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It's absolutely astounding to me how many folks blindly sign legal documents. Especially employment related. Whenever I've pushed back on an employment contract

It's absolutely astounding to me how many folks blindly sign legal documents. Especially employment related. Whenever I've pushed back on an employment contract, NDA, or similar it's always met with sudden confusion - as though this has never happened before. In fairness, it's almost never met with negatively. But it shows that no one else has ever bothered to question it. And when I talk to colleagues I definitely get the sense that no one ever really reads these things or questions them.

mlthoughts2018 6y ago
When I have pushed back on the same topic, it usually is met with negativity. I believe recruiting and hiring staff have some incentives to treat you like you’re crazy if you want special provisions or need clarification on complex terms. In my career, I’ve negotiated - a severance package in my offer letter from a company that said, “we don’t offer severance packages as a matter of policy.” - a sign on bonus from a company that said, “we don’t offer sign-on bonuses as a matter of policy.” - a longer expiration period for startup options, as well as partial acceleration of vesting in the case of a significant liquidity event, from a company that said, “we can’t modify our standard equity agreement papers.” - immediate full vesting of matched 401(k) contributions from a company that said, “our policy is that matched contributions only vest after 1 year.” - ability to expense my own Linux workstation, which I could keep, in the offer letter, from a company that said employees are only allowed to be issued Mac laptops. - explicit extra section in the offer letter stating that any IP created by me using only my personal equipment and personal time was my sole property and was explicitly not subject to any part of the employee handbook dealing with ownership of IP. In all these cases, the conversation usually started out with me being gaslit about all this being impossible or my expectations being crazy. But after sticking to my requirements, eventually it normalized out into a sincere discussion. I should add, all these examples came from very large companies except for the case of the options expiry and acceleration. I also gave a hard “no” to many companies over the years that wouldn’t negotiate on topics like these, and I can say I don’t regret it one bit. There’s never been a case where I said no to a job offer over inflexibility on all these topics and then later regretted it.
- sizzle 6y ago
  How did you do this without scaring the hiring manager? Assuming the hiring manager has to vouch for you to their bosses to get the negotiated terms, you must have a very sought after skill set? Or is this purely negotiating with HR and/or legal for contract terms concessions without hiring manager as it doesn't come from their budget?
  - mlthoughts2018 6y ago
    The first thing you have to realize is that the hiring apparatus in the company is bureaucratic. They aren’t scared, mad, judgmental, whatever. They are going to be thinking more about what’s for lunch and whether they can cut out early next Friday than about your candidate profile or negotiation. As long as you are polite but firm, they aren’t likely to think anything. They’ll just figure they either like your profile and want to work with you, or they’ll figure they know they can’t meet your requests. Always present flexibility even if you aren’t actually flexible. In theory, if they cannot give a severance package, maybe they can give a much higher sign on bonus, or something else you want. Let them know what’s important to you, but that if there are other ways to address what you’re looking for, you’re open to hear it and think about it. Once you’re at the stage of making concrete requests, don’t be vague and don’t accept vague alternatives. Always ask for concrete alternatives and once it is stated, always take time to think about it offline, always. That way if you decide you’re not actually flexible, you have breathing room to process your decision and respond. You should also project confidence about your worth and why you are asking for something. For example, for negotiating a severance package, you should be very clear about it. In my case, that mattered to me because I was relocating to a new area and at the same time I was switching from individual contributor to manager. I felt the risk of the local job market for an inexperienced manager was high, so if the company I was joining would have restructuring or sudden cuts and I am laid off, the money to float myself in the new region would be high. To feel comfortable about this, I just wanted to know for sure if that kind of change was coming, I would have X months of salary as a cushion. If a recruiter or hiring manager is too immature to appreciate this as a sincere concern / request of a candidate, and would punish me just for asking either by acting like severance is a taboo way to protect insecurities of being fired or acting like I’m a prima donna, well that makes the decision to walk away pretty obvious for me. The main thing is just remember they don’t owe you any special features in a job offer and they absolutely won’t offer them unless you ask and make it clear it matters to you. But you also don’t owe them anything either, certainly not any expectation about being “too fussy” or “scaring” them. Nobody’s going to look out for what you want as a candidate except you. As long as you’re polite but firm, and you make clear asks and require clear commitments, you should feel completely confident asking for anything you want. Whether you’re willing to compromise or you need to say “no,” you’ll be doing yourself a big favor.
