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Comment by tranchms | Hacker News Reader

I’ve found these non-competes often have no teeth. Unless you possess exceptional knowledge or secrets, companies will not waste the resources going after you.

And often when they do, they lose. But it’s a judgement call. I’d say the fear of non-competes has more power than the non-competes themselves.

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> I’ve found these non-competes often have no teeth. Unless you possess exceptional knowledge or secrets, companies will not waste the resources going after you.

You naively conflate "not biting" with "having no teeth".

Amazon forces all workers to sign non-competes. They only sue those who piss them off. Granted, a small minority. But that minority suffers a harrowing ordeal, typically losing their new job and their ability to work.

You better believe the rest are kept in line by the mere threat of such lawsuit, and the courts have enforced the non-compete in the cases Amazon did take legal action.

Good to know. I'll never work for Amazon no matter what the pay is.

Didn't know that, also FUCK AMAZON from now on. But what are they going to do? Some sort of civil suit is not that big of a deal if you have your assets appropriately sheltered.

Although this makes me hate Jeff Bezos just a little bit more. Hope he loses it all in the divorce battle.

> But what are they going to do? Some sort of civil suit is not that big of a deal if you have your assets appropriately sheltered.

I think this statement minimizes the severity of being sued. The stress of a civil suit that threatens your long-term livelihood is a very big deal, daily uncertainty for prolonged period of times about important parts of your life can cause a lot of nasty health problems.

The problem is the average person doesn't have the money to pay a lawyer to fight off a company - especially the ones with teams of lawyers who need something to do.

No it's much worse than this. They never threaten the employee. They threaten the company hiring the individual. The employee might take it to court(and it most states win), but the hiring firm has no incentive to do so, and just moves on the next candidate.

They don't have to sue, they just have to send a letter to the new firm. Or even worse the new firm just has to ask "did you sign a non-compete?"

Yes, this is exactly how it works. Well, in my experience my CEO threatened me and the new company. I was actually given the choice between a lawsuit and a promotion (with a salary that was almost competitive with the new company) in the course of a single conversation. I chose to stand by my resignation because I'd been very unhappy there and it wasn't going to get any better if I showed them that I could be bullied into line.

I suppose I was lucky that the new company tried to negotiate a bit, but when my former employer refused to budge, they backed out. My lawyer had warned me that this could happen even before I accepted the job offer, right after he assured me that I would be on solid legal ground in taking the job. Admittedly, I didn't really think it would happen because why would they want to be known as the kind of company that does that? Even so, I've never regretted my decision to leave. As stressful as that was, staying would have been worse.

Huh. But the hiring firm didn’t sign the non-compete, so how does the first company go after the second?

They threaten them with a tortious interference lawsuit which is defined as "intentional interference with contractual relations, in the common law of torts, occurs when one person intentionally damages someone else's contractual or business relationships with a third party causing economic harm"

This is the reason why employers ask if you've signed a non-complete

If you’re the “average person”, you have nothing to worry about. Trust me.

Non-competes really only matter for people with exceptional knowledge of something.

From a business standpoint, the legal resources to build a case against a single “average person” who signs a generic non-compete are not a good investment.

But like I said, it’s a judgement call. Anyone in the possession of that exceptional knowledge should be able to determine the risk.

If the average person has nothing to worry about then why do all average people have to sign non-competes if they want the job? The fact is that companies see a benefit in threatening all new hires with non-competes, and like I said elsewhere, the only people with enough pull to negotiate out of a non-compete are those highly specialized non-average people who are the least likely to sign the boilerplate contract, who the company will still want to hire when they push back with specific demands.

So who are the non-competes really for then?

>So who are the non-competes really for then?

They're for assuaging the corporate leadership that they are actually effective at managing that pesky turnover problem they've been having in a manner that doesn't require them to increase pay or improve working conditions. That and people who carry a "book of business" (the sales team) and those with critical expertise in certain, niche knowledge domains.

I have heard of hiring companies dropping new hires because they had a non-compete. They didn't want to take the risk so the company that has the non-compete doesn't even have to do anything for it to have an effect.

Not true. A friend is a PA working in emergency medicine. Nobody will touch her with a 10 foot pole. She needs to commute almost two hours or change fields to get out of her non-compete.

There was also an issue that resulted in state legal action where fast food workers were blackballed due to non-competes.

Uh, I know of several low-mid level techies where their companies played hardball around their non-competes.

Exactly, for me personally, its silly to worry about this thing non-compete thing. Its a matter of risk assessment. I figure that its very unlikely to cause me trouble.

Yet despite the fact that only _maybe_ executives should be subject to enforceable non-competes, it is the case that just about every new hire has to sign a non-compete clause at most tech companies. In fact, the only people with enough leverage to successfully be able to push back against a non-compete are the very execs who the non-competes are meant for.

You're right that the fear has more power than the non-compete itself, but the reality then is that companies en masse employ a politics of fear in their contract language.

About a year ago, I lost a new job before starting because the new company didn't want to deal with legal threats from my former employer. They agreed with my lawyer that my former employer wouldn't have a strong case, but they expressed concern that it would look bad for them to be involved in litigation.

The CEO who had been threatening to sue me and the new company was removed in June, presumably for unrelated reasons. Last week, he announced that he was taking a job which _my_ noncompete certainly would have prohibited me from taking.

Now, I don't know if he had a noncompete with my former employer. Perhaps he was able to negotiate it away. Maybe he was granted permission. Maybe he'll get sued, but I think that's unlikely because they have to know the new company will have his back and that they don't stand a chance of winning.

Whatever the case, it shows who the system works for.

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