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Comment by Hizonner | Hacker News Reader

In case you're unclear, Silicon Valley is in California. Noncompetes have been legally unenforceable in California (in nearly all circumstances) for longer than there's been anything called "Silicon Valley".

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...

People have been known to write them. In fact it got so bad that the California AG had to issue a press release a couple of years ago as a "reminder" that they weren't enforceable. But they have never had any effect other than to intimidate the stupid.

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>...never had any effect other than to intimidate the stupid

I do not care for that characterization. Most people are not familiar with the intricacies of employment law. It is unfair to expect the average person to know that this magical spell in their employment contract is invalid, unlike the other magical spells in that thick document, because a magical spell at the state capital says otherwise.

People that are "impacted" by non-competes in California are quickly informed that they are not enforceable. At least in tech.

That's true now!

You're right. I apologize to all.

I took no offense. I get it, noncompetes are super annoying, and presumably most of the noncompetes people saw in SV were bullshit.

Maybe all the contracts I saw there were unenforceable, even before the California Supreme Court case everyone talks about, but they were certainly common (I lived and worked in California in the late 1990s and early 2000s).

I took my first job in California, at a company in Silicon Valley (in the actual silicon industry), in 1985. Everybody knew noncompetes were unenforceable then, and in fact nobody asked for them.

The 1990s Web kids had a certain ideology that led them to believe that no law could possibly say what California law has said since 1872. But it has always said that.

We have apparently hit a reply depth limit, so I'm "replying to myself".

There's a recognized carveout for business sales, and I think a couple of other things that don't implicate the ability to ply your trade. You might be able to stretch some of those to some restrictions on employees in some rare case. And I think that at some points the intimidation got bad enough that even some lawyers had lost track of reality, so I wouldn't be surprised if some people had settled some cases they shouldn't have settled, or even gone to court and failed to raise arguments they should have raised.

But the basic thrust of the law is refreshingly clear, and it's statute, not just customary law.

... and now the depth limit seems to have disappeared. Maybe it's a time restriction.

I forgot to mention that people also get noncompete mixed up with nonsolicitation. You can't hire me as a framing carpenter in California and try to demand an agreement that I not work as a framing carpenter for another contractor, or even that I not start my own company. But you can require that I not use relationships I built with your customers when I was your employee to convert them into my customers. And obviously there can be grey areas there.

For "Valley" purposes, that usually only affected people in sales, though.

... and you can NDA me and say I can't use your secret hammer grip. You just can't completely stop me from competing with you if that meaningfully restricts my ability to do the kind of work I know how to do.

You can click the “minutes ago” next to the username to bring up a link to the comment, and then it will show you an option to reply.

There were exemptions to the ban, right? Maybe all these noncompetes were done under the auspices of the trade secret exemption? I believe you, and I'm glad you called me out, but I also trust my own memory of this. There's a string of HN stories about it, as well.

I replied to myself thinking I wouldn't be allowed to reply to this. Just in case this notifies you in some way that that doesn't.

No, you're good. You can still reply; just click the timestamp next to my name.

There was definitely a trade secret exception to California noncompetes; maybe it was broadly (over)applied?

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