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Comment by candiddevmike | Hacker News Reader

You're fortunate you could afford an attorney and successfully argue your case. Most of the folks under a non compete (like hourly restaurant workers!) probably can't do that.

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That really is an abuse of employees to enforce non-competes on restaurant workers. There's nothing proprietary or top secret from one place to another, it's just a way to screw someone over if they leave so that they have no choice but to stay. In the UK and EU, we prohibit non-competes specifically to stop this kind of employer power over employees, seeing it essentially as a form of modern-day indentured slavery.

On the other hand, for extremely top-level managers or workers with access to commercially sensitive information, I can understand the desire for non-competes, but we would typically solve that by having contractually agreed long notice periods (putting people on gardening leave for the notice period) and NDAs.

> we would typically solve that by having contractually agreed long notice periods (putting people on gardening leave for the notice period) and NDAs.

Which is what would happen if non-competes were outlawed.

Are they ever really enforced? I've heard it's almost entirely an intimidation thing like cease and desist.

That's a form of enforcement, as it comes with the threat of legal action if the worker doesn't immediately quit their new job.

My wife was sued by the very large company she worked for under a non-compete after she went to a company that they saw as a competitor. They sued her in Texas (even though she worked for them in a Northeast state) and the two companies spent $500K battling it out before it even made it to discovery. We were out $20K personally just in legal fees to have an independent lawyer advising us. Neither company cared about her particularly, but were really fighting each other. When the old employer successfully got an injunction against her, then moved the case to Federal court, and laid out what the first year of the case was going to look like (while she was unable to work at all because of the injunction), she pulled the plug and settled with her old company with an incredibly one sided agreement, basically hamstringing her from working in the industry for the next 18 months.

So, yes, they are sometimes enforced.

What line of work was she in? How awful

Product management

Jeez those two companies must have really hated each other. That sort of legal investment is usually a personal thing by CEOs as much as about business.

The new company was in California, where there are stricter non-compete laws, and had been poaching people from the old company. They were at the point, I think, where they both wanted to get federal precedent on non-competes to settle matters. This is what one of the lawyers in Texas told us (we had lawyers in three different states working on "our" team), when he suggested we might not want to play defendant in that game.

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