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Comment by MBCook | Hacker News Reader

Some levels of non-compete would be legal according to most people. If you work as a chef at my Mexican restaurant, it seems fair to bar you from opening another Mexican restaurant within say 1 mile. For a year.

Simple, small, limited conditions to stop certain behaviors.

As to why many industry/business non-competes are legal? There’s a good chance they may not be. But until taken to court we don’t really know.

I’d be curious to know why these companies were chosen. Were they especially bad? Or just the companies they had the best evidence against?

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> If you work as a chef at my Mexican restaurant, it seems fair to bar you from opening another Mexican restaurant within say 1 mile. For a year.

I would argue that's not fair at all. Think about what you're saying: you're saying that your Mexican restaurant should effectively not have to worry about your competition providing a better job to your staff than what you offer. That changes the dynamic so that you don't have to worry about doing your best to retain your staff.

This problem is the crux of why Silicon Valley is so successful (where you can't do this there) and tech hubs in other locations aren't anywhere close to as successful (where you can do this there).

You didn’t read the comment. It’s not about getting a job in a restaurant within 1 mile - but rather opening a restroom yourself in that radius.

Right. Your chef should be able to work anywhere that needs a chef.

I don’t think it’s fair if they leave you without a chef and open a new restaurant selling the same kind of cuisine down the bock tomorrow.

That seems more like a spite restaurant. And I’m ok with putting a simple time/distance limit on that. Next year? Nearby city? Different kind of food? Go for it tomorrow.

What do you mean, it’s not fair? I genuinely don’t see anything wrong with a “spite restaurant”.

I’ve tried to come up with a comparable situation where the roles are reversed. Suppose that you owned a restaurant. If you fire your chef and buy your local competitor, can the chef argue that this purchase shouldn’t be allowed because he can’t get a job in the local market anymore?

It still applies even if the chef in question creates their own restaurant. This is literally how startups are born. Here in CT, a lot of pizza places are spun up by pizza people leaving a pizza place and creating their own.

That's always been the way the restaurant business worked, but big chains actually have been using non-competes for a while. They claim their training, even for the front of the house, is that unique and valuable. Absurd.

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