Massachusetts could be even more innovative if they banned noncompetes. EMC is the biggest employer lobbying to keep noncompetes in the state. Dell, based in Texas will probably want to keep noncompetes in place as well.
In Minnesota, I've had companies twice drag me into court trying to enforce a non-compete and the judge laughed at both companies and I was sent on my way.
The key in both cases was the company I had left was trying to keep me from working in the same field for a competitor. My attorney argued that if I'm "gainfully employable" you can't restrict me from earning a living in my chosen field - to do so would invite economic hardship.
The judge asked if they would rather compensate me for two years at my current salary (which was a six figure salary), or let me go work for their competitor. The company quickly chose the latter.
Don't know, as I am in CA. Someone from MA would have to answer this. The reason I won't consider jobs in states where noncompetes are legal is because employers will force them on employees during the hiring process (usually by surprise after the employee has given notice at there previous employer).
Noncompetes would be almost fair if it was required to compensate the employee for the duration of the time it is enforced. In the US, that's rare, but in the EU it not uncommon (gardening leave). In other words, the real underlying reason that noncompetes are used is to limit job-hopping by employees looking for better working conditions or a higher salary, but under the guise of prevent company secrets from being disclosed to a competitor is what is sold to the legislature.
I've worked for 5 companies since I've lived in MA, I've only ever had to sign a single non-compete, over 10 years ago. None of the places I've worked since have had them. I've never met anyone in MA that had one enforced.
Even if you beat the cases easily, I don't want to face the potential stress and lawyer overhead to adjudicate one. It probably takes a long time to come to a judge. It just sounds bad. So I imagine companies think this will discourage people from moving jobs, even if its not enforceable.
Seems a little weird to avoid 90% of the country for this reason. Why not just ask at the beginning of the interview process? Do you know of cases where a company has lied about their policy until after the candidate has quit their old job?
They may not lie, but they will attempt to dodge the question. You may also be deemed a troublemaker if you probe too much. (Which is probably OK, as you don't want to work in such an environment)
They want the docile job candidate who will sign anything with no questions asked.
I totally understand avoiding companies like that, I just think discounting almost every state because of the possibility of a non-compete is way too extreme. I'm early in my career, but I've never had to deal with a non-compete even though they're legal, and I don't think the behavior you're describing is very common, especially for non-entry-level positions.
In Washington state, all the big companies,medium companies, and startups I have applied to use noncompetes. Amazon, Facebook (I'm pretty sure), google, microsoft, all use noncompetes.
The success record at enforcing them is pretty good, actually. There was a court case some years back enforcing a non-compete and now companies have gotten bolder at going after people. I speak from a little experience, having hired a MA employment lawyer on one of these issues and the non-compete prevented my accepting of either of two job offers.
Good point, in wa state there were non-competes for sandwich shop makers. This is just to keep poor people from having economic opportunity. This is different than keep my recipes secret. This is you can't do minimally trained labor for someone else.
Personally think you dodged a bullet there... Not sure you would be employable after a 2 year hiatus from your industry. I would worry about how the next job interview goes due to the gap and the can of worms opened when explaining matters (if you are dealing with traditional HR).
Would it have been possible to leave the state(MN) and continue to work in your field?
>> Would it have been possible to leave the state(MN) and continue to work in your field?
I was already planning on it and one of the companies I was in talks with at the time had an out state office I could work at until "the heat" died down so to speak.
You probably need to talk to a lawyer to confirm what I say here, but if you move to CA, the only way you could be sued is if the employer files suit in a non-CA courthouse first,
You may be able to file a lawsuit in the CA court system first to invalidate the noncompete. Again, check with a lawyer on this.
Also, read up on Section 16600 in in the California Business and Professions code.
Emergency Motion, Restraining order, Injunction - these are all very exciting for the lawyers involved and gut wrenching for the employees. Usually you have to be a CxO level or salesperson - or do something that makes someone with money really mad.
We're getting there slowly. Keep in mind our big high-tech industry isn't electronics or software but rather bio-med which is big money and far more business and culturally conservative.
As someone who works for a start-up and tries to hire in MA, our biggest issue for innovation is a lack of people. Hiring is extremely hard here due to lack of applicants. The cost of living in the area is relatively high (only about 20% less than SF) and the winter weather is too cold for most people. Thankfully, Boston isn't as opposed to building as SF, so lots of new apartments are coming on the market every year. Hopefully that will drive down rents, or at least justify the high rents with nicer apartments. I'm not sure what to tell people about the weather, though.
All those issues sound just like the scenario in Washington State, which mostly means the greater Seattle area.
