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Comment by cullenking | Hacker News Reader

This seemed pretty interesting in that I could not recall another example of an entire development team leaving at once. Not to mention their way of putting themselves back on the market is interesting and humorous to say the least.

Does anyone else have any examples of entire development teams leaving at once and offering themselves for hire? Seems like a great way for the competition to snap up talent.

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They're in California too so they didn't have non-competes. I bet if they went to Kansas they would have had to sign them.

I'll let you in on a secret. You don't need to be in California to not worry about "non-competes". An employer rarely ever holds an employee to it; it is rarely ever upheld in court; they are just a deterrent. You cannot lawfully stop someone from gainful employment. The only time you will ever see a non-compete become an issue is if it is an executive, and even then it is rare.

You can stop someone from disclosing trade secrets, that is why most companies do a "non-compete / non-disclosure agreement". But, again, the non-compete part is about as enforced as the "do no remove label" on your mattress ;)

A company I used to work for is suing one of its ex-executives for starting a similar company after he was fired. I am interested to see how it turns out. The old bosses are of course telling everyone that they're going to win, but as you've noted, that goes against traditional wisdom and is probably just for psychological effect.

Non-competes can be enforced (even in California) if you are a founder and get bought out.

I've seen a non-compete enforced on a normal employee in Virginia - someone left a tech company that did graphics visualization to do graphics programming at a game company. While he probably would have eventually won the suit, the new company defended him - eventually settling for like 60k.

As a threat they're pretty effective at killing successful startups before they start up. I've directly experienced this sort of thing twice (well, I knew better than to sign them but others had).

Note that the lawsuit isn't going to be filed unless you're successful (or starting to be), upon which you're in for a world of hurt. Who wants to invest in a startup where success is going to earn that sort of "reward"?

Original Windows NT team with Cutler leading it was hired by MS when they left DEC (or was hired and then left DEC?).

Actually this happens very frequently when companies are acquired into larger more stagnant environments (or as Peter Lynch would label 'de-worisifcation'). It's not uncommon at all, and generally a good example of when these employees lockups or vesting has either completed, or reached an acceleration.

If Garmin wanted to move these people, they should have done so during the acquisition.

Peter Lynch labeled "de-worisifcation" as companies, for the sake of diversifying, heading into markets that have little relevance to their core business. It doesn't really apply here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinity_Ward

didnt the jruby team leave when bought by sun and start engineyard?

No, Engineyard was already around and was cool enough to give them jobs working on open source.

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/07/jruby-team-l...

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