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Comment by vwoolf | Hacker News Reader

Until "everywhere else" bans non-competes, like California does, California is unlikely to lose its position as the leader site and state for innovation: https://techcrunch.com/2016/02/18/silicon-valley-keeps-winni..., despite California's many policy missteps from housing restrictions to failure to enforce basic law and order.

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I live in a European country, and while non-competes are legal, if a company chooses to exercise them, they are also forced to continue to pay you for the duration, and you can still take a non-competing job in the mean time.

Non-competes are also judged rather narrowly: they can't ban you from working for any tech company, they need to operate in the same space as the one you worked in before.

Such an own goal by Washington and New York leaders to not get rid of non competes. They were both millimeters away.

The financial sector in NY was never going to let a non-compete ban happen.

It came down to one person’s signature. If the industry had that much control, it would have stalled in the legislature. Seems pretty risky to let it come down to one person.

Edit: If anything, the big tech companies did a better job in Washington by allowing the non compete ban to pass for only jobs under $100k per year salaries. That way, political support is neutered in the future for any broad non compete ban that would actually affect them. For context, the legal minimum annual salary in Washington will be $90k in a few years.

New York is 1990s Indiana with NYC attached. Industrial powerhouses like Syracuse, Buffalo, etc are rust belt territory now.

With the export of American industry and the consolidation of all things agriculture, the solvency of the entirety of the state budget is almost entirely dependent it just on financial services, but specifically on income tax on Wall St bonuses. No sane governor would sign that bill.

The death spiral of agriculture in particular is incredible. Through incredibly incompetent policy decisions, entire regions of rural America are country ghettos, with our food supply dependent on a depleted aquifer in the Midwest and the fickle Colorado River.

Been in Tech for 20 years and never encountered a non compete clause

I had one for the first time in 20+ years for my last gig out of a Midwest state. Said I wouldn’t take the job if it was forced. They folded.

There were non-compete clauses in every employment contract I saw when I started my software career (east coast circa 2005). Companies even tried to weasel them into the independent work contracts they signed with me when I did independent contracting for a while.

As someone who's been in tech in Texas for nearly 25 years, I've always had to sign a non-compete as a full time employee. It's all state/locale dependent.

Banks have asked me for one, when all the job is writing internal tools, no deep trading secrets

Probably easier to apply across the board instead of on a per-role basis.

It's not just the non-competes though.

California explicitly protects ownership of inventions made on your own time/equipment[0].

AFAIK other states tend to default to employer ownership of inventions.

This alone is a huge win for Cali when it comes to HN/maker type folks...

[0] https://law.justia.com/codes/california/2010/lab/2870-2872.h...

I see non-compete agreements in tech employment all the time in the US.

I also had to push back against an overly broad non-compete when contracting.

When I was leading engineering at an early startup, I had to push back against our lawyer, who drafted an employment agreement that none of us wanted to sign. It included broad non-compete, and a bunch of other grabby clauses.

That startup one was tricky, because we were getting rumors that supposedly investors were demanding non-competes from tech startups. Silicon Valley notwithstanding. (And a bunch of clauses I hadn't seen before, including things like, IIRC, the company has right to do search and seizure in the home of the employee, on IP grounds. This was pre-Covid.)

It's hard to argue, when you're an aspiring actor, fresh off the bus in LA, and a producer is claiming to you that every role starts with the casting couch.

To resolve the argument-from-authority impasses on the startup's employee agreement, the company reimbursed me to hire a lawyer representing me as an employee. Both for my own interests as an employee, and to provide some kind of balance for the interests of employees in general.

Housing in San Francisco, the Penninsula and Silicon Valley is constrained by the fact that it's rich, already built out and there isn't anywhere else to expand to at the edge of town because of water or hills. People commute from outlying areas such as Tracy and Modesto where there's been massive construction of housing over the last 30 years.

> there isn't anywhere else to expand to at the edge of town because of water or hills

San Francisco has massive infill potential [1]. Its limited, expensive housing is a policy choice.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jake-Wegmann/publicatio...

New York is rich and yet can still build up. Bay Area NIMBYs are just next level.

That’s because of the giant amounts of land to the east of 280 that you’re not allow to build on

Convenient for existing land owners..

Already built out land should be made denser. I don't want the area to be expanded; that will make the area worse for walkability and bikeability; I don't want to see super commuters commuting from Tracy or Modesto because that's so much pollution, congestion, and misery; I also don't want to see the area's abundance of large open space disappear. We should instead make the current built land denser by strongly encouraging existing single-family homes to have ADUs or be converted into duplexes and fourplexes. We should require all new residential construction to be multi-family units meeting density standards. We should set minimum height rules for new residential buildings to encourage vertical use of space.

100% this

The culture this has created and kept going over the last decades is exactly why.

It's not because the laws anymore, it's because the change in the law so many years ago changed the culture, changed the attitude about what was "right" Andover the needle towards favoring innovation and employee talent maximization over their career rather than focus on the profits of individual companies or the output of the company. Its so worker focused, worker aligned - and in an industry that relies heavily on thought leadership type work, that is a very attractive work environment for those types of people.

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