Are you covered by a non-compete agreement at your current employer? Are your workers covered by a non-compete? While non-competes may make your executives (and their attorneys) feel good, they may not be good for your company.

Non-compete agreements restrict where you can work after you leave your current employer. They might lock you out of taking another job in your industry for years—agreements of even up to five years are not uncommon. Of course, non-competes can dissuade competitors from recruiting you while you are still working. That’s not all: They could also scare away potential employers even if you lose your job due to a layoff or involuntary termination.

By restricting the free flow of employees from company to company, non-compete agreements limit employment options. They also can cut down on a vibrant culture of innovation and startups.

Why have non-compete agreements? One argument is that employers invest in hiring and training their employees, and don’t want to have those employees, once trained, snatched up by competitors. Another is that by virtue of their jobs, employees have access to intellectual property, and that the non-compete stops competitors from gaining ready access to that IP.

As you can imagine, information technology workers, including software developers, are often seen as key strategic assets and may find non-compete agreements a necessary evil. Programmers aren’t the only folks locked in by non-competes, though. A recent story by Steven Greenhouse in the New York Times, “Noncompete Clauses Increasingly Pop Up in Array of Jobs,” talked about a Boston-area teenager who couldn’t work at a summer camp in 2014 because the camp she worked at in 2013 had a 12-month non-compete agreement. Ugh.

Some states, including California, give more protections to employees than to employers, and non-compete agreements are often unenforceable. Some analysts believe that this worker-friendly environment contributes to the vitality of the area’s tech economy—see Sharon Wienbar’s blog post, “The Power of a Fluid Market: Employee Mobility Makes Silicon Valley Flow.”

Wienbar writes

A non-compete isn’t the only reason why the abundance of VC $$ remain in Silicon Valley but it is an important item to consider. In the technology landscape, talent can make or break a business and the more fluid the resources, the better the chance of building a viable business.

Other states are friendlier to business and uphold non-compete agreements. I would not like to work in that environment, personally. I’m not a fan of non-compete agreements and have never signed one or asked an employee to sign one. However, I recognize that in some locations, and in some companies, that’s the only way to get the job you want at the company you want.

Compelling arguments against such agreements are plentiful. Read Jeff Haden’s, “The Case Against Non-Compete Agreements,” published in Inc.; “Time to get rid of ‘noncompete’ agreements” by the Boston Globe’s Scott Kirshner; and Jon Zemke’s “To Compete or Non-Compete: Contracts That Make Michigan Less Competitive,” in Concentrate.

Data can be abused. The rights of individuals can be violated. Bits of disparate information can be tracked without a customer’s knowledge, and used to piece together identities or other profile information that a customer did not intend to divulge. Thanks to Big Data and other analytics, patterns can be tracked that would dismay customers or partners.

What is the responsibility of the software development team to make sure that a company does the right thing – both morally and legally? The straight-up answer from most developers, and most IT managers outside the executive suite, is probably, “That’s not our problem.” That is not a very good answer.

Corporations and other organizations have senior managers, such as owners, presidents, CEOs and board of directors. There is no doubt that those individuals have the power to say yes – and the power to say no.

Top bosses might consult with legal authorities, such as in-house counsel or outside experts. The ultimate responsibility for making the right decision rests with the ultimate decision-makers. I am not a lawyer, but I expect that in a lawsuit, any potential liability belongs with managers who misuse data. Programmers who coded an analytics solution would not be named or harmed.

This topic has been on my mind for some time, as I ponder both the ethics and the legalities implicit in large-scale data mining. Certainly this has been a major subject of discussion by pundits and elected officials, at least in the United States, when it comes to customer info and social-media posts being captured and utilized by marketers.

Some recent articles on this subject:

Era of Online Sharing Offers Benefits of ‘Big Data,’ Privacy Trade-Offs

The Challenge of Big Data for Data Protection

Big Data Is Opening Doors, but Maybe Too Many

What are we going to do in the face of questionable software development requirements? Whether we are data scientists, computer scientists or other IT professionals, it is quite unclear. A few developers might prefer to resign rather than write software they believe crosses a moral line. Frankly, I doubt that many would do so.

Some developers might say, “I didn’t understand the implications.” Or they might say, “If I don’t code this application, management will fire me and get someone else to do it.” Or they might even say, “I was just following orders.”

According to IDG Research, 80% of business leaders say that Big Data should enable more informed business decisions – and 37% say that the insights provided by Big Data should prove critical to those decisions.

A February 2013 survey on Big Data was designed and executed jointly by IDG Research and Kapow Software, which sells an integration platform for Big Data. As with all vendor surveys, bear in mind that Kapow wants to make Big Data sound exciting, and to align the questions with its own products and services.

That said, the results of the survey of 200 business leaders, are interesting:

• 71% said that Big Data should help increase their competitive advantage by keeping them ahead of market trends

• 68% said that Big Data should improve customer satisfaction

• 62% believe Big Data should increase end-user productivity by providing real-time access to business information

• 60% said Big Data should improve information security and/or compliance

• 55% said Big Data should help create compelling new products and services

•33% said Big Data should help them monitor and respond to social media in real time

Those are big expectations for Big Data! The results to date… not so much. The study revealed that only one-third of organizations surveyed have implemented any sort of Big Data initiative – but another third expect to do so over the next year.

What are the barriers to Big Data success? The study’s answers:

• 53% say a lack of awareness of Big Data’s potential

• 49% say concerns about the time-to-value of the data

• 45% say having the right employee skills and training

• 43% say ability to extract data from the correct sources

The classic database engines – like the big relational behemoths from IBM, Microsoft and Oracle – store the data on disk. So do many of the open-source databases, like MySQL and PostgreSQL, as well as the vast array of emerging NoSQL databases. While such database engines keep  all the rows and columns on the relatively slow, disks, they can boost performance by putting some element, including indices and sophisticated predicted caches, on faster solid-state storage or even faster main memory.

From a performance perspective, it would be great to store everything in main memory. It’s fast, fast, fast. It’s also expensive, expensive, expensive, and in traditional services, is not persistent. That’s why database designers and administrators leverage a hierarchy: A few key elements in the fastest, most costly main memory; more data in fast, costly solid-state storage; the bulk in super-cheap rotating disks. In some cases, of course, some of the data goes into a fourth layer in the hierarchy, off-line optical or tape storage.

In-memory databases challenge those assumptions for applications where database response time is the bottleneck to application performance. Sure, main memory is still fabulously expensive, but it’s not as costly as it used to be. New non-volatile RAM technologies can make main memory somewhat persistent without dramatically harming read/write times. (To the best of my knowledge, NVRAM remains slower than standard RAM – but not enough to matter.)

That’s not to say that your customer database, your server logs, or your music library, should be stored within an in-memory database. Nope. Not even close. But as you examine your application architecture, think about database contents that dramatically affect either raw performance, user experience or API response time. If you can isolate those elements, and store them within an in-memory database, you might realize several orders of magnitude improvement at minimal cost — and with potentially less complex code than you’d need to manage a hierarchical database system.

Not long ago, in-memory databases were a well-kept secret. The secret is out, according to research from Evans Data. Their new Global Development survey says that the developers using in-memory databases has increased 40% worldwide from 18% to 26% during the last six months. An additional 39% globally say they plan to incorporate in-memory databases into their development work within the next 12 months.