CodeGlitch 6y ago
The problem arises especially when the document is written in legalese. I also feel like I'm not really qualified to understand these documents - they are generally written for people who have the appropriate qualifications. For example when buying a property in the UK, the soliciter will be the one parses the legal documents. It's crazy to think that normal people are expected to fully understand these, and it doesn't surpise me when they just blindly sign them. At the end of the day they want the thing and carry on with their lives - throwing caution to the wind.
- mech422 6y ago
  I feel this is one of the major problems with most TOSs... You generally don't have a lawyer around to explain every TOS you come across, so people ignore them and hope for the best. Hmm - I wonder if there would be a niche for a website that explains specific, common TOSs in easy to understand terms?
  - CodeGlitch 6y ago
    We've all been hearing about machine learning algorithms that can parse legalese and pull out the important bits given parameters of interest. So certainly a possibility. HN make it so!
    - mech422 6y ago
      Does that mean we'll sprout a generation of "Legal SEO" lawyers that try to game the algorithms ? :-P
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
    Tbh I don't find tos very hard to understand. They are akin to programming for the law. And generally speaking they just tell you what you should already know about the terms under which you use the service, so that you can't sue the service for absurd things. For the sake of demonstration, I just went and read the first seven sections of Personal Capital's TOU. Not a single surprise in there, so far. To give one example, section 5 just says that for the sake of displaying the information you are agreeing that personal capital can retrieve on your behalf, personal capital has your authorization to act legally on your behalf. This is to prevent some idiot from suing them for fetching account info that said idiot inputted into personal capital. Another section says, hey, we aren't responsible for mistakes you make with your investments, even if you base your decisions on the information we show to you. Which is a perfectly reasonable thing as well -- you literally could not run a service like this otherwise.
brightball 6y ago
Same. I’ve never seen anyone balk. If anything it shows attention to detail.
Aeolun 6y ago
I think part of it is coming from a country where any ‘unreasonable’ or ‘unfair’ conditions will almost certainly be considered nonapplicable in court (if it ever came to that).
lcall 6y ago
Happens in doctors offices too. Now I try to request all paperwork in advance so I can read. At one (where I thought highly of the doctor who seemed very kind and competent), 2 people in the front office insisted to me that the "other document" to which the main one referred and said I was also agreeing was the same document that had the reference. After I refused to sign, one left and the other made a phone call to find the real "other" doc. I think (though am not an attorney, so not sure what a really honest, articulate, kind one would say) that if attorneys who wrote these long, difficult agreements applied honesty and the Golden Rule, they would start reading them themselves more often in general life, and they would word them so that their target audience would have an easy time understanding them, etc etc. But the executives have other things on their minds I suppose, and don't push for this (or care...?). (maybe this is one of my pet peeves--sometimes I wonder if it just makes life harder for honest people). But I still think being honest and kind is totally worth it in the long run. Wrote more elsewhere on that.
- perl4ever 6y ago
  Last time I went to urgent care/the ER, I was told to sign an electronic pad repeatedly, and no document was provided at all, on paper or screen. It was just verbal, sign for this, sign for that.
  - lcall 6y ago
    Yeah. Maybe they get used to the majority of patients who don't want to read things, and systems even reflect that. I watch the displayed fine print just in case it actually says something, but maybe I should ask more questions. Once when at a nearby hospital to just get a blood sample drawn, the documents to sign including those by reference were ~11 pages. Fortunately they weren't busy, & I tried to apologize for taking so long & explained I felt it was a matter of honesty to know what I was agreeing to, and they printed things for me and let me cross some of it out. But I found that another nearby hospital system (a regional nonprofit w/ good reputation) had a 2-page agreement, and I go there now even though it is slightly farther for us. (It unfortunately seems like on medical stuff, it helps to get as much as possible covered before the visit, also for financial questions, making sure everyone is in-network etc etc, so I am now trying to remember to ask for everything in advance sometimes.)

