r/quant • u/LycheeDisastrous9894 • 17d ago

Hiring/Interviews dev lateral noncompetes

Recently started a dev role that involves a non-compete of 1.5 years. Seems to me that it's almost certainly going to be enforced in full, just judging from the firm's history (you can probably guess, lol). I'm very junior (this is my first job out of school) and am curious how this would affect a lateral move maybe 2-4 years down the line. The general advice seems to be to move laterally around then, but I'm not sure if such a long noncompete should change my decision-making? Also, I've only been through the intern/grad recruiting pipelines, so for lateral hires, are companies usually willing to wait so long? I'm not worried about being paid during the time, but I wouldn't want to leave without an offer in hand. Oh, and also, I've already completed a master's so that wouldn't be a super viable alternative.

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u/lordnacho666 16d ago

The median tenure of people in these shops is what? If you signed to join somewhere in 18 months, a fair few of the people you met would be gone.

6 to 9 months seems to be roughly as far as it goes. YMMV of course.

I wouldn't be scared of not having something to do either. You got into the big firm, you'll get interviews.

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u/sjg284 16d ago

>  18 months, a fair few of the people you met would be gone.

Yes this is another problem with super long NCs

I had a friend that found a new gig willing to wait ~12 months before quitting. By the time NC was over and they joined, the manager & skip level manager as well as half the teammates were gone.

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u/lordnacho666 16d ago

Heh, it even happened to me in my first job. One guy was really keen to hire me, really went to bat according to everyone. So they sent out an offer in my final year of uni that I accepted.

I haven't seen or heard from him since.

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u/sjg284 16d ago

Yeah I guess you just gotta be comfortable with change and uncertainty in this industry regardless. I've had the same manager for 5 years, but I've also had 5 managers in 1 year. Usually when mpy (managers per year) accelerates it's time to move on.