Hacker News Reader

Comment by alephnerd | Hacker News Reader

> If you’re at an EU company and need to give 3+ months notice to quit that will discourage starting your own company on the side.

India has similar non-competes to Western Europe, but is able to maintain an innovation ecosystem.

View on HN

India’s where offshoring from the us is. That maintains demand. India is also still industrializing. Expect India to look more like China - with similar economic pitfalls - in the next few decades. Some companies have already begun pulling from India because of costs and poor performance negating the labor savings. Some companies have figured this out and the non competes create a captive workforce but others are just wasting money trying to emulate.

> Expect India to look more like China - with similar economic pitfalls - in the next few decades

Pretty much this. The best way to operate in India is to use a mixed Chinese and Israeli mindset tbh.

> India’s where offshoring from the us is

True, but there is a massive change now from the 2000s where it's just BPO. Literally the crown jewels of enterprise and deep tech and increasingly innovated and designed by the India teams directly (eg. the cybersecurity backbone of a major 5G telco in the US, the Apple mobile chips, Google Pay, etc).

> The best way to operate in India is to use a mixed Chinese and Israeli mindset tbh.

What do you mean by that?

Indians are argumentative and sales driven like Israelis, but you still need to operate the same way you did in China in the 2000s, with local contacts and recognize that you might get scammed if you don't do your due diligence correctly, but if you make good friends with local partners or parties you will get the red carpet and PLIs.

Cadre-driven parties like the BJP, DMK, BJD, BRS/TRS, etc are organizationally similar to the CCP but other parties are more loose and disorganized, so having a local partner act as your firewall helps massively by pointing you where to invest, just like in China, where most western companies invested in Guangdong, Zhejiang, etc but ignored Hubei or Guangxi.

There's a reason why Israeli, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean companies tend to be fairly successful with their India ventures, because they're used to this kind of an operating model, and most American companies tend to have a first-gen Indian American or Indian educated in America managing operations with India.

Post-employment non-competes aren't enforceable in India [1][2][3]

[1] https://m.economictimes.com/jobs/fresher/it-freshers-beware-...

[2] https://www.business-standard.com/amp/industry/news/non-comp...

[3] https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bengaluru/cant-enfo...

You still need an NOC to shift to another employer, and if your boss is vindictive, they will make it hell.

India is very different than Europe. It would be difficult to attribute outcomes between the 2 countries to just this single difference without considering the many other differences.

Absolutely true, but I'm just pointing out that non-competes are not a major precursor for Europe's laggardness in innovation.

If all of the EU's innovation system is sclerotic compared to Illinois or MA or India where non-competes are vindictively enforced, then there is a major issue.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com