Hacker News Reader

Comment by frankc | Hacker News Reader

Not really. It's widely understood that NY won't enforce a non-compete if its not paid. It's very common in the hedge fund world to get paid your salary for a year to do nothing, even for junior developers. It depends on if the company really wants to hold you out or not. They will release you from the non-compete if they don't want to pay.

On the other hand, in the hedge fund world, bonuses are a big part of comp but generally only base pay is paid out, so in reality you might be say 150K to 250K while your comp in expectation is much, much higher. For a junior dev maybe your bonus is .3x to .6x base but for someone senior, your bonus might be 1x to 5x base or more depending on where you sit in the organization. Therefore sitting out still costs you a lot of money.

View on HN

"in the hedge fund world"

You are describing a minuscule world that comprises an insignificant amount of American workers.

> It's widely understood that NY won't enforce a non-compete if its not paid.

I’m sure the Walmart cashier with a non-compete hanging around their neck is much appeased by this.

> sure the Walmart cashier with a non-compete hanging around their neck is much appeased by this

You describe an enforcement, not legal issue. Even with this legislation, the manager can still verbally threaten the employee.

I am not a lawyer but it strikes me that such a threat (of action which the employer is not legally entitled to take) would probably violate a law or two. This wouldn't help the employee unless they went to court or the NLRB with it, but if some employee eventually did the court/NLRB may require things from the employer to prevent such incidents in the future.

I don’t think Walmart cashiers are saddled with non compete. You might have a good point here, but you will fail to get it across if you frame it in such ludicrous, obviously false way.

I don't know about Walmart cashiers, but non-competes are concerningly common for entry-level positions like sandwich chefs or delivery drivers:

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/15/upshot/when-the-guy-makin...

This article is just NYTimes grasping at straws, trying to conjure a narrative that’s completely foreign to 99.999% low wage workers.

Non-compete clauses are not “concerningly common”, these are in fact so rare that NYT couldn’t even point out to a single example of non-compete actually affecting low-wage workers: their leading example of Jimmy Johns is not something that ever been enforced, and I seriously doubt that any worker there is even aware of this clause in the contract (low wage workers don’t read these anyway).

https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2022/article/noncompete-agreeme...

This is data from a longitudinal survey of which the respondents were 32-38 years old when in the 2017/2018 survey.

Scroll down to Table 1 and Chart 2 and it looks as though non-compete agreements affect about 1 in 11 people who make approximately minimum wage (presuming these self-reports are accurate), and increase in frequency from there.

-----

Non-competes for job creators can indirectly impact low-wage workers by preventing a job-providing business from opening in their area.

And while trickle-down economics isn't that powerful of a force, it does exist. When non-competes suppress higher-level wages this has a knock-on effect on lower wages, and a side-effect of reducing the discretionary income the higher wage people can spend into the lower-wage economy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com