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Comment by oezi | Hacker News Reader

In Germany non-competes are legal but restricted by law as follows:

- max 2 years

- employer has to continue to pay at least 50% of the salary the employee last earned for the duration of the non-compete.

- cannot non-compete minors

- must provide reasonable argument for the non-compete (hard for interns)

I think this is a good balance.

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IANL but AFAIK, they have to pay 50% if they chose to enforce the non compete, i.e. you want to work for a direct competitor in the exact same field but now you can't. Otherwise they don't have to pay anything and you are free to work on whatever else you like.

Which is fine. It puts some monetary cost on the employer as well.

It's a fair system we should adopt everywhere.

50% is…not great.

Getting paid 50% of my peak salary for just sitting on my ass and doing nothing sounds great to me. I'd go for it. Move to Spain for a couple of years, pursue my hobbies, stuff like that.

Considering that this means I cannot find employment at all and can’t contribute to open source, I would be somewhat disappointed.

They don’t actually prevent you from working. They’ll usually have to declare before you leave if they enforce the non compete or not, and if so they will pay 50% whatever you do, for the length of the clause.

What the GP was expliciting is that since paying 50% for an employee with low risk is absurd, a lot of companies won’t enforce the non compete.

My point is that if they do choose the noncompete for whatever reason, I’m still losing.

You end up losing if it’s so hard finding a job that’s out of the non-compte that you end up unemployed for the length of the agreement.

In that case the only recourse would be to try sue/re-negociate under the angle that the non-compete is unfair (too low pay or too broad scope).

Otherwise, if you find another job in another field, you’d get the full job salary + the 50% from the non-compete. That’s usually fair enough.

It's great for some specific cases, but it's not great if you have fixed costs to pay.

I'm sure one can find a job outside their field for 50% less money which doesn't trigger the non-compete, if that's the case.

Though, TBH, I'd like the comp to be 100% of the offer I'd be forced to forego. I.e. I go interview somewhere, negotiate an offer with them, and if my previous employer feels very strongly about me not working there, they can pay me 100% of the total package to not work there. That's the only set-up that'd be truly "fair" to the former employee, IMO.

I don't know. I think I'd be hard pressed to find a job outside of software engineering as a whole that paid half what I'm making now. Maybe I could get a SWE job with a company in an unrelated field, but probably not outside of software entirely.

Even that’s not entirely fair. You’re not just missing out on salary, but opportunities for growth and advancement. And, depending on your field, you might also be unable to keep your skills honed.

In California, non-competes are generally not allowed. Never expected us to be better than Germany in workers’ rights.

Allowed if correctly compensated seems better to me than just forbidden.

It’s a bit more messy than that in California even. Non competes are not forbidden, just generally unenforceable due to some other labor laws. So a lot of companies will still to this day have employees sign non-competes, and threaten them with legal action if they violate them.

They’d almost certainly lose, depending on circumstances, but the threat is enough to have a pretty strong chilling effect.

Well, I wouldn't take half my pay to not work. This is prime career time. The losses are huge? I could be compounding my income by working.

50% is an embarrassing amount. I'd accept 100% maybe.

I always assumed a non-compete would be unenforceable in Europe because I don't see how it can fit within the European convention on Human rights.

Do you work in HR? not sure max of 2 years is a Good Balance.

Especially if you can stop some one after leaving there first low payed job to not work for 2 years on 50% of their starting salary - do you not see the potential to abuse young workers here

The 2 years is a good balance for highly skilled employees who carry competitive information such as customer contacts or technology. After that time the information is likely mostly worthless anyway.

I agree that for interns the situation is not good but believe the "reasonable" provision is most likely to make a non-compete with an intern worthless in court.

You do know that non competes are not for protecting trade secrets right?

You wouldn't get a 2 year non compete for a FSTE 100 CEO in the UK to stand up in court.

Non-competes get abused so much in the states because the cost to companies is next to nothing when workers don't push back. I don't think companies would go around giving everyone two-year non-competes if it meant they had to pay an extra year's salary to everyone who quits.

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