Item — HN Reader

It’s not the noncompetes that’s the problem, it’s confidentiality agreements with extremely broad language.

Learn about the legal principle of “inevitable disclosure”. It’s the idea you can’t work for a competitor because you can’t help yourself but violate an NDA

3 comments

I haven't heard much about it, but I am incredibly curious about how this is currently shaking out in the AI craze.

It seems these labs are revolving doors, and any kind of breakthrough knowledge would immediately make you incredibly valuable to other labs or incredibly valuable as a spinoff start-up. Never mind these researchers all knowing each other and certainly having more than a few common spaces (digital or IRL). And the excitement of working in a fresh field still littered with low hanging fruit.

I can't help but feel that a large part of the reason why the labs are neck and neck is because everyone is talking to everyone else.

I can't substantiate any of this though, it seems to have largely dodged anything besides internal conversation.

They're all in California where the law is very pro-employee. As long as you're not taking actual documents or code with you, there's nothing your former employer can do about what's in your head.

This is a huge part of how SV as a whole works. People figure out what works and point out how to do things better at their next roles. It's mostly a good thing. The main downside is that it exacerbates tendencies to cargo cult apply solutions for problems that come from a particular organizational scale to orgs without them.

Inevitably, it's just the need for lawyers to intervene in "common sense" negotiations. It's never legal to do X, Y, Z, but if the business has all the lawyers and the employee has non, then it doesn't really matter whats legal; it's whose willing to exhaust the cash to fight the issue.

Which of course, is why unions are what's needed to properly negotiate employee-employer relationships, the same way a strong government is needed to negotiate corporate-civil relationships.

Americans, however, have decided that "individual freedom" is _soooooo_ valuable, that it only exists for people with enough cash to defend it.

Have fun trying that in CA.