> Obviously, if I work as a developer making a stock trading app, I shouldn't be making a competing stock trading app after hours.
Why is that obvious? If I work as a studio musician can I also be working on my own album after hours?
Why is that obvious? If I work as a studio musician can I also be working on my own album after hours?
That would not be a question of competition, but of IP theft.
> And it would be tough to argue that your at-home trading app code is completely uninfluenced by ideas you have at work.
How is that of any relevance? I can have ideas about a better way to wipe my ass at work, is my novel ass-wiping implement competing with the company?
And even if it were, mere competition should not be enough for NCCs to trigger. NCCs should be about unfair advantage owing to the exploitation of sensitive or confidential information.
But there is a broader though still imo legitimate view that a company, paying a knowledge worker to solve a particular class of problems, has a right to the result of that work. An extreme example would be a company giving you a lab and research assistants, you working there a year and then parenting the results yourself and licensing them to a different company. It might not have required any insider info, and all the IP is ostensibly yours, but that feels abusive.
Granted we're overlapping into IP assignment and moonlighting clauses, but they're all closely related.
And that your at-work trading app code would be influenced by ideas you have at home.
You're a craftsman making trading apps, some for an employer, some for yourself, it's what you do. It's strange for an employer to be allowed to force you to stop doing the others without compensating you for it.
If you were a carpenter who worked in an old-time furniture store, turning chair legs on a duplicating lathe at work and turning toy spinning tops on a treadle lathe at home, there's no harm to your employer if you use some related skills at home. If you're not making parts that match their requirements, those parts are of no value to them. The company might as well pay you per unit, rather than hourly or as a salary.
If you worked at a think tank or research institution, your job might be to generate one particularly brilliant concept that was by itself worth your annual salary. You might spend your days testing ideas and improving your understanding of the problem domain while your subconscious mulls over everything at night. A musician is an interesting career in context - are they paid to move samples around in Pro Tools or think about and try a huge variety of riffs until they find the next Top 40 sound? If you had a great idea in your sleep, it was probably because you've taken a paycheck for the last 6 months at work generating no useful output, the only thing you built was the thought patterns in your brain. The company wants to own your brain, the thought patterns therein, and everything you think of.
Technology and automation is making ideas more scalable all the time, the industrial era where workers were paid to pull a lever repeatedly is in the past. I think we're only seeing the beginning of non-competes.
Which is an issue legally. Who owns the code? Who needs the license to use it?
I saw something in Theranos's employee contract about granting a perpetual license to all the patents of the employees. I have no idea why that would be reasonable.
I'd much prefer this to a noncompete.
And the Theranos contract had no such limitations (that I could see) of opting in to using it in the company. Just "we can use any of your patents you had at the time you worked here, thanks".
So what you write at work is your work's, what you write elsewhere is not, by default.
Umm, but you are also taking money from your employer so you can't say that in reverse.
In fact, your employer is taking your a fragment of your life, and human life is worth more than currency, so actually, it's really quite inappropriate if your employer was found accidentally using ideas that you had while you were in the shower at home when they weren't paying you. (internet you-can't-hear-my-voice disclaimer: this is obviously hyperbole meant to really drive home the point.)
I'm generally a fan of market-based methods of structuring economic activity, but this sort of implicit assertion that the owner of capital is just obviously more important than the owner of labor really puts the "ism" is Capitalism.
Labor is a market, and markets are determined by both the players and the rules under which the players compete. Companies use the force of law to coerce laborers (see: every other post in this tread where supposedly free people worry about being sued). It's completely fair game for labor-force participants to turn around are use that same force to coerce employers.
I've been so indoctrinated in how non-competes work that I didn't even see that this wasn't obvious. Gah.
Yes.
> Why is that obvious?
Just because there's a law somewhere that covers both a part of making music and part of making software, and just because some programmers make music and some musicians write software, and both are sometimes creative, doesn't mean they have much in common.
Because it creates a clear conflict of interest; stock trading apps compete with each other much more directly than do music albums.
If you're not doing your job anymore, or are sabotaging your dayjob, then it's an employment issue. NCCs have no reason whatsoever to enter the equation before or after.
Of course most people wouldn’t, but this is one narrow area where I think it is reasonable to limit employees.