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Strapped startup declines acquihire, Apple poaches key engineers; NP, says court [pdf]

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Re: Strapped startup declines acquihire, Apple poaches key engineers; NP, says court [pdf]

#351

Post by peteri »

C1sc0cat wrote: post #313
donor20 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In france you these need to be pre-approved, you have to have an employment protection plan, and even then the court can overturn all this and make you hire everyone back. "Collective redundancies can be void by an administrative court, if the latter recognises shortfalls in the employment protection plan or if an administrative authority did not validate or approve the employment protection plan at all. In case the…

NC and restrictive covenants are not "highly enforceable" in the UK, I do not know where you got that idea from. Limited NC for v senior people for short periods possibly - and by v senior I mean board level.

They are relatively enforceable as part of a compromise agreement. However the last one I signed was quite restricted in that it was for 12 months and only listed 4 direct competitors. Normally the companies lawyer tries for more and your lawyer tells them to get real.

If you don't sign the agreement I suspect a lot of the time you'll just have to do gardening leave for the rest of your contract. Also don't forget if you were a director you still have a fiducary duty to the company once you've left.

What I'm slightly unclear about is how practical this is for sales folks where this is an expectation they will steal prospects or existing clients. I suspect you might only bother with lawyers if it looks like they are poaching from your existing clients.

In the UK non-competes in my view for engineering staff are basically unenforcable, IP theft is much more likely to succeed (and I've been involved in a direct copyright theft case).

24/7 IP ownership is enforcable but my experience is that most places don't care if you're not going to be a direct competitor. I always feel it's worth getting that in writing though, my current contract limits this to areas of the companies business. Our corporate lawyer limited this when we had to sign a new contract post a takeover (it was a bit broad and could have covered things like photographs of your kids). Also I have in the past asked if I'm contributing to open source as part of my work as like things to be clear.

IP rights is probably the one area I check in a new contract and usually it's fairly easy to get agreement for some minor changes.

Re: Strapped startup declines acquihire, Apple poaches key engineers; NP, says court [pdf]

#352

Post by fnord123 »

fsloth wrote: post #308
KingOfCoders wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Southern France has wonderful weather and the Mediterranean Sea. The EU should start a special economic zone for startups there (a split of later taxes going into the EU budget).

What happened to Sophia-Antipolis near Antibes? That area was spun out as "silicon valley of europe". No tax specialization AFAIK but it did have a dense concentration of tech companies at least two decades ago.

Everywhere is "Silicon Valley of Europe". Silicon Saxony, Silicon Roundabout (London), Silicon Fen (Cambridge), Silicon Docks (Dublin), Silicon Glen, etc

Re: Strapped startup declines acquihire, Apple poaches key engineers; NP, says court [pdf]

#353

Post by christophilus »

toomanybeersies wrote: post #127
brianwawok wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can no one but the US pay developers well? The GDP per cap is there in many countries... but for some reason developers are only key employees in the US?

Or are developers paid a disproportionate wage in comparison to other jobs? Why should a software developer get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, while those who weren't lucky enough to be born with the required intelligence (despite what coding bootcamps say, not everyone is cut out to write code) are doomed to work a low-wage job for their entire life? It's the height of privilege. And if you subscribe…

I think part of it is that a builder’s work has no leverage behind it. A day of work might positively affect the 5 or so people whose house was repaired. A day of software development may impact millions of people.

Re: Strapped startup declines acquihire, Apple poaches key engineers; NP, says court [pdf]

#354

Post by dctoedt »

jsjohnst wrote: post #342
dctoedt wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even if you're 95% chance likely to have things work out okay, what would the lawyer get in that situation? Nothing. And in the 5% of cases they'd be excoriated for giving their client bad advice. Spot on. EDIT: On further thought, there's a wrinkle, which is that NOT being super-conservative can be good marketing for a lawyer. In a 95% confidence situation, consider the lawyer who tells the client, "here are the p…

IANAL, but from my understanding, it’s a bit more complicated than that. If a lawyer tells you something is “probably ok”, but doesn’t cage that “probable” in enough legalese, then they can potentially be held liable in court. This is why you’ll rarely see a good attorney saying things like you suggested. Ultimately though, there is an important thing that GP’s friend missed out on. Lawyers do not tell you what to do…

Thanks. FYI, IAAL; I don't claim to be the world's greatest, but my clients seem to appreciate it when I tell them that I think that Contingencies X, Y, and Z are acceptable business risks for their situation — after explaining the nature of the risk — and I've never had any kind of malpractice claim, knock on wood.

