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Comment by biomcgary | Hacker News Reader

I agree. Rather than having legislators get into the weeds of defining "compete", "trade secrets", "customer poaching", etc., laws should simply require that enforcing ANY post-employment terms require the former employer to pay the former employee the greater of the employee's maximum salary plus 10% (to cover opportunity cost) or 110% of any offer by a prospective new employer. Who better than the company to price the value of what the former employee knows? Maybe cap enforcement to 2-3 years.

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My current employer tried to make me sign a noncompete clause and I asked them for precisely this.

They were flabbergasted that I wanted compensation in exchange for essentially cutting myself off from a wide swath of employment opportunities.

“Aren’t you our slave to do with as we see fit!?” was very much the attitude that I was getting.

Why even allow this? Just makes things less competitive and pays people to be unproductive.

No business would do this; non-competes would be de facto banned. It's not a sincere suggestion.

I think rare situations can exist where a company would reasonably conclude that paying the employee not to compete is worth a lot more to the company than their salary. However, they should pay for it, not the employee (or the market, for that matter).

I think open source, the internet, and Stable Diffusion have shown that the diffusion of knowledge is generally in the public interest. I really think judges made a serious mistake when they stopped treating non-compete clauses as unlawful prior restraints on trade. They are not remotely in the public interest.

>No business would do this; non-competes would be de facto banned

That is the point. It is a sincere suggestion, because it would force companies to only seek out a non-compete in the case where the employees knowledge is valuable enough to warrant subsidizing their extended vacation.

And this does happen in the finance industry. Some businesses do in fact do this.

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