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Interns’ Job Prospects Constrained by Noncompete Agreements
- lawrenceyan 7y agoLuckily noncompetes are illegal in California. The Bay Area/Silicon Valley wouldn’t be what it is today without the freedom to move between different companies and/or start your own company yourself. Edit: illegal should be replaced with non-enforceable as mentioned below. Initially I didn't see any difference between the two words, but I can appreciate the nuance in meaning now based on hedora's provided example.
- bsder 7y agoThey are unenforceable, but the offending company can still haul you into court and make your life miserable.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- hedora 7y agoNon-competes are unenforceable in California, not illegal. By reading this message, you agree not to accept employment in technology-related firms for the next 25 years. (This comment doesn’t violate the law, it just isn’t worth the electrons it’s written in in a court of law.)
- staticautomatic 7y agoThere are situations in which non-competes are enforceable in CA, just not for regular employees. For instance, if you sell a company you own in part or whole, a non-compete with the acquirer is enforceable.
- staticautomatic 7y agoIdk why anyone is down voting me. I consult on lawsuits for a living and recently worked on one where all the parties, lawyers, and the judge agreed that the non-compete was both valid and enforceable in exactly this situation.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- dang 7y agoPlease don't break the site guidelines by going on about downvotes. Users will often come along and provide corrective upvotes (edit: your original comment has now been heavily upvoted), and then comments like this linger on, no longer accurate but just adding noise. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- your-nanny 7y agobecause voting on HN is broken.
- your-nanny 7y agofirst rule of HN voting is don't talk about HN voting, even if it's friggin broken and lame.
- your-nanny 7y ago-2 I should be proud. hn's voting system is trash and they do their best to make everyone look the other way. kind of dystopian.
- dang 7y agoWould you please stop this? It's strictly noise, and we're trying for better signal/noise, not worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- deogeo 7y agoSure is unusual how a lawyer, versed in California employment law, drafting a contract and including terms he knows are unenforceable, in an attempt to mislead a worker and cheat them out of their rights, isn't considered fraud.
- master-litty 7y agoYeah, that's... Interesting. Is this truly something that simply has no repercussions for the lawyer?
- deogeo 7y agoI'm not sure how it is in that specific case, but in general the penalties can be very severe. For example, when Apple was misleading Australians that they have only 1 year of warranty, instead of the 2 guaranteed by Australian law, they received a strongly worded letter from the courts telling them to stop. [1] [1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-forced-to-comply-with-australian-consumer-law/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-forced-to-comply-with-au...
- social_quotient 7y agoParts of the agreement aren’t enforceable but not everything? I’ve seen things like venue and arbitration rules established and persist in otherwise junk agreements. I see a lot of contracts from customers buying our dev services with weird language in it. The opposing counsel would have to know it not enforceable but it’s there anyway. Sometimes it’s silly stuff like “no open source software or code” yet it needs to be MEAN stack running on Ubuntu in AWS.
- lawrenceyan 7y agoAhh, interesting. So I suppose that means many companies add noncompete clauses into their contracts regardless, on the off chance that someday they can be retroactively enforced?
- MiddleEndian 7y agoOr on the more likely occurrence that employees will simply assume they're enforceable.
- matz1 7y agoEven if it legal doesn't mean it should stop you to work with competitor, what matter is how likely it is to cause you trouble.
- Animats 7y agoYes. I used to point that out to visitors from other states who wanted to create "Silicon Austin" or something. Their state won't have the guts to ban noncompetes, so they're doomed to lose.
- chronic7382 7y ago> Ms. Dunne said she was given the agreement on her first day. “I had no idea what I signed, they didn’t explain it to me.” Found the problem.
- geofft 7y agoAbsolutely agreed - contracts you're asked to sign without the opportunity for a lawyer to review should be considered invalid/under duress. They're basically like EULAs you only see after you've opened the package and forfeited the right to return the software.
- pgodzin 7y agoI don't think having to retain a lawyer just to sign an internship offer is ideal either. There should be some guardrails that some things are simply unenforceable and you don't need to get a lawyer involved.
- geofft 7y agoIf there are millions of college kids who all need contract review within the span of a few days in the spring, I would expect the market to adapt in some way. The most likely, I think, is that employers (at least employers within an industry) would settle on some boilerplate contract, and law firms would let you upload a contract to their website, have a script run a diff, and come back "Yes, this is in fact the boilerplate contract, here is our plain-English summary" or "No, here's how it differs, you can retain us at normal rates to explain the diff or you can push back on your employer." (They could charge you a few bucks, or they could just have the cost of reviewing this year's boilerplate contract be paid by the employers, who are incentivized to successfully and legally hire interns.) The more interesting question is whether if everyone knows there's a non-compete and it's the industry standard, there will be any more effective pushback... now that I think of it, I worry there may be less if contracts get mechanically standardized.
- Buttons840 7y agoAnother problem is that you only know the terms of the contract after you're all-in and it's the first day.
- oezi 7y agoIn Germany non-competes are legal but restricted by law as follows: - max 2 years - employer has to continue to pay at least 50% of the salary the employee last earned for the duration of the non-compete. - cannot non-compete minors - must provide reasonable argument for the non-compete (hard for interns) I think this is a good balance.
- walshemj 7y agoDo you work in HR? not sure max of 2 years is a Good Balance. Especially if you can stop some one after leaving there first low payed job to not work for 2 years on 50% of their starting salary - do you not see the potential to abuse young workers here
- oezi 7y agoThe 2 years is a good balance for highly skilled employees who carry competitive information such as customer contacts or technology. After that time the information is likely mostly worthless anyway. I agree that for interns the situation is not good but believe the "reasonable" provision is most likely to make a non-compete with an intern worthless in court.
