3 ms·
Not a lawyer, but I have seen this exact thing in the past and discussed it with our lawyer. He advised to say that the scope was overly broad, point out as you
by dboreham 5y ago
Not a lawyer, but I have seen this exact thing in the past and discussed it with our lawyer. He advised to say that the scope was overly broad, point out as you have that AMZN does absolutely everything, suggest that you either see what they say in response, or you suggest you would be happy to agree to a reasonable narrowly scoped provision (e.g. not to work on products directly competitive to the products you worked on at AMZN).
I'm not sure making this about confidential information is helpful -- there are already other provisions in the contract, I'm sure, relating to that.
In general yes all contracts are up for renegotiation and in house lawyers fully expect this kind of push back. If they rescind the offer then they're a.holes and you shouldn't work for them anyway.
It seems to be a concept in law that you can't enforce overly broad and unreasonable provisions like this so they are being a bit cheeky slipping it in anyway. Again there's a legal term I forget for this but it means "something only a fool would agree to".
- bradknowles 5y agoMy wife is a lawyer. She checks all contracts that either of us sign. And we realize that there's a lot of stuff we can't change with regards to a contract we sign with large companies, like Amazon. Nevertheless, we do push back on those things that are most important to us, like my ability to support existing open source projects like NTP.org, which I have been involved with since 2003. I'm personally not too worried about the non-compete, because I'm so low on the totem pole that I really don't think the company will care about me if/when I leave. I strongly suspect they won't even notice -- there's at least six or seven layers of management between Andy Jassy and me.