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I'm not sure its being totally readable to a law professor who teaches contracts helps Joe Engineer.

dctoedt 15y ago
@ianterrell, consider how often you've had to struggle to make sense of someone else's source code -- it's much the same with contract language. Seldom do lawyers go back and refactor their contract language for improved readability.
- ianterrell 15y ago
  Sure, but I also don't ask lawyers to debug C++ for me. In both cases we're talking about a highly specialized domain that takes, on average, years of training to be competent. And yet the engineer is expected to enter into a legal contract on equal footing with company lawyers?
  - Vivtek 15y ago
    There you've put your finger on it. That's why this is evil on Skype's part (or Silver Lake, or whoever); engineers - the "best and brightest" want to do engineering, and trust the business people to do business. If the business people figure it's just good business to screw the engineers over a barrel on the way to buying their yachts, the engineers are just plain SOL. I will agree that the contracts are not incomprehensible. Honestly, if given that contract, I would have complained vociferously about the language, but I would have taken the time to parse it. (This is one reason I rarely sign contracts, I guess.) Of course, as a translator I regularly deal with the same kind of language but in German and Hungarian, so your mileage may vary.
    - gnosis 15y ago
      "That's why this is evil on Skype's part (or Silver Lake, or whoever); engineers - the "best and brightest" want to do engineering, and trust the business people to do business." If the parties involved really trusted each other, there'd be no need for a contract. When there's serious money at stake you'd be naive (to put it in the kindest possible terms) to sign a contract that you didn't fully understand.
      - ianterrell 15y ago
        I can think of kinder possible terms: inexperienced, young, needing health insurance, broke, out-of-your-legal-depth, suggestible, susceptible to Kool-Aid. There's a huge power disparity between a company and an individual. I suspect that there are many many cases where the individual got screwed for different reasons than naiveté.
      - Vivtek 15y ago
        Yes. Exactly. Naive in precisely the way that good technical people tend to be. Which is why it's just such a lucrative business model to screw them five ways from Sunday. More specifically, I think it's probably more in the nature of technical people to imagine that if any screwing is going to happen, that the screwing will be to the benefit of the company, and thus to their own benefit as well. Whereas I think the business mentality can much more easily gloss over details like division of labor and cut straight to "make more money for me".

@ianterrell, consider how often you've had to struggle to make sense of someone else's source code -- it's much the same with contract language. Seldom do lawyers go back and refactor their contract language for improved readability.

ianterrell 15y ago
Sure, but I also don't ask lawyers to debug C++ for me. In both cases we're talking about a highly specialized domain that takes, on average, years of training to be competent. And yet the engineer is expected to enter into a legal contract on equal footing with company lawyers?
- Vivtek 15y ago
  There you've put your finger on it. That's why this is evil on Skype's part (or Silver Lake, or whoever); engineers - the "best and brightest" want to do engineering, and trust the business people to do business. If the business people figure it's just good business to screw the engineers over a barrel on the way to buying their yachts, the engineers are just plain SOL. I will agree that the contracts are not incomprehensible. Honestly, if given that contract, I would have complained vociferously about the language, but I would have taken the time to parse it. (This is one reason I rarely sign contracts, I guess.) Of course, as a translator I regularly deal with the same kind of language but in German and Hungarian, so your mileage may vary.
  - gnosis 15y ago
    "That's why this is evil on Skype's part (or Silver Lake, or whoever); engineers - the "best and brightest" want to do engineering, and trust the business people to do business." If the parties involved really trusted each other, there'd be no need for a contract. When there's serious money at stake you'd be naive (to put it in the kindest possible terms) to sign a contract that you didn't fully understand.
    - ianterrell 15y ago
      I can think of kinder possible terms: inexperienced, young, needing health insurance, broke, out-of-your-legal-depth, suggestible, susceptible to Kool-Aid. There's a huge power disparity between a company and an individual. I suspect that there are many many cases where the individual got screwed for different reasons than naiveté.
    - Vivtek 15y ago
      Yes. Exactly. Naive in precisely the way that good technical people tend to be. Which is why it's just such a lucrative business model to screw them five ways from Sunday. More specifically, I think it's probably more in the nature of technical people to imagine that if any screwing is going to happen, that the screwing will be to the benefit of the company, and thus to their own benefit as well. Whereas I think the business mentality can much more easily gloss over details like division of labor and cut straight to "make more money for me".