Hacker News Reader

OT, but can someone explain why this won't instantly be sued into oblivion by the former employers? It seems like some of the Otto team will be using knowledge they gained at their last job on what seems like a competing product.

View on HN

IANAL, but as long as you're not infringing on patents, trade secrets, or using stolen source code, you can't be sued just for using your brain to solve similar problems.

Depends CA is quite liberal in terms of non competes and I suspect they woudl argue that self driving trucks is sufficiently different from self driving cars.

This is one reason why California is great for tech workers, the unenforceable non-competes. In much of the country you'd have to wait out a year before working in the same industry as your current employer.

Agreed the USA having 52 separate sets of employment laws does not make sense - really employment law should be done at federal level - think of the saving in reduction in red tape.

Though I suspect HR and Lawyers might lobby against that as a job protection scheme.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com