Hacker News Reader

Comment by foobarkey | Hacker News Reader

In Europe if you want to force a non-compete you need to pay full salary for the duration, so if someone enforced non compete for 5 years I could sit home and play games while earning salary

View on HN

AFAIK this is only valid if the non-compete effectively prevents you from working in your profession.

Which is most of the time, granted.

I was told by an attorney years ago that non-competes were only enforceable if they had a reasonably defined scope and specifically were unenforceable in Right to Work states if it effectively prevented you from working at all.

Reasonable scope was something like max 2 years, specific distance from current office that wasn’t excessive (couple of miles) or had specifics about taking existing customers.

Yea, the previous employer needs to prove that your knowledge of their internals will harm them financially.

And you, of course, need to not be an ass and start poaching clients with insider information =)

Same. The biggest issue with non-competes is the intimidation factor. People are scared to challenge them even though without proper compensation and scope they are basically worthless. Few if any judges will prevent someone from making a living.

I also think they are mostly fine in the cases where they are properly constructed (compensation and scope).

That's the case in some European countries and it seems fair. If you don't want me competing, you pay for that privilege. Otherwise, the non compete is just an abuse of power.

There's no EU-wide law about this.

This is incorrect. Non-competes do mandate that there should be a compensation for the worker but not the value of said compensation.

Europe is not a single country, and even a single country would usually not have perfectly homogenous laws in all is regions.

...But in the near future they will have to agree on the common directive on this topic, which for now considers them as nonbinding, except for very specific corner cases, if even: https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/document/download/ad...

I have signed a two-year non-compete as a part of my contract in the Netherlands. The official government website says basically "yeah so non-competes are binding, but if you go to court, you have a decent chance of voiding it, no promises though, good luck".

Regarding the EU document, there's a very long way between "EU noticed a problem" and "EU fixed a problem".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com