- The almost conspiracy-esque malice of bending ‘to the rich’ that the grandparent poster was talking about is much more easily explained by ‘these people also have unusually privileged information’.
- I think the thinking (perhaps unfairly) went like this: Whilst there is such a thing as domain skill, a noncompete should affect a secretary or assistant minimally in practice, as they generally have a broad, non-domain-specific skillset, unlike the executive they report to.
These aren't what people think of as 'secretaries'. These are highly skilled executive assistants with WAY more domain-specific skills than you're giving them credit for. I have friends that do this for C level executives. Including at $100bn+ companies. A non-compete within a given industry would severely hamstring their future career.
I knew this (correct) case would be made as I was writing my comment, but thought I could avoid including a sub-clause to deal with this topic.
So yes — I know folks like this too and fully acknowledge the skillset involved. Some of those folks have a deep skillset and yet don’t have any particular knowledge such that a noncompete would make sense to keep them from spreading it.
Per my comment I don’t like noncompetes — but I do think that this is the thinking that was used to define policy around this.
I also do think that there is an exclusion zone, whereby folks are either:
- Non-specific and not affected by this materially.
- Highly skilled and /would/ take material privileged information with them.
- High skilled and /would not/.
I suspect the last category is just elided in the thinking that led to this coming to be.
I don't think the answer here is necessarily all that clever -- charged conversation notwithstanding, I just wanted to get at the fact that it's likely /not a conspiracy/.
I would love to deflate this mess of a subthread. :)
Huh? The VP of Engineering has a hefty stock plan, a guaranteed bonus, and a three-year contract. Do you really think that her secretary has anything comparable? Heck, her secretary doesn't even have a three-year contract.
But I don’t know if that is why the carve-out is there or not. I doubt it, but some exec contracts absolutely allow for a guaranteed support staff of the exec’s choosing.
The VP's contract reasonably protects the VP from the consequences of a non-compete. The VP's staff has no such protection.
No it's not. If the VP's contract says "The company will hire an assistant for you" then the assistant negotiates with HR for their salary like a regular employee. If the VP's contract says "You get $100K/yr to hire an assistant" then the assistant can't get a raise until the VP's contract changes.
> The VP's contract reasonably protects the VP from the consequences of a non-compete.
It might, or it might not. Contracts do whatever they say they do. If the contract says "You and your staff can't work for any of our competitors unless it's a leap year and you say Pretty Please" then that's what it says.
More generally, above a certain level, executives are more like a small agency than a single person. If you hire Tim Cook to be the next CEO of your startup, he's going to bring his current assistant(s) with him, he's not just going to inherit whoever the old CEO's assistant was.
Most laws revolving around protecting corporate secrets are enablers of inequality that the public pays for. It’s one of these services the government provides to business that it really shouldn’t.
The only reason I commented was to dispel and push back on the conspiracy-esque style that the parent commenter used to characterise /how/ the law got written this way.
You’re absolutely right. I’d happy sign any non-compete contract as long as _I’m paid my salary throughout the non-compete cool-down period”
The last contract I signed (1 sheet of A4) bound me not to take work with a "competitor" for 6 months after quitting. Since the employer's clients were all local, I took that as meaning I was not to take a job with a web-shop in the same town. And I thought 6 months seemed reasonable - after all, we weren't developing patentable inventions, we were just making websites.
[Edit] I think the purpose of the clause was mainly to stop me taking customer lists to the competitor. I'd have thought that fell squarely into the "unfaithful servant" bag - it's a scummy way for an employee to carry on.