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Comment by Latteland | Hacker News Reader

The article says the noncompetes will stay for 100 executive level employees. Executive level and they have 100 of them? My experience tells me they probably have the devs listed as fake executives like at a lot of companies so they don't have to pay them overtime. Is that what is really going on here?

Noncompetes are terrible and places without them do very well, California being the best example. Everyone should work to get rid of them.

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Devs as fake executives? I’ve never heard of that specifically. Devs are often FLSA exempt employees due to their professional status, but that’s usually accurate. The effect of being FLSA exempt is that they aren’t paid overtime, but that’s just the law operating as intended.

I've personally known a couple of people that worked in NYC for big financial companies, and this was a known dodge. They even had a separate washroom and cafeteria for the real executives. I don't know the precise details, but I noticed that a software engineer colleague at a company had something on his resume about "vice president" on his resume at 'big finance co' and asked for the details.

Ok, I get it. Investment banks pretty much make almost everybody on salary (with some obvious exceptions, e.g. interns, administrative assistants, etc.) a “vice president.” It means nothing and is more out of tradition than anything. Those “VPs” are likely FLSA exempt regardless of title, based solely on what they do and the amount of professional judgment they get to exercise.

I'm sure a lot of it is good old-fashioned title inflation, but at least in the financial world part of the reason for so many VPs is that its an easy title to give someone to make them a corporate officer, and thus eligible to sign on behalf of the company.

That’s just the way banks work. VPs are managers everywhere else.

My dad knew a good old boy type guy who had an epic VP of X title. His job duties consisted of buying a dozen different newspapers at the airport and matching obituaries and reports of deaths with safe deposit box holders before 9:30AM.

Sounds like a great subscription business right there. Charge $X per month to aggregate obituaries and make them searchable or matchable to a list every day. You just replaced a $60k/year employee.

In investment banking, the career path is generally:

Analyst (college graduate - 3 years) Associate (3 - ~6 years) Vice President (~6 - 8+) Executive Director Managing Director

There are exceptions at every level, but generally speaking, you automatically get promoted to vice president after 6 years if you stick around.

Note that the managing director has many levels. When I worked as an analyst at an investment bank, I reported to a managing director who had 3 other managing directors between him and the CEO of the investment bank (who himself reported to the CEO of the bank as a whole).

A VP at an investment bank may have a few low level analysts reporting to them, but generally it's no where near what you would call an "executive" position, although pay can still be quite high.

I used to work for a large US corp that called us all professional developers, just so they don’t have to pay overtime... professional grades don’t get overtime

Well it is a "professional" job - though I suspect the employer didn't follow through on the other side i.e. self directed time no fixed hours etc.

As a junior developer at an investment bank, I had the title of Associate VP.

We needed a VP to approve every code change. Fortunately, I had three of them on my team of five.

Despite the general California rule, California does in fact permit and enforce non-competes. If an employee obtains “trade secrets” and the non compete is narrowly tailored to prevent the employee from using said trade secrets, the non-compete will generally be enforceable.

True, but protection from stealing trade secrets and stealing customers are very different from ordinary devs facing non-competes. Every job I have taken in 25 years as a dev has them, never specifying what a competitor really means. If I work on optimizing compilers for Google I can't work at another company for a year? Amazon has actually enforced them against nonvps. Big companies basically compete against everything in the industry. You are confusing the issue imho. My current job says I am working under California law but still put a non-compete on my contract, because they want to make people think they can't leave.

> You are confusing the issue imho.

California companies often have you sign an agreement that prohibits working for competitors, and says they'll fire you if you do; as far as I know, those are enforceable. That seems to meet the naming convention of non-compete. Perhaps we need to use another word for the post-employment non-competes allowed in less civilized regions.

If you're working for a competitor while working for them...they probably should fire you simply as a matter of operational security unless you're doing the type of work where you wouldn't have any exposure to trade secrets.

Yeah, it's reasonable. Although it kind of kills any side projects if you're working at a big company; because name something fun to do that doesn't compete with Yahoo.

But that's what I think of, when someone says non-compete. Because it's the only kind of non-compete I've seen, no one has tried to get me to sign a post-employment non-compete.

Misuse of trade secrets is a completely different law to "non competes"

“Trade secrets” according to the Supreme Court anyway, are a “Common Law exception” to non-competes.

100 employees... Makes me think of high-level employees who are "in the know" about company secrets.

Plus you can essentially and blatantly ignore them anyways.

I had a non-compete and discussed the meritless nature of it with a lawyer. My response to the company had a few swear words in it. And the issue was settled because they knew they had no basis and it was completely uneforceable.

I didn't care about burning bridges in this particular case.

Unfortunately, not everyone is in that position, or has access to an employment attorney, or even knows that they can challenge them.

In some cases you won't even need that attorney. That costs money on their end too. Every once in a while you can stand your ground a bit and tell them to fuck off. I consulted one which was a waste of a small amount of money. It's amazing when they realize they have to spend a lot of money, and you are not going to back down. You don't even need an attorney to write a letter that says "fuck off". I've found when you meander around an issue like that, it's sometimes useful to go hard right out of the gate so the other side doesn't think you are a pushover. Although I generally prefer a more pragmatic and polite approach, there is a shock value that is useful.

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