If a company really cares that much about stopping competitors from taking advantage of your skillset, they need to be willing to pay up.
Why are all these lazy entitled companies not pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and doing everything they can to keep customers?
It's completely unfair to pit an individual against a corporation. For the individual, a lawsuit related to a non-compete can consume their entire life for years while everyone working at the corporation has no real skin in the game. They'll go home and night and live their lives. Worst case they have to work late. It's not comparable at all.
It's better for a corporation to be wronged by an individual, than for an individual to be wronged by a corporation. So the law should err on the side of the individual.
To answer your question directly: frankly I don't see why not. Why can't the clients choose to change vendors? Is it not a free market? Are clients really going to change vendors just to still have the same sales rep?
A salesman doesn't exist as an island. He's selling products or services from a particular company, no? And if he leaves, he would then be selling products or services from a different company. Yes, maybe some clients will like the salesman enough to switch suppliers, but surely the fact that it's a different company with at least somewhat different products/services matters too, no?
If you are skilled in being the chief of staff at google maps, it is likely your highest market value is in that particular niche.
Restricting your employment opportunities to those where you don’t have the highest market value through the use of non-competes is absolutely unethical and needs to be banned.
It should be treated in the same way as other kinds of market fraud, insider trad8ng and rigging are treated.
I assume intellectual property law is sufficient to cover this case in practice though, because Silicon Valley is in California where noncompetes are unenforceable, and Silicon Valley is not exactly known for lack of R&D investment.
Chief of what? People use Bing Maps?
You are never allowed to steal trade secrets or use them elsewhere even if you didn’t sign any agreement about it.
An NDA isn’t even technically required. There are state and national laws which blanket ban using trade secrets outside of the company you worked for.
Not saying anything is right or wrong, just that when something is illegal doesn't mean it prevents that crime.
> Anthony Scott Levandowski pleaded guilty and was sentenced today to 18 months in prison for trade secret theft related to Google’s self-driving car program, announced United States Attorney David L. Anderson and John F. Bennett, Special Agent in Charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Levandowski was also ordered to pay a $95,000 fine and $756,499.22 in restitution.
A non-compete agreement doesn't actually "prevent" an employee from working at another company any more than an NDA prevents an employee from divulging confidential trade secrets.
They don't. What I learned while working for your company isn't your company's property any more. Good ideas almost always eventually spread in our industry. And I think thats a good thing for software as a whole!
You can protect your data, and your code. But you can't really stop someone quitting a job at your company, working somewhere else and reimplementing a software system that worked well. It might take years to do it, but probably not decades.
I honestly think this is a pretty good tradeoff. It means if you build some software, you have head start, but not an impenetrable wall. For someone to compete, it'll take a lot of time and money just to catch up with where you are today. So it'll be hard to do but possible. This leaves the door open for any incumbent to be outcompeted in the market if they stop doing good work.
And thats a good thing! Competition is painful, but it pushes us to make better products for our users. Ultimately thats better for everyone.
You are only thinking about code. Imagine knowing all the dirty secrets about how your company screwed customers. I have seen employment contracts forbidding working for a customer, in addition to competitors and in addition to an NDA.
The "Front Page" ethics test is probably the best one I've heard: "What would people think if what was being done was reported on the front page of the NY Times or other major news outlet?"
I don't even think this case is undesirable. If we were welders, it would be absurd to be prevented from using a welding technique we learned on the job at a new employer. System design is just a technique.
If you're talking about trade secrets, I believe if there is evidence in the product/products that a former employees company is releasing that seems to be operating or working in a similar product they could gather publicly available evidence, hire a PI, and ultimately attempt to subpoena additional information if there is sufficient evidence that the employee is actually sharing trade secrets from a previous company.
Where trade secrets really leak (in tech), in my experience, is engineer to engineer. A chat between friends over beers about some technical problem. It is nearly untraceable and it doesn’t involve anyone leaving their job.
As a fun example, database tech is buried in trade secret restrictions and has been for decades. There is a classic problem in cache replacement algorithms that has no solution in literature. Nonetheless, an astonishingly elegant solution exists — the kind that you can’t believe you never thought of it yourself after you learn it — that has been selectively passed around informally among practitioners for (at least) a decade or two. No one knows who invented it but it was likely developed at one of the old database research powerhouses like Oracle, IBM, et al that have severe trade secret regimes. A trade secret that leaks isn’t a trade secret, but there are enormous punitive consequences if anyone knows who leaked it.
This kind of trade secret leakage happens even under non-compete regimes and it is pretty common. When it happens, the probability of figuring out how it happened is very low. It has to be part of your risk model.
Edit: My (possibly incorrect) understanding is that rather than having a blanket “everything is our secret” kind of contracts like we have now, the act requires the company to specify what they have that they consider a secret, and to show that they take steps to protect those secrets above and beyond regular day-to-day information exchange within their company.
For example, a list of customers would have to be explicitly identified as “secret”, and handled more carefully.
There are dozens of small optimizations in my tech that where painstakingly discovered through years of research and iterative improvement. These are not cost-effectively patentable.
Even if you believe the trade secrets 'work' do you think companies are going to document every design of optics, electronics, laser frequencies, rf powers? Then if we did then we'd get a series of posts about how onerous the regular confidential info acknowledgement forms are for the employee.
Not to mention, once it becomes 'commonly known' via disclosure, it may not even be protectable anymore.
Non-competes sidestep all these issues. Sure, if they are overly broad its bad, but they have an important role to play.