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Comment by matsemann | Hacker News Reader

Where I live (Norway), these laws came thanks to unions. When I graduated, all developer jobs I was offered had a noncompete clause in the contract. These were wide and potentially career-altering if enforced, barring you from doing basically any kind of work for long stretches of time. All companies when pushed basically said "ohh, we seldom enforce them, only for upper management", but still they insisted on them being there.

Luckily my union, Tekna, helped squish most of these in 2015. They can no longer be general, they have to name specific companies and areas you can't work for if you ask. And pay full salary while enforced. So now they're basically non-existent for individual contributors / devs, except for maybe naming the main competitor if you work for a niche company.

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I had a chance to visit Norway recently, and this was something that a tour guide impressed upon us about the culture; she gave an example of a restaurant in town that was caught skimming pay, and it wasn't just a union representing restaurant workers they heard from; they found themselves unable to find someone to repair plumbing or their storefront (the plumbers and glaziers wouldn't work with them), and their ingredient supply chain suffered (truck drivers told them to make their own 3AM trip to stock up).

This also happens in the US, it just isn't reported on heavily by the media.

When the dining workers at my university in the US were campaigning for a contract, teamsters blocked most truck deliveries to the university

Labor action generally is barely reported on in the US. You have to go to far-left media like Democracy Now to hear about most of it. People who don't seek that out could be forgiven for thinking unions in the US almost never do anything at all.

It's worth noting also that this sort of "secondary strike" approach is explicitly illegal in the United States.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidarity

And its complement, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostracism

While that does occasionally happen in the US as well, it's illegal (both general strikes and sympathy strikes were banned by Taft-Hartley).

> And pay full salary while enforced.

That's a good clause, that will basically eliminate them. It makes sense from the government's standpoint, they don't want anything that restricts people's income because that restricts their (tax) income too.

> that will basically eliminate them

in NYC, it doesn't seem to stop quant firms. they have a term for it, although I forget what.

But if they're willing to pay it, it seems like it probably means this is a real issue rather than just a way to punish employees who leave, and it seems like they're reasonably compensating employees for the problem.

i think they are probably slightly disincentivizing leaving if they are only paying base salary.

someone who knows more will have to chime in, i didn't even remember this was called gardening leave

Yeah, that's fair, if I only got base salary I'd be pretty strongly disincentivized to take such a deal.

Gardening leave.

Garden leave

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