<p>Hi
just got curious during making a decision about my college</p>
<p>I got accepted to UIUC Purde UW PSU Arizona. etc</p>
<p>I know UIUC is the best school i have right now</p>
<p>but I am kinna worried the fact Illioinois’s , the state itself, economy is not as prosperous as other states like California, and therefore effect the future job after my graduation from UIUC</p>
<p>that being said, what Engineering school is really “rising stars” and which is not.</p>
<p>Superficially, UIUC’s engineering school itself seems to be a rising star</p>
<p>Uh, did you not perhaps realize that <em>Chicago</em> happens to be in Illinois…? The state itself is doing just fine.</p>
<p>Also, people from California and the like are, in my experience, often very desperate to grab a few Illinois grads from Chicago and St Louis companies. After I got my MS from UIUC, I got a lot of offers, and people all over the country seemed to be very impressed with the fact that I came from Illinois’s program. Don’t worry about it.</p>
<p>^ I think people from California are preoccupied enough with the hiring of UC/Caltech/Stanford grads…</p>
<p>It saddens me to say that overwhelmingly, most professional engineers and people I know in California come predominantly from the UC system (we lack academic diversity I know). You might be the cool guy though if you ever work here. UIUC is a great school from what I have read on CC (although most Californians are not really aware of it).</p>
<p>That’s because they’re there, and they’re plentiful, and they’re used to cost-of-living being what it is in California. All the firms I worked with would <em>love</em> to bring in people from the top schools east of California, but once they hit salary offers and their prospects start looking at real estate and leasing prices, the offers hit the skids and the candidates decline the offers. It was a huge problem at my old firm.</p>
<p>It’s not that the companies don’t want out-of-state people, it’s that the out-of-state people can’t fathom paying 2K/month for a two bedroom apartment.</p>
<p>The Fermilab is outside of Chicago, and there is also the CATerpillar plant in Peoria if you you’re in to that. Of course, there are also plenty of jobs in Chicago, I’m sure.</p>
<p>However, don’t feel limited by your college location. I’m going to UI and I want to get a job in either SoCal, Raleigh, Boston, or Hamburg. Who knows where I will end up…</p>
<p>Totally agree with California companies having a problem with sticker shock from potential employees. A guy that got his PhD in the lab I was working in last year was offered a position at a national lab in California. They offered him somewhere around $90k as a post-doc. He got a job off for around $80k to stay in Pittsburgh. He wouldn’t even have been able to afford renting a nice apartment for the same price he’d pay on a mortgage for the house his wife wanted to build in the Pittsburgh area. It was a fairly easy choice for him to make (especially since both of their families were in from PA).</p>
<p>Yeah, but I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. The reason why California is expensive is because it is desirable. Landlords wouldn’t be able to charge 2k a month for a small apartment if nobody wanted to live there. </p>
<p>I think one benefit to working in California that has been vastly ignored is the issue of noncompete agreements. They are completely illegal in California (except for a tiny exception for trade secrets), but legal in most other states. What that means is that while you are completely free to work for a competitor firm or start your own company immediately after you leave your previous employer if you are in California, that often times isn’t true in other states. Since most non-competes are industry-specific, you may be forced to work in another industry for which you have no previous working experience and hence are forced to take lower pay. Or in extreme cases, you may even end up not really being able to work at all, i.e. if your skills are so specific that they aren’t applicable in other industries. </p>
<p>In fact, it gets even worse. Employers may ex-ante not even dare to even consider taking a better job at a competitor firm for fear that they will be sued for violating their non-compete. What that also means is that some (evil) bosses will use their power as a hammer on you: i.e. they will simply refuse to give you the raises or promotions you deserve, or even reduce your pay, knowing that you can’t easily go anywhere else because of your noncompete. </p>
<p>I’ll give you an example. During colloquium, I heard about a guy who got a PhD from MIT, specializing in speech recognition, had published a number of papers on the topic, and was widely regarded as a rising star in the field. But then he made the fateful mistake of joining a speech recognition company that made him sign a noncompete. Then after he quit the job (or was fired from the job, depending on who you ask), he basically found that he could no longer get another job in speech-recognition because he feared being sued for violating his noncompete. So - just like that - he found he could no longer work for two years (the length of the noncompete) in the industry that he had spent years studying for and building experience within. </p>
<p>Granted, maybe that’s an exaggeration, for maybe he could have beaten the noncompete in court for being too onerous, but he couldn’t afford to take that chance, because what if he lost? Then he would have been completely bankrupted. Heck, even if he had won, he still would have had to pay a small fortune in legal fees, just for the right to get a job in his own area of expertise.</p>
<p>Non-competes are pretty unenforceable and a restraint of trade.
