Reading 02: Non-Competes and Job Hopping

Currently, I don’t know where I see my career headed. My dream job would be something in the gaming or movie industry, but the job I have lined up for next year is not in either of those. The job I have lined up for after graduation is the place I interned at this summer, and I liked it enough to go back when I got the offer. However, I didn’t like it enough that I plan to stay there longer than a few years. What I do after that, I’m not sure yet. As some of the articles in the reading for this week pointed out, staying at one job for a long time could result in a 50% less salary, while job hopping every few years could make you a more marketable employee as you pick up more skills and get a more diverse experience. These factors, however, are not my reasoning for thinking I will move on from my employer after a few years. Rather, my goal is to find a job that I really love, and once I find it, stay at that job as long as possible or as long as it I still enjoy it. For me, I see job hopping as the path to finding my ideal job, not as a strategy for making more money.

I think that there is such a thing as company loyalty, and it is something that many companies wish to instill in their employees. If an employee genuinely enjoys working at a company, then they will be proud of the company’s brand and loyal to the company’s secrets. This requires some loyalty from the company towards the employee, however. The company should look out for the wellbeing of employee, and show that the employee is taken care of. In the same way, the employee should reciprocate by taking care of the company’s secrets and trying to make the company as successful as is in their power.

A big issue in loyalty are non-competes. I feel these violate the idea of company loyalty. Rather than relying on building a trust with their employees, non-competes forcibly prevent employees working for competitors for a certain amount of time after leaving. In the case of Mark Papermaster, who went to try and work at Apple after working at IBM, he was forced to take a 6-month unpaid vacation before he could work at Apple. IBM claimed to be concerned that he would give Apple some company secrets. This, however, is ridiculous, as it in no way prevents Mark from giving IBM secrets to Apple if he had planned to (which, as the article points out, he likely had no relevant information to share with Apple from IBM). Rather, it seems to serve only as a punishment for Mark leaving IBM. It seems to me that IBM’s non-compete clause is less about preventing the leak of secrets and more about trying to keep employees at the company. If a company has secrets they wish to preserve, they should have their employees sign non-disclosure agreement and leave it at that. While it is understandable that a company is concerned with retaining talent, using the threat of a year without work, or something similar is not an ethical way to do it. On the flip side, employees need to be careful of job hopping. While I feel there is nothing wrong with leaving a job you do not like after spending only a couple years there is fine, getting in the habit of staying at companies for only a few years is not a good thing to do, particularly if you are upset with companies having non-competes. Companies feel the need to implement such things as non-competes because they feel threatened by the idea of their employees leaving. In the same way that employees want to feel secure in their jobs, companies want to feel secure in retaining their employees, however, I don’t believe that non-competes or other such strong arm methods are good ways to go about doing this.