- walshemj 7y agoYou do know that non competes are not for protecting trade secrets right? You wouldn't get a 2 year non compete for a FSTE 100 CEO in the UK to stand up in court. A
- mrfredward 7y agoNon-competes get abused so much in the states because the cost to companies is next to nothing when workers don't push back. I don't think companies would go around giving everyone two-year non-competes if it meant they had to pay an extra year's salary to everyone who quits.
- VBprogrammer 7y agoI always assumed a non-compete would be unenforceable in Europe because I don't see how it can fit within the European convention on Human rights.
- walshemj 7y agoTek mountains hr seem incompetent. You don't stop disclosure of trade secrets with a non compete agreement.
- human20190310 7y agoAnd now they're famous as well.
- Palomides 7y agoa summer internship I did had a 1 year noncompete and we own your IP contract; when I asked about it, they basically said it would be too inconvenient for them to change it at all, and it was fine, all the other interns were fine with it, just sign... I did, of course, since it was too late for me to have any leverage and I really needed it for my resume.
- garmaine 7y agoCross out the terms you disagree with, initial the changes, and then sign.
- hluska 7y agoI wish that someone would put up a website where interns can share what company they slave for, how much/if they get paid, and whether stuff like this goes on. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I would prefer not giving money to companies that do things like this.
- vikramkr 7y agoGlassdoor?
- hluska 7y agoHa! I always forget about Glassdoor. :)
- aripickar 7y agoThe cscq intern salary sharing thread is pretty good for that
- dentemple 7y agoyou mean the Brag About My FAANG TC threads?
- lawrenceyan 7y agoThe values are generally accurate at least.
- hluska 7y agoForgive my question, but is cscq the computer science career questions subreddit?
- JudgeWapner 7y agoBlind?
- pmiller2 7y ago
- threwawasy1228 7y agoIt is really to the detriment of the states that allow it. I constantly feel as though due to noncompetes I will be forced to make a move to California in order to further my career on any reasonable timeline. I can't actually know that I will want to stay at a company many years until after I sign the noncompete, but then it is much too late and the noncompete is in effect. If I don't want to be chained to a specific company possibly killing my career progression, I have to be extremely careful. It is things like this that are severely slowing tech growth outside of the bay. Since there are no noncompetes, the chains have to be crafted with positive incentives instead of negative incentives, causing developer salaries and benefits to go up rapidly.
- Nasrudith 7y agoIt really is a tragedy of selfishness. The economy would be better overall but the vested interests want non-competes. The best thing federally that would draw heavy backlash would be to abolish non-competes federally.
- jonathankoren 7y agoFrom a practical standpoint, does anyone actually enforce the noncompetes against regular employees? It never struck me as worth the money and bad press to enforce something like this against an intern or regular line engineer or manager.
- kasey_junk 7y agoIt’s fairly common to enforce non-competes in trading.
- geofft 7y agoOn the other hand it's fairly common to pay people during their garden leave - at least their base salary, if not their bonus.
- wikibob 7y agoFYI, the bizarre practice of “garden leave” as well as contractual notice periods is limited to the U.K. market. In the USA no significant tech company has any contractual notice period, and the social norm is to provide two weeks notice. In fact, at Google the policy is that the maximum period an employee may continue is three weeks once they have handed notice of resignation. I believe bizarrely long notice periods, commonly three months now, are a large contributing factor to the depressed wages in technology in the U.K. When friction is applied to the labor market, it’s to the detriment of the employees.
- kasey_junk 7y agoIt is common in US trading firms to enforce non-competes also frequently via payed ‘garden leaves’.
- microDude 7y agoMy former employer threatened me in Oregon (started as an intern, software engineer). I had to pay a lawyer $4000 to help avoid going to court. Basically they were trying to scare other employees from leaving.
- jammygit 7y agoIn Canada, I had to sign a noncompete for my internship. Also couldn't have side projects. Made me pretty uncomfortable.
- lixtra 7y agoDid you challenge that, before you signed? Edit: When my employer tried to retrospectively claim ownership of side projects through a change of policy I got the wording changed to concern work projects or projects during work time. I doubt the original wording would have been enforceable in my jurisdiction, though.
- saagarjha 7y agoWhere do you live, and what was your employer?
- hedora 7y agoA non-CA startup once tried to get me to sign a non compete for an internship. It would have forced me to resign a position at the university that was the reason they wanted to hire me in the first place. I pointed that out, and they immediately escalated to the founder, and replaced the internship contract. The old one was boilerplate that they cut and pasted from some other document. They were pretty apologetic, actually.
- droithomme 7y agoWow I had no idea interns were being forced to sign noncompetes. That is exceptionally unreasonable and unconscionable.
- saagarjha 7y agoAs far as I am aware, interna sign contracts similar to what full-time employees would.
- antoineMoPa 7y agoI'm in QC/Canada and I signed a non-compete for my 4 (paid) internships. This is pretty normal here.
- closeparen 7y agoSo your internships were all with the same company? Or you violated them in taking subsequent internships?
- antoineMoPa 7y agoThe non-competes were limited to a specific industry.
- Proven 7y agoThat doesn't make sense - if it constrains your job prospects, why would you sign it? If some interns are stupid or careless, that's another problem but you can't say that non-competes are the problem. You don't have to sign it.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]