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Comment by toktok555 | Hacker News Reader

Lucky Californians. Here I am with a non-compete clause that prevents me from working in my industry for 12 months...

How are you supposed to survive if you can't work in your field for a full year? And then if you are required to work in another field, you are going to get punished by the interview process when you try to come back.

In finance, where non-comptetes are regularly enforced, the answers are typically 1) garden leave [1] and 2) generally not, it's a built-in expectation.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_leave

Ok, that doesn't sound so bad now, kind of a 12 month PTO, which is unheard of anywhere else. What am I missing?

One big thing that makes it not as good as it sounds is that it's just your salary. In the industry, that can easily be less than half of your total compensation with bonus. Not that that's anything to sneeze at, but it certainly adds to the opportunity cost of switching roles.

It's not unheard of elsewhere, but it certainly isn't common for engineers and line level managers. 12 mo is longer than average probably, but for an exec role or a key position it's not uncommon to get a severance term that includes pay for non-compete months.

Not in Finance, tech. No garden leaves. I'm a dev, fortunately, the non-compete does not cover programming or tech as a whole. I can't work in Blockchain and Fintech, which is the focus of my startup.

They pay you for those 12 months. At least that's how it works in trading here in Chicago.

They pay you salary, but IIUC not bonus, which, depending on your role, could be more than half of your usual compensation. That's a big price to pay over 12 months just to change employers.

Garden leave is paid, you’re also still essentially employed so no gap on the CV.

You get a new job before leaving, they’ll wait.

On a bit of a tangent, are CV/resume gaps still frowned upon in 2020? It's kind of ludicrous that one unbroken stretch of continuous work seems to be some kind of ideal.

From my experience it just creates another question for the interviewer, i.e. "What were you doing during this period?".

Similar to how banks view gaps in employment as additional risk when applying for a mortgage for example (at least in the UK).

If you're making >80k USD a year, regardless of region, and you don't put away money for the unlucky years that you aren't making that much, you deserve to starve.

Leave beneath your means - ALWAYS.

Would you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN? You've been doing a lot, and it's not what this site is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.

In my first frontend dev job for a startup, the contract was absolutely ludicrous. I believe it was something like I can't work in a related industry (tech) or with any clients of the company or the specific domain of the tech I was working on etc etc. For a year.

Had a lawyer look it over who said it was highly unlikely to be enforcable, then I got the company to basically remove the parts that didn't fly.

That's my mistake, always ask a lawyer when you see sketchy stuff in a contract. My situation is similar, I'm a dev for a startup and the non-compete covers the domain/focus of the startup (Blockchain), I can still be a dev for other domain stuff.

It can be an intimidating thing to challenge, and was awkward as hell to pull my boss aside and say "Can we talk about some concerns I have with this contract?", then proceeding to show him huge swaths of text that needed to be removed.

They said it was just kind of a stock contract they used, and I'm willing to believe that I guess because it wasn't a fight to get them to remove it. The lawyer specifically said that it would be on them to prove the clauses relevancy, but your mileage may vary. She pretty much laughed at it and charged me for like 15 min to 30 min of time.

You should never sign one of those unless your employer provided you with the skills to enter that industry.

But if you started the job already possessing those skills, then that's essentially your profession. Them asking you not to work in the industry for 12 months after leaving the job is akin to asking a lawyer or docter not to practice law or medecine after leaving a firm or clinic. It's a major overreach.

I am a developer for a startup in the Blockchain space. I definitely could code before that job. The non-compete covers any company that deals with Blockchain.

My very first job out of college was with a company that put us through a 6-month training program and paid us our regular salary during it. I found it fair they asked us to sign a contract promising to remain with the company for at least 1yr after the training program ended, and signed that. They didn’t ask us to sign a non-compete, but did ask us to sign a no-solicitation agreement (eg don’t poach their employees after you leave), and I found that fair too.

A subsequent company later asked its developer hires to sign a non-compete agreeing not to work in that industry for 1yr after leaving. But they were hiring us for skills we had already developed prior to joining, and contributed no training or skill development. All the developers refused to sign that and explained how you can’t expect people to agree not to work in their profession if they leave a company.

The CEO of that co realized they had overstepped and cancelled the non-compete request, which was cool. It was just an overprotective legal department pushing the limits of what they could get away with.

Regarding your contract, is your company’s blockchain product open source? Almost all of them are, since the whole point of blockchain is trust. If that’s the case, then their non-compete may be pointless, in that it doesn’t protect any actual trade secrets since they’re all open source. Also depending on what state you’re in, your non-compete may not be legal. Worth looking into.

Life's not so bad here - welcome to come anytime

What industry are you in?

I am a developer for a Blockchain startup in Europe. The non-compete prevents me to work for any company that has anything to do with Blockchain for 12 months. I don't know if I can call Blockchain an industry but that's my area of expertise and nowadays many tech company are doing Blockchain for the hype.

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