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Comment by 6502nerdface | Hacker News Reader

> non-competes should be banned, yes.

I like my non-compete. I'm a highly paid professional with rare skills/experience, I negotiated hard on my employment contract with multiple rounds of edits in consultation with my employment attorney, I will generate and be exposed to valuable trade secrets during my employment, and I look forward to being paid millions of dollars to sit on my ass for a couple of years if/when I eventually leave.

Should it be banned? Seems fair to me. Or you just mean noncompetes that don't include monetary consideration, or which don't establish protectable interests? In many jurisdictions those are already unenforceable.

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> and I look forward to being paid millions of dollars to sit on my ass for a couple of years if/when I eventually leave.

Executive level employment contracts are kind of not relevant to this thread.

Totally different situation that you can’t compare to the average non-executive worker.

Well, I guess all I mean to highlight is that a blanket ban might be sub-optimal versus requiring some minimum bar of fairness and consideration of noncompetes. After all, if the situation outlined above seems fair to us, then I feel like we'd have to concede that it would also be fair for the "average worker" if only such workers got similar terms (not necessarily millions of dollars, but commensurate with their normal pay) and had some negotiating leverage going into the agreement.

There is already plenty of precedent for overly lopsided/one-sided contracts not being valid/enforceable (and indeed many noncompetes actually aren't valid for exactly that reason), so I would have no problem with a law that makes the standard explicit, rather than relying on litigation and jurisdictionally variable case law to sort it out as happens today. Compared to a blanket ban, requiring employers to pony up some "fair" cost and to weigh that against the benefits to them of a noncompete may actually be better for workers overall.

Even if there were a blanket ban, I think corporate lawyers would quickly find ways around it for special cases (e.g. VPs, c-level, etc).

For example, you could ban blanket non-competes but not ban non-competes where very strict criteria are met, or having an exec agree to pay a [an insanely large penalty] if they choose to go work for a competitor.

That is very, very far from the typical experience, assuming it's even real.

> assuming it's even real.

Sir or Madam, you question my good faith!

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