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Comment by tehwebguy | Hacker News Reader

Good luck trying to find a judge that would enforce a non-compete for basically any employee below a C-level title.

You can't sneak a non-compete clause in with no compensation for it and expect it to hold up in court.

From the article:

"Daniel McKinnon, who had been a hairstylist in Norwell, Mass., lost a court battle with his former employer who claimed that Mr. McKinnon had violated the terms of his agreement when he went to work at a nearby salon."

My assumption was that they left significant details out since there was so little on the case in the article. For instance some payment like severance in exchange for the noncompete.

If there was no compensation then it's truly insane - I can't imagine a judge possibly denying a person the right to work on the basis of a one-way contract. The thought that his options are to learn a new profession or get out of town, that's sort of insane.

In California, yes. In other states, this crap has certainly held up in court. You're also dealing with employees who, like some mentioned in the article, are unlikely to have access to lawyers or money to spare for legal bills.

Whether or not that's true, a lot of smaller companies in particular simply won't touch someone who has a non-compete because they don't want to get involved in any potential expense and effort of legal action. Rightly or wrongly I can tell you that a company I used to work for categorically refused to consider hiring anyone who had a remotely relevant non-compete.

I once dealt with a company that both 1) insisted I be clear of any non-competes, and 2) had an utterly horrible non-compete clause, that they assured me they would never enforce.

A company handed me a (client constrained) non-compete + non-hire and said the same before they would talk to me about a consulting gig.

The first thing to surprise them was that I actually read it. You should have seen their eyes when I started redlining it in front of them.

Agency: "We never enforce this, we are really cool, we even let one of our employees go work for one of our clients"

Me: "That's not what the paper says though. If you want to initial where I crossed that part out I can sign."

They dropped the issue and gave me the gig.

"No one ever reads it" is a standard negotiation tactic. You are being weird by trying to negotiate at all, so stop it, let's just move on okay?

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