[Kolenka]

Originally Posted by supermighty

Unless you live in California where last year their supreme court rejected noncompete clauses (link) in employee contracts.

Which is true, I just wasn't specific on which states weren't in that 'lot'. But it also depends on who they poach from, and whose laws apply. I know there have been court cases that have hinged entirely on whose laws applied, and if the employee was still on the hook because of it. Even though it might take place in a California court, they may have to use another state's laws to resolve it depending on when/where/how the contract was entered into.

Still, I'm not sure poaching managers to run a product rollout is the best use of risk-taking. A good manager in this area is a good manager, they don't have to have experience in an ultra-specific market in order to make it work.

But in the end, there are a few things that could lead to delays in shipping.
- Manufacturer screwing up on getting the boxed devices out to B&N. Not exactly common, but it does happen occasionally.
- Show-stopper bugs that pushed back software development a week, but they thought they could make up elsewhere in the run-up to the launch (by changing up shipping to express to the local warehouse). I've seen this happen, sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't... and I've seen how frazzled people get either way, it isn't pretty.
- Lawsuits always throw a wrench in things. It's also hard to predict the sort of advice a lawyer will give a client when the hearings start.
- If the engineers and the marketing folk can't agree on the time table... this tends to get ugly as well. Marketing will win on what the schedule says and the engineers will win on what the schedule is. This isn't horribly uncommon any time marketing decides a product must be out in time for Christmas, especially when both groups are too stubborn to compromise.

If there wasn't a lawsuit, we could pretty much say that a group of people at B&N were too stubborn about getting it out in time for Christmas that they had no buffer in the schedule in case things went wrong. This is never a place a company wants to be in, as things do go wrong, and you need the buffer because you don't know exactly what will go wrong (if you could know, you could just add it as part of the schedule).

But because of the lawsuit, and the simple fact that everything between the lawyers and B&N is covered by lawyer/client confidentiality, we will likely never know the real truth, and just have our speculation.