Our blocking issues for growing are enough devs, infrastructure costs (roads are crowded, buildings are in shorter supply, hard to find a place to build a new building in Kirkland, say). Also high cost of living. I personally think non-competes must hurt freedom to move around companies here a little bit too. I have only heard of it being an issue a few times. Still, more worker freedom is better; it must be that some people are disincentivized from switching. Worker "job switching lubrication" is an important economic boost that California has and we don't.
As someone that lives in Cambridge and going by your linkedin profile and glassdoor salaries, you might want to try bumping your salaries up by 15+%...
Really? Have you or someone you know had their noncompetes held against them? I've never actually seen it done here (MA), which is a good reason alone to abolish them but doesn't equate to them holding back innovation.
It's a bullying tactic that makes it difficult for employees to either go out on their own or go to other companies.
Would you be willing to go to court to find out?
I used to work with a guy who came up with a fairly good product idea (in his own time and at his own cost). He brought it to mgmt and they were not interested (wasn't in our space). So he tried to go out on his own with it and immediately received a Cease & Desist order. His lawyer said if he went to court could easily cost him up to $50K to defend successfully. So he gave up & complied.
Can you imagine the outrage if a plumbing business tried to enforce a non-compete (e.g. "you can't work as a plumber for 2 years"). Well ... unions.
Mass. would do well to outlaw them, but sadly the state legislature is easily bought so I don't expect it to happen anytime soon.
The worst I've had to endure myself is "friendly warnings" in exit interviews, but I know others who have been sued or overtly threatened with a suit. It doesn't take many actual cases for the chilling effect to be felt all around.
That's quite surprising achievement considering their surface area and pop size which both relative to CA, are small. And given the CA propaganda, doubly surprising. On the other hand, they have some great higher ed institutions.
By propaganda I mean the constant CA self congratulatory atmosphere, we're the best, most innovative, always at the forefront of cool, if we were a nation we'd rank... economically, etc...
All of these metrics except for productivity are "density" measures. That is the size of the state matters (in a way that penalizes states with larger, more diverse economies).
A better ranking would be to use CSAs. Industry clusters are based more on region than states. State borders are relatively arbitrary with respect to technology clusters. CSAs are based on commute times so better reflect industry clustering.
Having said all that, I think MA is great. If I didn't hate the cold weather and East coast cultural conservatism I would consider moving to the Boston area.
Not to mention the east coast response to "the homeless are sleeping in our parks!" isn't "remove all park benches throughout the city".
Having lived in NYC and SF, I find that California's claim to being a liberal bastion isn't nearly as strong as reputed, and that the overall tenor of its social liberalism is fairly superficial.
I live in California but grew up on the East Coast, and I go back fairly often. I'm honestly baffled by your comment here. The main difference I see is in the diversity of people you will find in CA -- it seems that few people are really 'from' California, we all migrated here from somewhere else. But otherwise I don't see many cultural differences.
I've lived in both Boston and California. All of what I'm about to say comes from the small sample size that is personal experience and therefore YMMV, but this is my observation.
The most important difference between Boston (and the East Coast in general) and California is this: On the East Coast and in most other places, business culture has a kind of de-facto caste system in which executives, managers, and owners by definition are separate from and out-rank doers. To do is not to own, and to own is not to do.
In Boston if you roll up your sleeves and actually do the work, this makes you lower class compared to the executives who manage, own, and control. On one occasion I had this actually explained to me explicitly and the explanation included the phrase "CEOs don't do anything" stated as if this were a fact and a law of nature. It was explicitly explained to me that for a CXO-type person to actually get their hands dirty with real work was a dangerous distraction that would negatively impact their ability to lead.
In California, being a maker and a doer is respected equally and in some cases more than being a manager or a hustler. The extreme end of this is the CA startup culture where being a "non-technical founder" is sometimes seen as a liability. A founder might eventually transition to mostly managerial work but having a background and having been the original builder of the product is seen as a good thing and a badge of honor.
At the very least, being a maker and a doer in California does not count against you and mark you as lower class the way it does in Boston. It doesn't by definition mean you can't lead, found, or own.
This is why I left Boston. I couldn't stand it. The message I got from the culture is that I was a sucker for trying to get good at actually doing things. I don't have What It Takes and therefore I can only work for those who do. What It Takes is never quite defined but I gathered it to be a mixture of extroversion, a very dominant personality type, and mild to moderate narcissism. Skills and abilities and experience don't factor into it unless that experience is exclusively within the business realm.
East Coast: "I'll have my people talk to your people." -- the ideal archetype of the East Coast business elite would be Donald Trump or Carl Icahn.
West Coast: "Here let me get on that." -- the ideal archetype here is Elon Musk or Larry Page.
East Coast: "We're looking to hire people from the right schools." (I actually heard this multiple times and even read it in print at least once. Skills were not mentioned.)
West Coast: "We're looking to hire people with the right skills."
