[dan-robertson]

It’s reasonably normal to be more like garden-leave where the employee is paid some high percentage of their base salary for some amount of time when they may not compete. This can still be very expensive for employees who will often have bonuses that are a large multiple of their base and so going down to base for the duration of the garden-leave.

Some places won’t compensate for the noncompete at all, others won’t compensate if the person works at a non-competitor. Some have a mix, eg up to a year of (paid) garden leave followed by up to a year of (unpaid) noncompete. If someone does leave one firm for another, there is often some negotiation, eg maybe the hiring firm agrees not to have the person work on certain things for some amount of time (potentially longer than the noncompete) and in return they can get them sooner.

So one solution is to allow noncompetes so long as employees are fairly compensated. It seems hard to discuss improving the rules around fairness there if you’re a politician because quant firm employees are not very sympathetic – it looks bad to say they are mistreated when they make many times more than lots of other professionals, even though by allowing that mistreatment you’re effectively giving the money to their even-better-off bosses instead.

[amelius]

> It’s reasonably normal to be more like garden-leave where the employee is paid some high percentage of their base salary for some amount of time when they may not compete.

Some would use that money and time to start a competing company :)

[dan-robertson]

If you’ve been successful enough at a quant firm that you want to try to set up your own firm, it’s not one year of base pay from garden leave that’s going to be providing your start-up capital.

But also, setting up a competitor is definitely violating noncompete. If you look at how actual firms started (basically all of them start from people leaving other firms) the founders waited out noncompetes. It would be a waste of money and potentially scare off investors by risking getting massively sued.

The things people normally do are like:

- go travelling, especially to places less well suited to short trips. Hard for people with partners who don’t want to stop working for a year or two.

- learn/train for something. Eg maybe requires a bunch of courses or maybe just a lot of time and effort.

- some combination of the above, eg mountaineering requires a certain amount of training/fitness as well as long trips

- some kind of civic/vocational thing where you’re applying professional skills from work but not IP, eg taking a more active role as a charity trustee

- spending more time with kids/other family

- working for some non-competitor like Google for a year.

[auntienomen]

Lawyers will advise you not to do this. It exposes you to accusations of IP theft and barred competition.

[iancmceachern]

It worked out for the traitorous 8