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Comment by habosa | Hacker News Reader

A good example might be the practice of “garden leave” in finance where employees are paid to not work between jobs to reduce the risk of bringing active strategy information to a competitor.

Seems pretty low harm to the employee (it’s paid vacation) and it prevents some pretty ugly kinds of poaching.

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To my understanding "garden leave" wasn't disallowed, you can _pay_ people to not work for a competitor, but you can't enforce limitations on their employment if you aren't paying them.

I hear this quite frequently and I’d have to disagree. While it’s certainly hard to complain about getting paid to ride the bench (I’ve been there myself), garden leave inhibits one’s freedom to work on what they find interesting. Not to mention missing out on bonus.

A garden leave isn't a non-compete, as you are employed during that time, even if your job is doing nothing.

Techincally, garden leaves are longer, mandatory termination period, not banned under the FTC rules.

Garden leave non-competes were allowed under the FTC's rule.

Garden leave hurts everyone if key people are disallowed from working in their peaks years of their societal contributions.

More generally, in high turnover industries, we're taking out x% of the workforce and paying them to not work, not develop skills, etc.

That might be fine if you are getting 100% salary + benefits, but some of these agreements can be too broad. It could say that the amount of salary can be an arbitrary amount determined at the end of employment. What if they decide they only want to pay something like 50 or 75% base salary? Also once you are on a family plan, paying COBRA can be a substantial expense. My plan is nearly $1,600 a month if I had to pay the full amount.

How is this different than them being an employee (and the employer deciding that they don't have to work on anything)?

Also, I thought this was a British-ism, because over there employers can't fire at will and instead once the employee (or employer) has given notice then the employer must keep paying them until the end of the notice period.

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