I also felt more classism in general on the East Coast. The fact that I'm originally from Ohio and went to a small Midwestern university meant I wasn't fit to mop the floor. The West Coast certainly has its Stanford cult but the Ivy League cult on the East is orders of magnitude more intense and pervasive. I know and do business with a number of high-ranking Stanford types and never have I gotten the sense that I'm a "plebeian" simply because I don't have an impressive university name behind me. If I'm talking to a Stanford Ph.D and what comes out of my mouth is intelligent, it feels like a conversation between equals and I don't get the sense that my opinions are inherently suspect.
Don't get me wrong. There is absolutely class in California, and if you're not from a top-tier university or an otherwise impressive background you will probably have to work harder to achieve a similar level of cred in most circles. But you can. Class is malleable here and if you demonstrate merit I've found that people respond quickly. By contrast out East it feels fixed by birth and education. After being there for years and working really really hard I did gradually feel like I'd risen a bit but it felt like a really slow process with a constant undertow. I did find that if I stopped referring to my educational background or place of origin people started to assume I'd gone to a place like MIT, so I could sort of sneak in under the radar and only reveal my beginnings once I'd thoroughly demonstrated ability. Out East I was actually tempted to lie about my education (never did), while out West the idea seems preposterous and silly.
There are exceptions in both places of course, but that was the general cultural zeitgeist I ran into. I imagine it might be even worse in a place like Washington DC where it's all about political clout.
I've been in rooms where someone's asked me "What year did you graduate Penn?" not because they were mistaken and thought I went there, but because the environment we were in was sufficiently high-class it didn't occur to them I might not have gone to an Ivy League school. It can get insane sometimes.
I had lots of experiences like yours up there. People noticeably changed their demeanor when they found out I was from Kentucky and Ohio, grew up on food stamps, and went to a medium sized Midwestern school. I once had someone actually ask me with a totally straight face "how do you know this stuff?" He was referring to machine learning and combinatorics. It was not meant as an offense. He was genuinely mystified that someone with my background could possibly know what a state space was.
I was once sitting in a restaurant in Boston for lunch. There was a basketball game on. I overheard two obviously upper crust fellows at the bar chatting about it: "I see they're playing a bit of street hoops... they must be in Chicago or Detroit."
"Detroit" was pronounced "dee-troit."
I'm a white nerd and right then I felt black as oil. Hilarious.
There's an amazing amount of brains and talent up there but it's all stuck in this morass of cultural anachronism. You could probably fix the place by kidnapping all incoming Harvard freshmen, dosing them with acid, and dropping them off at a hip hop show or Burning Man or something. It's too bad because Boston is a fantastic city and I otherwise liked it up there.
Unfortunately I fear that the insane gentrification in the Bay Area may eventually infect it with this stuff or at the very least drive out its culture of hands-on reality. You should thank the bums and the dirty hippies. They're a vital part of the ecosystem, a constant reminder that there is in fact a universe beyond planet trust fund.
The two I've heard are di-TROIT and DEE-troit. The emphasis is the most important, but "di" also typically doesn't have the long e sound (although it can).
Ha. Even worse, if you go out to eat on the east coast you often have to wear "nice clothes", they won't let you into the better restaurant unless you have a tie and jacket. What rubbish. :-)
I want to drive my Tesla up to the nice restaurant and get out in jeans. Up yours, fancy pants places.
> That is the size of the state matters (in a way that penalizes states with larger, more diverse economies).
Like 2nd rank California, home to 50 Fortune 500 companies ranging from Apple to Clorox to Allergan? /s
Also, diverse economy doesn't mean more innovative. Some companies like, say CVS in Rhode Island, can prop up a state's economy, but add little to the innovativeness of the state.
Boston is filled with college students and skilled professionals. The skilled professionals work in tech, biotech, finance, and healthcare primarily. Boston is an amazing city that any one who is tiring of the SF/SV scene should seriously consider.
Yeah, that would be more valuable. "Boston" is a huge portion of "MA", while (for example) "San Francisco" is but a small slice of "CA", so if the Boston area were compared directly against the San Francisco area, the results would no doubt be quite different.
Many of the Boston area tech companies are actually outside Boston (Cambridge, Rt 128) while many of the SF area companies are similarly outside San Franscisco (Palo Alto, Mountain View, Cupertino, Berkeley, etc).
It would be interesting to add a column of average income tax rates. At a glance, it seems like higher tax states tend to have more innovation, but that could just be my own bias.
(Correlation isn't sufficient to show causation, but it would show that taxes don't have a negative effect on innovation as many anti-tax proponents would argue.)
MA doesn't really have a high income tax. It's half of CA's and less than a lot of red states (AR, MO, TN). It's going to drop to 5.1% or 5.0% or something soon as well (I think?).
