Comments by "Anders Juel Jensen" (@andersjjensen) on "When TSMC Sued SMIC and Won" video.

This is known and expected in the industry. And the usual way to get around it is that once people get good enough to work on the seriously important stuff they sign a period specific NDA in exchange for a golden handshake and a looong vacation when they leave. The lead times in the high tech fields is often close to five years. So just being cut out of the loop for 18 months before you're allowed to work in the exact same field for someone else pretty much takes the sting off. You'll have fallen enough behind, and you'll end up in the middle of a product development cycle when many things are already set in stone, or you'll end up at the beginning of a product development cycle with 18 months old info. My buddy is a sales engineer at a crane company. If he gets fired he will get 70% of his salary for 12 months (on top of his new salary), but cannot work with price projecting of crane projects. That doesn't mean he can't work on, say, designing a new hydraulic system for some specific type of crane. He just can't work for a competitor in a way that would put his former employer at a serious disadvantage. Being able to undercut every contract bid by precisely 0.5% (knowing the internal prices of the former place by heart) would not only be unfair to his former job, but also unfair to the customers who expect bids to be given "blind". Each company has to guess at the level of competition they think they are facing and make a competitive bid. Not doing so is considered price fixing. But in the above case it would effectively be price fixing for the customer and a practical monopoly for the new employer.
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