8 ms·

I've been fortunate enough to have an employer with no non-compete, but in the past with my first job out of college I just signed everything and was under one

by tdicola 10y ago

I've been fortunate enough to have an employer with no non-compete, but in the past with my first job out of college I just signed everything and was under one for a year after leaving. My thought process now is that a non-compete is just another thing to negotiate during the hiring process. I'm happy to sign one but I will absolutely require that I'm compensated at least for a year of salary, benefits, etc. while under the non-compete. It's only fair that if you're asking me not to work for a year that I can actually sustain myself and my family. Employers are just coasting off the fact that people will sign these things and ask for nothing in return--once people realize it's negotiable (even if you just plain walk from that job opportunity to something else) employers will have a much tougher time with them IMHO.

aetherson 10y ago
Yeah, so it would in a lot of ways be ideal if people could reasonably read, understand, and negotiate the contracts they sign, and then be reasonably bound by those contracts. So each person could say something like, "Sure, I'll sign a non-compete. For an extra $15,000 per year." And then the company could decide if that's worth it to them. In practice, people just sign what's in front of them, and indeed even if they want to read and understand everything, they can't without a fair amount of training -- and the existence of lots of other people who will just sign what's in front them means that it's hard to negotiate based on what you're signing even if you do read and understand it. (Digression: I bought a house. The amount of paperwork that I signed without reading was probably around 100 pages. This is a crazy way to live.) This feels like a problem that is getting amenable to a technological solution. It's pretty easy to imagine a digital assistant that could understand common contract phrasing and even do things like say to a person, "This offer includes a non-compete clause. Based on your demographics and the position, signing a non-compete clause will cost you approximately $X per year. Would you like to negotiate for +$X per year? Y/N" The problem, it seems to me, would be to get buy-in to the idea that such digital assistants should exist and that companies would have to accommodate such assistants.
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  I signed mine with my new hire paperwork. I had just flown across the country to take the job. Am I supposed to say no when my family had just spent a ton of money to move? Shady when companies do this, IMO
  - tdicola 10y ago
    Bring it up in the interview process, particularly when talking to HR, etc. You don't have to make a stand right there but at least find out what's typically in an employment contract (a very reasonable question to ask even in an early interview). Then later on when they're trying to close the deal make it a negotiable thing just like salary, etc.
    - CaptSpify 10y ago
      Lesson learned on my part, for sure.
    - wyldfire 10y ago
      I asked about something similar at the offer stage: invention disclosure and assignment. I asked several times and the recruiting team told me that "everything I needed was on the website [where the job offer and the related terms were]." I even asked "No, I mean the forms you'd ask me to sign upon accepting the offer when I'm hired." Still nothing. Sure enough, as soon as I accept the offer I'm presented with exactly what I was looking for on that very same website. Somehow I think "never attribute to malice ..." doesn't apply to corporations.
      - morgante 10y ago
        > Somehow I think "never attribute to malice ..." doesn't apply to corporations. Indeed. Refusing to disclose terms until you've started the job is abundant evidence of them being employee-hostile and manipulative.
      - crusso 10y ago
        Why didn't you tell them that you wouldn't take the job if they couldn't present you with the paperwork that they would be requiring you to sign? And if they presented extra paperwork later, why wouldn't you hold them to that?
stale2002 10y ago
That isn't really a solution, because most employees are ignorant or don't care about noncompetes. If you don't sign the noncompete, the company very well might recind your job offer. The REAL solution is when you leave a company, you just completely ignore the non-compete, and do whatever the hell you want. It is enormously risky for a company to go after former employees, especially engineers. It costs time, money, and for all they know, the former employee saved a bunch of passwords and is crazy, and will cause a million dollars in damages. If you break a non-compete, the chances of someone actually going after you is exceedingly slim, due to how dangerous you COULD be if you wanted.
- tdicola 10y ago
  Any reasonably sized company is going to have the dollars and IT smarts to not worry about former employees causing damage (passwords, keycard access, etc. are all immediately cut off on the day of leaving.. and any actual damage someone does is grounds for a likely felony-level criminal case with years behind bars). As others have mentioned they don't even need to take people to court to enforce a non-compete--just the fact that a former employee is under a non-compete is enough to scare away and stop potential new employers (read the comments on this page to see examples of this). By making the non-compete something the company has to pay for it pushes it more into the realm of only applying to people that absolutely need it (high level executives, critical engineers, etc.) and who will be compensated while under it.
  - stale2002 10y ago
    How about IP being leaked? EX: saving all your code on a flashdrive on the 1 day that you work from home. Sometimes crazy people do stupid things. Obviously you should never actually do something like that, but from the companies perspective, an X% chance of millions in damages is a stupid risk to take, for little benefit.
  - lsc 10y ago
    >Any reasonably sized company is going to have the dollars and IT smarts to not worry about former employees causing damage (passwords, keycard access, etc. are all immediately cut off on the day of leaving.. At least on the sysadmin side? The only way to be sure that someone who once had root on your server no longer has root on that server is to wipe and re-install using scripts that person didn't develop/sources that person didn't control. Of course, you kill the logins, but there are a million ways to leave a hard to detect backdoor... and many of those are impossible to distinguish from a simple mistake. This is definitely something you need to worry about; and at the very minimum, you go out of your way to make sure you don't piss off ex employees more than you have to. Yes, yes, if you have your whole process in source control, that's great, and will really help when trying to track down who put in the back door (However, can you prove it was a backdoor and not just, you know, a dumb mistake that left a security hole open? Innocent mistakes of this type are pretty common.) - even then, what of the sysadmins who have root on your revision control server? (this is actually an area where smaller shops, which tend to just use git, have an advantage; it's way harder for the repo owner to insert something without anyone noticing on a git system, say, than a more centralized setup like perforce, which tends to get used by the much larger companies.) For that mater, even the ground-pounding so-called "rebooter monkeys" have a lot more power than you think. Anyone who has root on your workstation, even for a short period of time, can cause all sorts of mayhem, and worse, make it look like you did it, for some time to come. >and any actual damage someone does is grounds for a likely felony-level criminal case with years behind bars). I mean, I'm not saying you couldn't make things pretty miserable for the perpetrator, you could. but that doesn't really help the business that was harmed. It does provide a pretty good deterrent. but that's why the comment you are responding to was talking about "crazy" - there are people who do things that are not in their long term best interest, and if those people have root on your systems, or access to your codebase, they can do more damage to you than you can possibly hope to recover from them. It's a pretty rare sysadmin who couldn't do millions of dollars in damage to his or her employer; and a pretty rare sysadmin who has the assets/insurance to cover a judgment that large.
amenod 10y ago
From where I'm from (Eastern Europe) the law mandates that the non-compete clauses are only enforcable when appropriate compensation was being paid during employement period (must be labeled as such). Since most employers (even those with non-compete clauses in hiring contracts) don't follow this, in practice virtually all non-competes fail if/when challenged.