If could also show that where innovation has led to exploding revenue, politicians decided to take a bigger cut. The trouble is, with no way to isolate the effects, you can only make religious statements about the causes. People who want more state control will see taxes as a good, as they do given any set of facts.
California and Mass. have been blue, high tax states for decades. If high taxes were as destructive to entrepreneurship and innovation as low-tax proponents usually claim, one would expect that these two states would be in the economic dumps. Instead, the opposite is true.
Washington state is the easy counter case for high tax states. No state income tax, 10% sales tax. Doing about as well as these states. In fact, you are prohibited from moving here. And there's a constant complaint that we are overtaxed and that adding income taxes would destroy the state (just like Mass. and Ca. have been destroyed).
- Tektronix (now acquired), founded in Portland in 1946
- Intel, opened their largest center outside Santa Clara in 1974
+ lots of companies that have been acquired, etc.
California has a bunch of great stuff going for it in terms of weather, a variety of landscapes, and so on, but between the NIMBYs and the inability to deal with density... yeah, it's got some serious problems too.
I visited Boston once in the summer. Nice place, but no way would I ever live there.
I have to disagree with you there, but only about the part where you say MA and CA are not desirable. Oregon is a wonderful place, but Massachusetts and California are also great. I'd be happy to live in any of them (I live in California).
Contributing to the ranking of MA is probably Boston's "Innovation District"[0] that has been renovating some of the less-nice parts of the South Boston waterfront area.
I don't understand the point of things like these. You could choose any set metrics or variables that you want. How do we know these arbitrary categories are actually associated with a meaningful outcome? This is silly
I stay in Tri-State area within Memphis Metro bounds mainly. The culture and priorities of local governments seem to be against intellectualism or high-tech to the point that TN and MS's positions on the list don't surprise me. That TN beat out MS made sense but sad that MS was so low. Thing is, the Mid-South needs innovation and high-tech jobs to offset the poverty and crime coming from losses in manufacturing and farming. Yet, it's almost like they fight positive stuff.
Not sure if any of this applies to AK. The three states usually have more similarities than differences as it's all similar types of people. Like an extended family, haha.
I know exactly what you mean, there's a really strong anti-intellectualism that blankets this region. It's mostly in rural areas, but that accounts for probably 95% of the state's geography so they get to call all the shots unfortunately.
Also Arkansas is AR, AK is Alaska. A pretty common mistake, cousin ;D
Oops. I slip on those kind of things all the time haha. Yeah, the rural areas are dominating in that. I think the push will have to focus on how increased tech will bring more jobs to the area and maybe (ironically) increase their voice on politics. A way to stay in the loop, be heard, negotiate deals, whatever. Might be a decent selling point.
It seems to be working in Texas. Dallas is such a technological hub now that Texas might actually become a blue state before long! It gives me hope for my area, at least.
I was thinking about Texas as I wrote that. They're the innovation leaders in the South. Another tactic of mine is appealing to the pride of local states by reminding them Texas is kicking their asses and they can't let that happen. So, we steal anything good they're doing without the... Texan stuff...
What you think? Competitiveness might help where other strategies failed?
Note: Texas has to factor into these discussions one way or another as they've shown how to get it done. I figure at least Nashville or Knoxville in TN could follow suite as they're already playing it smarter (err closer to Texas) than most of the South in IT. Chattanooga went 1Gbps, too. I'm not sure what cities are comparable in... AR... and MS.
Southaven MS was one of the first cities in America to offer public wireless internet service. Otherwise I can't think of a single good thing for tech to come out of that area.
I was over there just a week ago. Didnt know that about them. The thing they havd going is they're a miniMemphis with lots of growth and low cost of living. There's untapped potential there.
I'm a born and raised Memphian and I stayed as long as I could before I hit a career ceiling. I never intended to leave, but I'm even happier living in the SF Bay Area.
Good to see two of us here. :) Ive stayed in area for family reasons mainly but will probably move soon. Whole Tri-State area is a dump far as IT jobs and innovations go. Plenty of smart people but they just go under-utilized.
Eh being from AR (though I now live in Colorado) I'm not totally surprised. It doesn't help such a large percent of the state's revenue/business is concentrated in a tiny portion of the state (mind you at least it is next to the biggest university as well).
Lots of medical jobs - the NIH is in Bethesda, and Johns Hopkins Hospital is the #1 employer in Baltimore (with the university not far behind). Plus tons of NASA (Goddard), DoD (Ft. Meade and NSA headquarters), and related contractors in the DC suburbs. DC has more post-graduate degrees per capita than any state (and more than most cities), and Maryland gets a lot of spillover.
The difference in the statistics is explained below the chart - "STEM concentration" is based on employment field, regardless of education.
