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by ghaff 1863 days ago
I honestly think non-competes are overstated. I've worked in MA most of my life, once signed one, and it was very specific. I now work for a company that even lets me contribute to competing open source projects. Do all non-CA companies let you do that? I'm aware of one or two consulting firms that have very draconian non-compete clauses but not sure it's very common and MA, specifically, defanged them a while ago.

Personally, I think it was more of a conservative East Coast mentality vs. an anything is possible West Coast Mentality.

Stephen Levy's Hackers is probably a good start (but skip the Stallman The Last Hacker part).
3 comments
paxys 1863 days ago
Non-competes are absolutely not overstated. Microsoft would frequently sue employees in WA for violating non-compete agreements when they bounced to work for Google, Facebook or other tech companies who were starting to open up offices in Seattle.

Amazon recently sued an exec for moving to Google cloud (also in WA) – https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/11/aws-case-against-worker-who-...).

Here's an IBM one from New York – https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=84252db4-ccc3....

A quick search yielded a ton of results for large tech companies suing employees and each other over non-competes, and – surprise – none of them are in California.

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astrange 1863 days ago
I'm not sure how often it comes up, but SV started with Fairchild Semiconductor being founded by everyone leaving Shockley's company - so it would've been important right at the start.
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onlyrealcuzzo 1863 days ago
Honestly - isn't it most likely to be random luck?
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ghaff 1862 days ago
Possibly.

To the degree that you believe Shockley was an important catalyst, that does seem to have been largely happenstance. There are arguments to be made that the next phase after the minicomputer would logically be somewhere other than the Northeast. On the other hand, a great deal of computer tech prior to the minicomputer was concentrated on the northern part of the East Coast, so why a shift? Finally, given Compaq, Dell, and TI, why not a more robust Silicon Prairie earlier?

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