The California Supreme Court recently ruled that most non-compete agreements aren't valid. I've seen a bunch of commentary, most of it saying that this is a non-issue and that it won't change the way we work. I have seen some comments that this might free up more workers to leave their jobs and move on, and possibly provide greater worker freedom to change jobs.
I'm bound by a non-compete agreement, actually two, from the sale of SQLServerCentral.com. I have one that was a time limited agreement not to engage in a competing business (another SQL Server site, essentially) for a fixed time span after the sale. I have another that is part of my employment that is similar, and is for a time frame beginning from when my employment were to be terminated.
In both cases, I have had mixed feelings about the agreements. On one hand I understand that I am well paid, and part of that compensation is because I have some skills (debatable), and a following (why, I'm not sure), and my employer wants to retain me. If I were smart, I'd be setting aside some portion of my salary to cover the time of the non-compete time frame to support myself.
My employer wants protection that if I were to quit, that I wouldn't take some large percentage of readers to some other site next week. The non-compete gives them time to find someone else to write this nonsense and gain some traction so that at some point if I were working for another site, SQLServerCentral.com would not necessarily be harmed by my leaving.
Side note: I don't plan on leaving as I have the best job I've ever had, so don't worry.
But is it fair that I couldn't practice my skill, writing, for a period of time. Many people, in many technical jobs, would not be able to pay their bills if they couldn't work in their field. Take an embedded systems developer, for example. They may be able to make a good living working in some niche area. If they leave their job for some reason, is it fair that they can't find work in that area when most of their skills would be in demand from competitors? The guys and gals that build SQL Server, most of their skills are in database engine development. Do you think they could make as much from some corporation as they could from Oracle, DB2, Informix, Sybase, or some other database vendor? Probably not.
So are non-competes fair?
I tend to view them as fair in some situations, but overall they've been abused and applied in a blanket fashion to most people when they shouldn't be. A non-compete should only cover someone using specific company knowledge or trade secrets to aid a competitor, not their general knowledge or skills. So a SQL Server storage engine developer (at Microsoft) should be able to go to work for Oracle tomorrow, but they shouldn't be able to implement the same backup routines or concurrency algorithms there. Just as a salesman should be able to go sell similar products, but not necessarily approach his current customers.
As with many other situations in the database world, I think the best answer for whether a non-compete should apply is "it depends."
Steve Jones
The Voice of the DBA Podcasts
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