141–150 of 223 posts
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This is a good call. Or (at a minimum) some agreed upon fraction of salary.
It should be whatever is highest between your current salary and the new job offer.
Non-competes should be completely killed. Disclosing confidential trade secrets should be a legal issue, but getting a new job with a competitor shouldn’t be, as long as you don’t share confidential info with them. If you build up a tonne of domain knowledge, and become an expert, you should be able to leverage that expertise by continuing to work in that domain, as long as you aren’t sharing legit secrets.
I once started a job where the contract contained a very weird clause: I wouldn’t be able to use any programming-related knowledge I gained at the job for my future jobs. Obviously that‘s not enforceable, but it led to a ridiculous discussion where I tried to explain to them that if previous employers did this, I could only use the knowledge I gained before being employed - effectively programming like during highsch…
Ugh, this garbage again. AWS came after someone I had hired trying to enforce the same non-compete, under more or less the same circumstances (Washington-based employee, working remote out of California). In the process I learned a bunch about this non-compete, and in particular about Amazon's behavior with respect to it: as of 2012, they had tried to enforce this non-compete "hundreds" of times -- and to the knowled…
This wouldn't be able to happen in EU as well. Previous employer can't force you to not being able to offer your services in the job market. They can pay you instead.
Noncompetes writ large are terrible policy. However, I do think at a given level of seniority/responsibility, they’re reasonable, subject to the usual limitations of time and place. He worked for AWS for ~18 months and then shopped himself to a direct competitor.
Californians do not consider non-competes reasonable at all, even at that "seniority" level. Search for "Mark Hurd Oracle HP" -- HP was not able to win that case in California.
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Prohibiting non-competes means you can't make a contract with a non-compete provision. Allowing non-competes is less of a restriction on people's freedom to contract. (Personally I think prohibiting non-competes makes employment work better in practice)
Yeah but people don't care about limiting their employer's ability to make contracts. Only their own.
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Google likely considered legal defense as part of the hiring cost when taking someone that high profile. > the hiring team has always led me to believe that the non-competes are a standard clause and are not likely to be enforced. Your average engineer is likely easily replaceable. Directors and VPs are hard to replace and a huge win for any company that successfully hires them.
> Google likely considered legal defense as part of the hiring cost when taking someone that high profile Stuff like this is always so fascinating to me: the idea that someone's ability to do their job is worth fighting over in court -- nevermind the cultural costs of bringing someone new into a executive position at a company.
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The tech industry in California does just fine without noncompetes. In fact, lack of noncompetes is probably one of the biggest reasons Silicon Valley was able to take off in the 1950s-60s when people were constantly leaving their jobs to start new chip companies, starting with the original "traitorous 8" who founded Fairchild Semiconductor. There just aren't good arguments for noncompetes. People often bring up trad…
> There just aren't good arguments for noncompetes. I think the standard argument isn't trade secrets. The standard argument is that you want to incentivize employers to train employees. If I, as an employer, train you for 6 months, then you leave at month 7 for a higher salary (which you can demand cause you have more training/experience), I lose out. So I have no incentive to train you. So training or hiring of peo…
Pay higher than others and employees won’t leave you.
Make delayed payments part of compensation, so employees get the money only if they stay long enough.
Don’t hire employees who change jobs too often.
There are many ways to keep employees from leaving without damaging their careers.
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> non-competes are held to be unenforceable They're not completely unenforceable in California. And the company can make your life miserable by suing you because you have to hire and pay the lawyer to win the case. However, you generally have to be someone at this guy's level before non-competes can even have a chance of being enforceable. And there are lots of weird restrictions--you have to have access to data that…
> And the company can make your life miserable by suing you because you have to hire and pay the lawyer to win the case. This is the part that I can not understand about United States. How is this even allowed? It is literally bullying someone to submit, even if what you do is illegal. One of the main reasons I choose to immigrate to EU instead of US
The problem in the US is that judges don't throw around the "this was pretty obviously frivolous and you lost so you have to pay for the court costs" card anywhere nearly enough.
Another problem is that the lawyer doesn't share in the penalty even when it gets applied.
A final problem is that the lawyers and judge are all buddies and see each other for lots of cases, so they're unwilling to actually slap each other when one of them is being stupid.
Amazon, everyone knows you monetize open source. It's not a huge secret. Brian Hall hasn't stolen any secret magic recipe that he's now selling to Google.
They're also not really monetizing open source, at least not any more than a consultant does. What you're really paying for is Amazon to manage it for you--that's their value-add.