[sangnoir]

Were all your employees blank slates when they joined, or did they "use" their previous employers to gain the skills required to become hirable by you?

If your training is so valuable, why aren't you charging for it? I'm sure your competition would be willing to pay lot's of money to have their people upskilled from 0.

[robomartin]

You managed to miss the entire point of the post.

It is obvious from your simplistic comment that you need to acquire a much broader perspective before being able to interject with value in a conversation on this topic.

[sangnoir]

It's telling that nowhere in you ad hominem did you attempt to give a simplistic answer to an argument against your position that a middle-schooler could construct; they may not know the Categorical Imperative, but can intuit what's fair and what's not, and are old enough to know the world doesn't revolve around them.

[robomartin]

Ad hominem? Funny. Pointing out something is wrong or stupid isn't an attack, it's a fact. Don't like it? Well, sorry.

It is clear from your original comment that you both missed the point and likely do not understand the matter enough to, well, make the comment you made.

Go hire someone who isn't qualified. Spend a year and a million dollars training them. Then see them go work for your competitor. Then, maybe then, you could have an opinion worth listening to.

Here's another one: Go use credit cards to pay salaries and take out a second mortgage to keep your business afloat during an economic depression (both of which I had to do in 2008) and then come back and see if you understand.

To simplify it for you, one of the things I said was that non-competes MIGHT (not DO, MIGHT) create a feedback mechanism that cause companies to avoid hiring people who need to be trained, for the simple reason that the training is valuable in time and money and the last thing they want is for those employees to jump ship as soon as they have gone through such training.

It's a simple matter of survival: If you are a small company or a startup, it would be suicidal. You are not in business to train people for your competitors or the industry. That's just a simple fact. You do that too many times and you are out of business.

And, again, to be clear, I don't like non-competes and advise everyone who asks not to sign them (if they live somewhere where they might be legal). It's a bad idea. However, once again, I understand why a small to medium organization might thing them to be essential when hiring people who need to be trained for the job.

[sangnoir]

> You are not in business to train people for your competitors or the industry.

If only employee retention were not an inscrutable black box. What are the poor job-creators to do in the face of ungrateful, capricious employees who can at anytime for unfathomable reasons like "more remuneration", "recognition", or "better working conditions". Perhaps one day someone in the social sciences will do research in this uncharted corner of human psychology, and 50 years later, employers will know what to do.

I've seen colleagues uproot their lives by moving across the country and be laid off before they got their 3rd paycheck. I have worked under a toxic manager brought in at a startup for the express purpose of increasing attrition, amd afterwards looked at his linked in an realized that was his speciality: a contractor brought in to shake engineering teams to see what falls. The power imbalance, and rate of abuse between employers and employees are clear to me.

[robomartin]

Sorry my friend. I know you are being sarcastic, but this continues to betray not having enough exposure to the realities of business, employing people and the realities of businesses of different scales.

Most employees are not evil, incompetent or undesirable. And the same is true of most companies. As is always the case in the real world, a few bad players cause all the problems.

A simple example of this are police forces. The overwhelming majority of people are good, law-abiding citizens and most of us never interact with police in the context of criminal matters. Policing and many of the laws they have to enforce, exist because of a very small number of criminals and idiots that fuck it up for everyone else.

It's the same in the employer-employee relationship. There are a small number of shit companies and a small percentage of shit employees, and that's where friction happens. That's where laws and some of what is being discussed in this threat is a necessity.

Another example from personal experience. We manufactured hardware products. In this context, we had very expensive manufacturing equipment and tools. For example, we had a whole series of specialized crimping hand tools for various connectors. These tools range in cost from $400 to $1,200.

I cannot tell you how many tools were stolen by our own employees over time --tens of thousands of dollars.

Once again, it's a few jerks that cause the problems. You could trust most people with your life, all it takes is one or two idiots to change things. And change they did. We had to institute a sign-out system. We setup surveillance cameras in the assembly areas. In some cases we had to buy full kits of tools, assign them to individual workers and make them sign for them (meaning, they are financially responsible if anything goes missing).

So yes, a few jerks, both companies and employees, are responsible for loads of shit nobody likes, including, to go back on topic, such things as non-compete requirements.

I don't like it. I just happen to understand why these things exist because I have held many of these cats by the tail. A reference to my favorite saying: "A man holding a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way" by Mark Twain.

One should never presume to understand anything until one has the experience to grab onto that tail and hold on for dear life. It is very easy to have opinions from an external perspective, in fact, everyone has them and they are all sure they are right.