by tdicola 10y ago

aetherson 10y ago

Yeah, so it would in a lot of ways be ideal if people could reasonably read, understand, and negotiate the contracts they sign, and then be reasonably bound by those contracts. So each person could say something like, "Sure, I'll sign a non-compete. For an extra $15,000 per year." And then the company could decide if that's worth it to them. In practice, people just sign what's in front of them, and indeed even if they want to read and understand everything, they can't without a fair amount of training -- and the existence of lots of other people who will just sign what's in front them means that it's hard to negotiate based on what you're signing even if you do read and understand it. (Digression: I bought a house. The amount of paperwork that I signed without reading was probably around 100 pages. This is a crazy way to live.) This feels like a problem that is getting amenable to a technological solution. It's pretty easy to imagine a digital assistant that could understand common contract phrasing and even do things like say to a person, "This offer includes a non-compete clause. Based on your demographics and the position, signing a non-compete clause will cost you approximately $X per year. Would you like to negotiate for +$X per year? Y/N" The problem, it seems to me, would be to get buy-in to the idea that such digital assistants should exist and that companies would have to accommodate such assistants.

CaptSpify 10y ago
I signed mine with my new hire paperwork. I had just flown across the country to take the job. Am I supposed to say no when my family had just spent a ton of money to move? Shady when companies do this, IMO
- tdicola 10y ago
  Bring it up in the interview process, particularly when talking to HR, etc. You don't have to make a stand right there but at least find out what's typically in an employment contract (a very reasonable question to ask even in an early interview). Then later on when they're trying to close the deal make it a negotiable thing just like salary, etc.
  - CaptSpify 10y ago
    Lesson learned on my part, for sure.
  - wyldfire 10y ago
    I asked about something similar at the offer stage: invention disclosure and assignment. I asked several times and the recruiting team told me that "everything I needed was on the website [where the job offer and the related terms were]." I even asked "No, I mean the forms you'd ask me to sign upon accepting the offer when I'm hired." Still nothing. Sure enough, as soon as I accept the offer I'm presented with exactly what I was looking for on that very same website. Somehow I think "never attribute to malice ..." doesn't apply to corporations.
    - morgante 10y ago
      > Somehow I think "never attribute to malice ..." doesn't apply to corporations. Indeed. Refusing to disclose terms until you've started the job is abundant evidence of them being employee-hostile and manipulative.
    - crusso 10y ago
      Why didn't you tell them that you wouldn't take the job if they couldn't present you with the paperwork that they would be requiring you to sign? And if they presented extra paperwork later, why wouldn't you hold them to that?

