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Comment by outworlder | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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