The most extreme I have seen are for only one year, not two. Even two would not be so long as to destroy a career. They usually only prevent you from working for a direct, active customer… not a competitor. I think this story is apocryphal. Tip: never indemnify an employer (which means you’ll pay their legal bills to sue you) and always specify that the agreement follows the law in your location… not their HQ. Why should you bear the expenses of going somewhere else to try the case? They should have to go to your location.</p>
<p>Heh heh, trust me, the story is not apocryphal in the least. I know who the guy is. </p>
<p>2-year noncompetes are indeed unusual, but do exist. Furthermore, noncompetes often times specifically bar you from working for competitors. In fact, that’s usually the whole point of a noncompete - a firm fears that you will take proprietary information to its competitor. Furthermore, noncompetes have been found to be quite enforceable in almost every state, within some level of reason. </p>
<p>I suggest you actually read up on the state of noncompetes and what they can and cannot do and how they impact innovation. In particular, I recommend Marx, Strumsky, and Fleming (2007).</p>
<p>Of course, this is all off the OP’s target…
NDAs (Non-disclosure agreements) are more common. As stated above, what an employer really doesn’t want is its intellectual property, etc. being taken by an ex-employee.<br>
I think a simple trip to a lawyer to discuss the agreement (the fee would probably be $100) to see if there was even a problem would have been better that sitting on a couch for two years.<br>
Bottom line: slavery is illegal in all 50 states. If no consideration (compensation) is being provided, there is no contract to provide a service or non-service to a non-employer.
“Most jurisdictions in which such contracts have been examined by the courts have deemed them to be legally binding, so long as the clause contains reasonable limitations as to the geographical area and time period in which an employee of a company may not compete. Courts have held that, as a matter of public policy, an individual can not be barred from carrying out a trade in which he has been trained except to the extent that is necessary to protect the employer.”</p>
<p>So I doubt he was banned from working anywhere in the world for 2 years.</p>
<p>“Few States totally ban or prohibit non-competes to the extent, for example, that California does.”
“In Virginia, the enforceability of covenants not to compete is governed by common law principles. As restrictions on trade, CNCs are not favored by Virginia courts, which will only enforce narrowly drafted CNCs that do not offend public policy.” “In Virginia, a plaintiff must prove by a preponderance of the evidence that the covenant is reasonable in the sense that it is: (1) no greater than necessary to protect its legitimate business interests, such as a trade secret; (2) not unduly harsh or oppressive in restricting the employee’s ability to earn a living; and (3) not against public policy. Paramount Termite Control Co., Inc v. Rector, 380 S.E.2d 922, 924 (Va. 1989).” etc.
“Courts will rewrite overly broad non-competition agreements by redrawing geographic, time or other restrictions on an employee’s non-competition agreement.”</p>
<p>Quotes are from Wikipedia which has additional detail, citations, and examples from other states like Ohio.
Sorry, I could not find Marx, et al.<br>
Anyway, I’m not very interested in someone’s supposed problem (brought on by himself). I’m just extremely skeptical.</p>
<p>First off, I never said that he was banned from working anywhere in the world. </p>
<p>The problem is that he was specifically banned from working within his industry. Obviously he could have gone to work in an entirely different industry. But that’s precisely the point - the nondisclosure prevented him from taking another job within the very industry in which he had spent his entire adult life studying for and obtaining experience within. To go to another industry would basically mean starting his career over. That’s the problem.</p>
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<p>You didn’t look very hard if your research is restricted simply to Wikipedia. </p>
<p>I would dispute the notion that he truly brought this problem onto himself. I personally think that noncompetes ought to be completely illegal, as they are in some states (notably California).</p>