie and NoNatty mean that you can't just take what is IP that a company put in a lot of time, money, and effort into and do nothing but walk to a competitor and give them a huge advantage having not sunk all that cost in. However, if your "secrets" are that it's just a lot of hard work that you can't just skip over then we're well past where non-competes are effective and not strictly anti-capitalist; it helps companies become more of a monopoly in their sector.
Knowing lots of sales people, a lot of the things you listed are things they already know. That's why I find non-competes more important in form than function. Sales guy culture means you're already aware of all that and are probably putting pressure on people in your company to do one better. I could see if we're talking about M&A issues, though. That makes sense.
Oregon has a lot of limitations on what you can do with them. I’m not an attorney I just know in our employment contracts it’s titled as “covenant not to compete” which is stricter than what we have in our contractor agreements.
I agree, and I think who can be subject to a non-compete should be (and is in many states) regulated. Same with no-poach agreements.
Right, my whole idea is that creating more regulation is going to be harder and possibly still allow companies to find loopholes (which they could still try to do even if they were banned) in how non-competes are crafted, but we know that California has done just fine in the tech world by banning them.
Trying to rationally deal with countries like Iraq that are fundamentally fucked is a no win proposition.
But also, if your clients don’t see the value of staying with you and would leave to follow a departing employee (barring your contractual agreements with that employee) you should probably do what you can to retain that employee or do a better job of proving the value of your company to your clients. They aren’t going to leave you unless it’s better for them to do so.
end result of wifes last non-compete was her former company made a bunch of money by forcing the new company to buy people out of non-competes and negotiations took so long a bunch of the previous employees didn't have jobs with the new company since they had to start hiring due to the length of time literally zero benefit to the employees and substantial harms
The reality is that while there is recourse if one of your top software developers, sales people, business development people, management, etc. goes to a competitor they do bring things with them that they will use that were your secrets, but it’s hard to enforce and hold them accountable to that. It’s much easier to keep them out of a competing industry where your secrets don’t have value and the skills they have can be used without those secrets. I recognize the nuance and issues on both sides, but I don’t see this as a black and white issue in terms of right and wrong.
Yeah, you're right. From my experience, albeit only in the litigation context, non-competes and trade secret disputes tend to result in lengthy and expensive litigation.
And how would you know if they were doing that? I think most people are looking at this from the perspective of pro labor and screw the big company, but as a small company who competes against billion dollar competitors, our secrets are critical to our survival. By the time one of my top employees left to go to one of these bigger companies with our secrets and spread them to others, it would be challenging to enforce, AND the larger company has the legal resources to fight us. Once they spread that info to others, are they still our secrets or just things that others have learned that we can’t stop. It's much easier to have someone sign the agreement knowing that they will learn things with us that require them to not work for the few outlined companies who could hurt us.
Kind of fucked up that my first thought was it would be an even better story if it was determined that he hit a Trump supporter.
Using an example that I dealt with in my company just last year- a sales manager left and went to work with a competitor. All of a sudden that competitor was making offers to certain customers (who just so happened to be customers he had dealt with previously) that happened to come in just a touch lower than what we had been offering this customer. It was very easy to connect the dotes and reach out to the new company to explain that clearly confidential information had been shared (which violated the terms of the NDA the former EE signed) since they had been quite a bit higher than our pricing for years. The competitor understood and due to the threat of litigation they backed off. I think we will just disagree on this, which is fine. I just don't think telling someone who they can and can't work for and/or what area they can or can't work in is inherently wrong.
I tried to take my talents to Rivals but tmb is very aggressive in enforcing non-competes for its most valuable posters.
That is an easy case to see, but what about a software developer who helped develop your idea or process and then brought the fundamentals of that to a competitor, but you wouldn't know until much later because it is not apparent in real time? I just think there is a place for non-competes. I don't think that place is for line employees or your average worker though. It's more managerial and highly compensated employees.
Yes I had an issue with Apple years ago where they stole our trademark and used it for a reasonably well-known iPhone feature, and there was just no way for us to fight them. We even had the trails of them searching our website and other proof prior to them using it. It just cost too much money to fight them and they wouldn't settle.
Nope, we tried and we were much smaller at the time and just didn't have the energy and resources to focus on it.
It would take a monster set of stones to sign that one up on contingency. The costs of litigating IP cases are tremendous. There aren't a whole lot of folks with that kind of credit, let alone bank roll.
To be honest, I haven't seen anyone in this particular conversation act as if noncompetes or lack there of are unpalatable. I saw people understanding that there were two sides and that the conversation is more nuanced. (Unless you are referring to something else)
It is nuanced but if you really boil it down it becomes a question of whether you are for the free flow of labor and those individuals' rights. Guessing to Mickey it probably doesn't matter that much if it's a smaller or bigger company.
Ted Cruz is the guy that puts on gym clothes, does 5 minutes of cardio, walks around looking at machines and stretches, then leaves so people can say they saw him at the gym.
The point that people find all this nuance in the question of who owns labor, intellectual labor, value, etc. is informative, and it is my point, yeah. Lots of earnest and thoughtful consideration of what workers owe owners, when it's okay to regulate markets on behalf of profit protection, and so on.
I'm sure non-competes help small businesses, but the vast majority seem to only help large businesses and in ways that weren't intended when they became commonplace. This is basically why most of us really dislike them, they're just used in all employee contracts now and rarely apply to people you'd be most concerned about stealing trade secrets.
Like the overwhelming majority of allegedly "pro-business" legislation and ideology. It's almost like being pro-business means more or less rapidly being pro-monopoly.
When I read your post it felt more like a judgment about people thinking something was right or wrong versus people realizing it is not a simple issue. I'm sorry if I misinterpreted. I didn't take a stand about whether I liked it or not as much as I just presented a situation to consider that may not fit what people are thinking of when they think of the idea behind the issue.
The example that I used though was actually anti-monopoly. It was the small business protecting itself against the monopoly.