Hacker News Reader

Comment by feoren | Hacker News Reader

> Employers also see trusted employees smile and leave for competitors even after signing that they would not do that.

Employers who ask their employees to sign immoral and usually illegal non-compete clauses deserve whatever they get, honestly. Employers should expect their employees to go work for competitors when they leave. Where else are they going to go work, but companies with similar operations? An ecology management company fires and ecologist and they clutch their pearls when that ecologist goes and works for another ecology management company, instead of McDonalds!? Gasp! The nerve of that person!

Don't want your employees to go work for a competitor? Don't treat them like shit.

View on HN

> Employers who ask their employees to sign immoral and usually illegal non-compete clauses deserve whatever they get, honestly. Employers should expect their employees to go work for competitors when they leave.

That's my point as to why employers want to immediately stop access to employees who leave for competitors.

> An ecology management company fires and ecologist and they clutch their pearls when that ecologist goes and works for another ecology management company, instead of McDonalds!?

You can word it that way, but what can and does happen is that employees leave and steal confidential processes or information to boost their own value at a competitor. Many people agree with you, until they start their own company and theft happens to them, draining their work straight to a competitor.

If that was the goal, wouldn't you do that in advance anyway before any suggestion you were bailing?

Sure, but it doesn't always happen like that.

You're in sales at a company in a highly competitive space and are exited. You're not the kind of person to premeditate taking anything with you, perhaps you left on good terms. You join another company and someone there asks you for the book of business or sales leads you were working on that the previous company. Oh look, your login to the CRM system is still working, and you can get a glimpse of information that you shouldn't have access to as a non-FTE. It seems benign, so you copy down a few phone numbers and email addresses. This isn't an academic example.

This wouldn't even be a possibility if the account was locked down immediately. It's obviously much more difficult to control access to information while you are employed (this is a subplot of Snowcrash, afterall), but immediate lockout isn't meant to mitigate that risk. It's meant to mitigate risks from an account being active that shouldn't be.

Absolutely not only is immediately removing the terminated employee’s access critical but setting up SSO and auto-provisioning/de-provisioning so straightforward and effortless with many SSO products that it’s essentially malpractice to not do so.

> You can word it that way, but what can and does happen is that employees leave and steal confidential processes or information to boost their own value at a competitor.

I mean, couldn't you make an argument where that's just capitalism at work? If Firm A is going to be competitive, they'll need to compensate their employees well enough that Firm B doesn't have the ability to poach. An employee with a considerable amount of stock in Firm A is gonna think twice before they devalue their shares by running to a competitor.

> Many people agree with you, until they start their own company and theft happens to them, draining their work straight to a competitor.

Again: tough luck.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com