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Comment by j7ake | Hacker News Reader

Checking voleons website some of their standard roles pay 150-190k, don’t know how they expect someone to accept that job with non competes like that.

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I've black lined a lot of clauses in employee agreements like the one in the article. When questioned by the company I tell them I cannot agree to such terms at the salary being offered and generally propose what I consider to be an outlandish number as salary plus paid PTO in exchange for it. Typically, the company just signs. Sometimes they tell me to eff off. Only once has someone paid me what I thought was an absurd rate to not work for their competitor.

My current non-compete is in the finance industry and uses paid salary during garden leave as a way of avoiding non-compete laws. Nobody esp cares whether it is legal since its a year or two paid vacation.

> My current non-compete is in the finance industry and uses paid salary during garden leave as a way of avoiding non-compete laws

More often than not they will quite happily waive the non-compete and the pay - a sensible arrangement for all concerned.

Yes, this happens often enough but for those who it doesn't, the salary isn't really enough. You'll drop from almost a million to a few hundred k.

We're told from the start to live within our salary and investment returns. If you make $200k base, usually make about $1m TC and choose to spent all of your cash every year, I don't feel esp bad for you. The operative word from VR is variable. Leaving, not negotiating a sign-on bonus with the new firm, and getting your garden leave enforced isnt much different than a bad year wiping out your VR, except you have to make your own mistakes at every turn to put yourself in that situation.

Absolutely true. Just illustrating it's not a vacation. You're missing out on productive years. Most people I know did a FAANG stint.

All bonus performance comp. The majority/all individuals who join a fund know how comp works in that industry.

So "we'll pay more than that, we promise, we just can't promise in a way thats legally binding" and "you aren't allowed to look for a better deal if you dont like what we give you"

Sounds ripe for abuse.

It would seem that way, but I’ve known many people who have had 7- and 8-figure year-end bonuses. The key is that it’s not a one-time thing, it’s a repeated game with many players who share information. If a firm gets a reputation for underpaying its star performers, it won’t ever again get good talent, and it will die.

They tell you the formula. For a group like this it’s usually just a percentage of your profits.

I've worked for 4 different quant hedge funds and interviewed with about a dozen others to reach final stages and comp negotiations.

I can claim with full certainty that comp is entirely discretionary and is not beholden to any "percentages". They pay you min(market worth, amount to make you stay) - and those figures are reviewed every year.

Percentages only apply to discretionary traders who are allocated a book to trade. They get to keep a certain percentage. For everyone else, especially techies and researchers, it's discretionary.

Yes, if you have no pnl attribution the concept of a take doesnt even make sense. I've never heard of a fund with attribution that does not pay the analysts some percent of their profits.

It’s crazy that it is discretionary but still have extremely oppressive non competes.

Is the formula legally binding? Can they change it retrospectively and pay out a lower bonus than it would require?

No but these places are 100% dependent on attracting and retaining talent, as alpha decays quickly in unmaintained strategies.

> Is the formula legally binding?

Sort of. Traders have successfully sued when screwed on a formulaic bonus. If it's discretionary, and historically didn't follow a formula, an employee has much less to stand on.

Normally you end up with a known percent of the firm's profits. The profits can't be known in advance, but everything else is.

It's still below industry average for base comp.

"In two of the contracts seen by Insider, the bonus payments exceeded the employee's base salary."

one move here is to use reputation and geographic reach to find edge candidates who are both skilled and also disadvantaged personally. This is part of "skills arbitrage" and is happily embraced as game rules, yet, with internet and database enabling access across economies and jurisdictions, one could argue that is can easily tip against the individual applicants over time, due to power imbalances.

One edge case for deeply-imbalanced power relationships is expressed in the writings of classical Italian advisor Machiavelli, and more recently in the US in the book "48 Laws of Power" by Robert Greene.

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