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Comment by mrweasel | Hacker News Reader

You don’t exactly need to ban them, but the employees should be compensated during the non-compete period and limit the lenght of the non-compete contract.

In Denmark my employeer can’t make non-compete contract for more that 12 month, during which I’m entitled to 60% of my salery. It’s also only valid within the same field. That is: You can’t jump from Microsoft, developing Windows, to Apple and work on macOS, but you can go to Twitter.

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In Norway it's 100% pay up to some relative high amount. And the non-compete has to be very specifically towards me and my role at the company, not some generic "we do a little bit of x, y and z, therefore everything is considered a competitor".

Actually my union, Tekna, was a big player in getting the laws much better in 2016. Unions work, and can be useful even for us techies even if in high demand.

Though if you get a new job during the period the non-compete is valid, the amount can be reduced down to 50%, depending on your income. The company also can't enforce the non-compete if they fire you. The Norwegian way of handling this is good, I think.

This sounds good in theory, and I was once presented with a job opportunity with something similar to this. Except much of the compensation was not in salary. So while salary goes down 60%, total comp goes down way more -- all the non-salary components goes to zero.

This is definitely a problem, especially because industries who frequently utilize the paid non-compete (e.g. finance) often have a significant percent of comp from non-salary (bonuses etc).

But you could fix this with craftier legislation instead of banning non-competes, e.g. maybe you have to pay the persons last years total compensation instead of just their salary

> In Denmark my employeer can’t make non-compete contract for more that 12 month, during which I’m entitled to 60% of my salery. It’s also only valid within the same field. That is: You can’t jump from Microsoft, developing Windows, to Apple and work on macOS

You probably can tho, unless they're justifying that you're privy to some super important stuff which endangers the company if you go work for Apple. Which… seems like something you'd have a hard time convincing the labour court of.

You’re correct, you cannot enforce a non-compete on your average engineer, it has to be some specialist function.

Honestly I think it should be 200% of your last year's compensation.

I think everyone wins - easier to enforce, but will only be enforced against people where it's really worth it.

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