mlthoughts2018 6y ago

When I have pushed back on the same topic, it usually is met with negativity. I believe recruiting and hiring staff have some incentives to treat you like you’re crazy if you want special provisions or need clarification on complex terms. In my career, I’ve negotiated - a severance package in my offer letter from a company that said, “we don’t offer severance packages as a matter of policy.” - a sign on bonus from a company that said, “we don’t offer sign-on bonuses as a matter of policy.” - a longer expiration period for startup options, as well as partial acceleration of vesting in the case of a significant liquidity event, from a company that said, “we can’t modify our standard equity agreement papers.” - immediate full vesting of matched 401(k) contributions from a company that said, “our policy is that matched contributions only vest after 1 year.” - ability to expense my own Linux workstation, which I could keep, in the offer letter, from a company that said employees are only allowed to be issued Mac laptops. - explicit extra section in the offer letter stating that any IP created by me using only my personal equipment and personal time was my sole property and was explicitly not subject to any part of the employee handbook dealing with ownership of IP. In all these cases, the conversation usually started out with me being gaslit about all this being impossible or my expectations being crazy. But after sticking to my requirements, eventually it normalized out into a sincere discussion. I should add, all these examples came from very large companies except for the case of the options expiry and acceleration. I also gave a hard “no” to many companies over the years that wouldn’t negotiate on topics like these, and I can say I don’t regret it one bit. There’s never been a case where I said no to a job offer over inflexibility on all these topics and then later regretted it.

sizzle 6y ago
How did you do this without scaring the hiring manager? Assuming the hiring manager has to vouch for you to their bosses to get the negotiated terms, you must have a very sought after skill set? Or is this purely negotiating with HR and/or legal for contract terms concessions without hiring manager as it doesn't come from their budget?
- mlthoughts2018 6y ago
  The first thing you have to realize is that the hiring apparatus in the company is bureaucratic. They aren’t scared, mad, judgmental, whatever. They are going to be thinking more about what’s for lunch and whether they can cut out early next Friday than about your candidate profile or negotiation. As long as you are polite but firm, they aren’t likely to think anything. They’ll just figure they either like your profile and want to work with you, or they’ll figure they know they can’t meet your requests. Always present flexibility even if you aren’t actually flexible. In theory, if they cannot give a severance package, maybe they can give a much higher sign on bonus, or something else you want. Let them know what’s important to you, but that if there are other ways to address what you’re looking for, you’re open to hear it and think about it. Once you’re at the stage of making concrete requests, don’t be vague and don’t accept vague alternatives. Always ask for concrete alternatives and once it is stated, always take time to think about it offline, always. That way if you decide you’re not actually flexible, you have breathing room to process your decision and respond. You should also project confidence about your worth and why you are asking for something. For example, for negotiating a severance package, you should be very clear about it. In my case, that mattered to me because I was relocating to a new area and at the same time I was switching from individual contributor to manager. I felt the risk of the local job market for an inexperienced manager was high, so if the company I was joining would have restructuring or sudden cuts and I am laid off, the money to float myself in the new region would be high. To feel comfortable about this, I just wanted to know for sure if that kind of change was coming, I would have X months of salary as a cushion. If a recruiter or hiring manager is too immature to appreciate this as a sincere concern / request of a candidate, and would punish me just for asking either by acting like severance is a taboo way to protect insecurities of being fired or acting like I’m a prima donna, well that makes the decision to walk away pretty obvious for me. The main thing is just remember they don’t owe you any special features in a job offer and they absolutely won’t offer them unless you ask and make it clear it matters to you. But you also don’t owe them anything either, certainly not any expectation about being “too fussy” or “scaring” them. Nobody’s going to look out for what you want as a candidate except you. As long as you’re polite but firm, and you make clear asks and require clear commitments, you should feel completely confident asking for anything you want. Whether you’re willing to compromise or you need to say “no,” you’ll be doing yourself a big favor.

