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Comment by fidotron | Hacker News Reader

> Under the final rule, existing noncompetes for senior executives can remain in force. Employers, however, are prohibited from entering into or enforcing new noncompetes with senior executives. The final rule defines senior executives as workers earning more than $151,164 annually and who are in policy-making positions.

Lot's of devs will be surprised to discover they are in policy making positions.

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I'd imagine that would be considered a role change and a new non-compete, and thus forbidden. That's definitely how I'd approach it if someone told me I was suddenly an exec. "Sweet, sounds good. Send over the new employment contract, then! With a 10% raise, of course."

New policy: no more non-competes

I suspect that "policy-making positions" is a term of art that is more narrowly defined than it looks and that it'll actually be difficult or impossible to abuse it enough to made it apply to SWEs. Most likely big 4 accounting firms have a definition of what that means and it is part of accounting and auditing standards. At any rate they'd need to first abuse it to apply to managers who are below VP levels.

It's defined in the rule...

Yeah, so its based on the SEC Rule 3b-7 definition of a company officer, only with some changes to make it even more restrictive to senior executives.

They're not going to be able to claim that a SWE is now the VP in charge of changing lightbulbs and is now a policy-making position. There is a whole lot of text in the rule about what a "policy making position" is, and I'm certain that there is a considerable amount of legal and accounting history behind that SEC Rule which will act as precedent.

Yep, this would impact basically any dev at Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, etc. From my own point of view (at MS), policy making decision do basically happen at my/our level too, unless policy is on the tier of "buyout Infection.AI talent". Any kind of planning research/work could be considered policy. Decisions like what kind of framework or listing to use? Policy!

Unlikely they are in a policy making position.

You're missing the subtle sarcasm here. OP is implying that companies will deem engineers making $150k+ as making policy decisions in order to continue enforcing the existing non-competes they have most likely signed.

I wish I was being sarcastic! IME the sort of people putting non-competes in contracts will claim things like "programming is simply the act of defining company policy in machine form".

That type of wording reduces programming to a mere policy-translation job, not a policy-making job.

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