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Comment by zrail | Hacker News Reader

The only time I would ever sign a noncompete like that is if it came with 18 months of severance pay. That's ludicrous.

That sums up non competes in Europe. Usually companies are required to pay 25%-75% of a former employee's salary in order to make a non compete clause enforceable.

Not high enough, it should be greater than 100% to penalize the employer more.

Yep. If you don't want me to work, you can keep me at my current standard of living plus a penalty for the 18 month resume gap and potentially rusty skills.

If it's not worth that much to you, I probably don't possess enough super secret special sauce stuff for you to need a non-compete anyways.

Well, you are supposed to get it every month until the clause expires, which can be a long time after you stopped working for them. I've only seen it happen to C-level guys of big companies.

Caveat that doesn't (AFAIK) apply in the UK. Here it looks like un-payed non-competes are enforceable but if they're too long/too broad that would likely make them unenforceable.

How does 25% of your salary "sum up" 18 months pay for 18 months non-compete?

25-75% of your salary every month, until the clause expires. So if you were making $100k a year you are getting $25-75k a year until it expires.

It's something but honestly anything less than 100% is not great though. You can't easily go from living on 100k a year to 50k or less. It's still fulfilling the purpose of being an unfair deterrent from finding employment elsewhere.

I had one of those clauses myself and I knew it was bull before I signed it. I have only seen it enforced once in the wild, to prevent a CEO from creating a competing company for a couple of years.

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