CodeGlitch 6y ago

The problem arises especially when the document is written in legalese. I also feel like I'm not really qualified to understand these documents - they are generally written for people who have the appropriate qualifications. For example when buying a property in the UK, the soliciter will be the one parses the legal documents. It's crazy to think that normal people are expected to fully understand these, and it doesn't surpise me when they just blindly sign them. At the end of the day they want the thing and carry on with their lives - throwing caution to the wind.

mech422 6y ago
I feel this is one of the major problems with most TOSs... You generally don't have a lawyer around to explain every TOS you come across, so people ignore them and hope for the best. Hmm - I wonder if there would be a niche for a website that explains specific, common TOSs in easy to understand terms?
- CodeGlitch 6y ago
  We've all been hearing about machine learning algorithms that can parse legalese and pull out the important bits given parameters of interest. So certainly a possibility. HN make it so!
  - mech422 6y ago
    Does that mean we'll sprout a generation of "Legal SEO" lawyers that try to game the algorithms ? :-P
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
  Tbh I don't find tos very hard to understand. They are akin to programming for the law. And generally speaking they just tell you what you should already know about the terms under which you use the service, so that you can't sue the service for absurd things. For the sake of demonstration, I just went and read the first seven sections of Personal Capital's TOU. Not a single surprise in there, so far. To give one example, section 5 just says that for the sake of displaying the information you are agreeing that personal capital can retrieve on your behalf, personal capital has your authorization to act legally on your behalf. This is to prevent some idiot from suing them for fetching account info that said idiot inputted into personal capital. Another section says, hey, we aren't responsible for mistakes you make with your investments, even if you base your decisions on the information we show to you. Which is a perfectly reasonable thing as well -- you literally could not run a service like this otherwise.

brightball 6y ago

Same. I’ve never seen anyone balk. If anything it shows attention to detail.

Aeolun 6y ago

I think part of it is coming from a country where any ‘unreasonable’ or ‘unfair’ conditions will almost certainly be considered nonapplicable in court (if it ever came to that).

lcall 6y ago

Happens in doctors offices too. Now I try to request all paperwork in advance so I can read. At one (where I thought highly of the doctor who seemed very kind and competent), 2 people in the front office insisted to me that the "other document" to which the main one referred and said I was also agreeing was the same document that had the reference. After I refused to sign, one left and the other made a phone call to find the real "other" doc. I think (though am not an attorney, so not sure what a really honest, articulate, kind one would say) that if attorneys who wrote these long, difficult agreements applied honesty and the Golden Rule, they would start reading them themselves more often in general life, and they would word them so that their target audience would have an easy time understanding them, etc etc. But the executives have other things on their minds I suppose, and don't push for this (or care...?). (maybe this is one of my pet peeves--sometimes I wonder if it just makes life harder for honest people). But I still think being honest and kind is totally worth it in the long run. Wrote more elsewhere on that.

perl4ever 6y ago
Last time I went to urgent care/the ER, I was told to sign an electronic pad repeatedly, and no document was provided at all, on paper or screen. It was just verbal, sign for this, sign for that.
- lcall 6y ago
  Yeah. Maybe they get used to the majority of patients who don't want to read things, and systems even reflect that. I watch the displayed fine print just in case it actually says something, but maybe I should ask more questions. Once when at a nearby hospital to just get a blood sample drawn, the documents to sign including those by reference were ~11 pages. Fortunately they weren't busy, & I tried to apologize for taking so long & explained I felt it was a matter of honesty to know what I was agreeing to, and they printed things for me and let me cross some of it out. But I found that another nearby hospital system (a regional nonprofit w/ good reputation) had a 2-page agreement, and I go there now even though it is slightly farther for us. (It unfortunately seems like on medical stuff, it helps to get as much as possible covered before the visit, also for financial questions, making sure everyone is in-network etc etc, so I am now trying to remember to ask for everything in advance sometimes.)