stale2002 10y ago

That isn't really a solution, because most employees are ignorant or don't care about noncompetes. If you don't sign the noncompete, the company very well might recind your job offer. The REAL solution is when you leave a company, you just completely ignore the non-compete, and do whatever the hell you want. It is enormously risky for a company to go after former employees, especially engineers. It costs time, money, and for all they know, the former employee saved a bunch of passwords and is crazy, and will cause a million dollars in damages. If you break a non-compete, the chances of someone actually going after you is exceedingly slim, due to how dangerous you COULD be if you wanted.

tdicola 10y ago
Any reasonably sized company is going to have the dollars and IT smarts to not worry about former employees causing damage (passwords, keycard access, etc. are all immediately cut off on the day of leaving.. and any actual damage someone does is grounds for a likely felony-level criminal case with years behind bars). As others have mentioned they don't even need to take people to court to enforce a non-compete--just the fact that a former employee is under a non-compete is enough to scare away and stop potential new employers (read the comments on this page to see examples of this). By making the non-compete something the company has to pay for it pushes it more into the realm of only applying to people that absolutely need it (high level executives, critical engineers, etc.) and who will be compensated while under it.
- stale2002 10y ago
  How about IP being leaked? EX: saving all your code on a flashdrive on the 1 day that you work from home. Sometimes crazy people do stupid things. Obviously you should never actually do something like that, but from the companies perspective, an X% chance of millions in damages is a stupid risk to take, for little benefit.
- lsc 10y ago
  >Any reasonably sized company is going to have the dollars and IT smarts to not worry about former employees causing damage (passwords, keycard access, etc. are all immediately cut off on the day of leaving.. At least on the sysadmin side? The only way to be sure that someone who once had root on your server no longer has root on that server is to wipe and re-install using scripts that person didn't develop/sources that person didn't control. Of course, you kill the logins, but there are a million ways to leave a hard to detect backdoor... and many of those are impossible to distinguish from a simple mistake. This is definitely something you need to worry about; and at the very minimum, you go out of your way to make sure you don't piss off ex employees more than you have to. Yes, yes, if you have your whole process in source control, that's great, and will really help when trying to track down who put in the back door (However, can you prove it was a backdoor and not just, you know, a dumb mistake that left a security hole open? Innocent mistakes of this type are pretty common.) - even then, what of the sysadmins who have root on your revision control server? (this is actually an area where smaller shops, which tend to just use git, have an advantage; it's way harder for the repo owner to insert something without anyone noticing on a git system, say, than a more centralized setup like perforce, which tends to get used by the much larger companies.) For that mater, even the ground-pounding so-called "rebooter monkeys" have a lot more power than you think. Anyone who has root on your workstation, even for a short period of time, can cause all sorts of mayhem, and worse, make it look like you did it, for some time to come. >and any actual damage someone does is grounds for a likely felony-level criminal case with years behind bars). I mean, I'm not saying you couldn't make things pretty miserable for the perpetrator, you could. but that doesn't really help the business that was harmed. It does provide a pretty good deterrent. but that's why the comment you are responding to was talking about "crazy" - there are people who do things that are not in their long term best interest, and if those people have root on your systems, or access to your codebase, they can do more damage to you than you can possibly hope to recover from them. It's a pretty rare sysadmin who couldn't do millions of dollars in damage to his or her employer; and a pretty rare sysadmin who has the assets/insurance to cover a judgment that large.

amenod 10y ago

From where I'm from (Eastern Europe) the law mandates that the non-compete clauses are only enforcable when appropriate compensation was being paid during employement period (must be labeled as such). Since most employers (even those with non-compete clauses in hiring contracts) don't follow this, in practice virtually all non-competes fail if/when challenged.