Example: Many years ago, on the afternoon of the last day of the quarter (when lots of business gets closed for financial-reporting purposes), a software-company client's VP of sales — with whom I'd worked for years — called me and described a situation, saying "the customer wants to change our contract to say X." I asked a couple of questions and then said "there's always the possibility of Bad Situation B coming up, but it's unlikely, and it'd be manageable if it did — go ahead." The VP said "Thank you — bye!" and slammed down the phone. (That VP went on to CEO positions at two other companies and uses me to this day.)

Re: Strapped startup declines acquihire, Apple poaches key engineers; NP, says court [pdf]

#355

Post by atraac »

piokoch wrote: post #348
ChuckMcM wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly correct. I tried to explain this to a public official from an east cost town who was flying back from the Bay Area trying to "learn the secrets" of creating an innovation hub. When I explained this situation (non-competes are illegal, stuff you do at home is yours) to him he literally said "That's crazy! Why would anyone hire anyone if they knew they could walk out the door to a competitor, or even to start a…

Are you sure that forbidding non-competence clause was really a big factor in Silicon Valley success. This sounds a little bit to simple. I was reading that it was all about initial founding from the military, access to large capital investments, proximity of good universities and existence of whole ecosystem targeted into making creation of startups easier. In Poland non-competence exists too, but in theory - it can…

It's worth noting that it depends on employment contract in Poland. Rules (if any) are different for B2B(freelance) contracts. Also NCA itself can differ, from forbidding to work with other companies, or simply forbidding you to poach clients(I've only ever seen this one in use).

Re: Strapped startup declines acquihire, Apple poaches key engineers; NP, says court [pdf]

#356

Post by sunshinerag »

travisjungroth wrote: post #169
ChuckMcM wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly correct. I tried to explain this to a public official from an east cost town who was flying back from the Bay Area trying to "learn the secrets" of creating an innovation hub. When I explained this situation (non-competes are illegal, stuff you do at home is yours) to him he literally said "That's crazy! Why would anyone hire anyone if they knew they could walk out the door to a competitor, or even to start a…

Your comment reminds me of this tweet: https://mobile.twitter.com/zackkanter/status/130493861651941... The cognitive dissonance humans are capable of is amazing. To actually say “We would never allow that in our town.” in the pejorative while flying back from a trip specifically meant to learn how to be like another town . If you’re not going to act on an author’s central point, don’t try to do any of the other parts…

what about the tax regime?

Re: Strapped startup declines acquihire, Apple poaches key engineers; NP, says court [pdf]

#357

Post by R0b0t1 »

Kbelicius wrote: post #221
R0b0t1 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, a first step would be increasing social mobility. It's pretty hard to attend school in large parts of Europe. If you are from Europe realize you might be in a bubble of people that speaks English very well -- in general, I've noticed such people are high performers relative to many.

Most EU countries have higher social mobility then the US.

I've read the opposite, or at least that they are very close, from an unbiased (as far as I can tell) source. Couple that with all the reports that investors in e.g. Germany are extremely conservative and it seems social mobility would be lower.

Re: Strapped startup declines acquihire, Apple poaches key engineers; NP, says court [pdf]

#358

Post by secondcoming »

rcpt wrote: post #281
KingOfCoders wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Southern France has wonderful weather and the Mediterranean Sea. The EU should start a special economic zone for startups there (a split of later taxes going into the EU budget).

Lisbon maybe getting there

I think Lisbon was on the radar a few years ago, but I get the impression it may have blown it. According to folk I know who were looking at it, they had issues with the 'work ethic' of locals (read into that what you will) and high tax.

Re: Strapped startup declines acquihire, Apple poaches key engineers; NP, says court [pdf]

#359

Post by teekert »

tubularhells wrote: post #328
teekert wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm I also have that in my Dutch contract. I really don't like the way my current employer handles their market and I'm eager to do it right myself (I feel that with the right technologies I could really build something nice myself.) This part of my contract has kept me from it (the "we own what you make at any time of the day"-clause). I do understand the clause though, it's just to easy to claim you made up some va…

If you want to go for it, have the company or zzp registered under your spouse's name. The spouse can employ you legally and even transfer ownership once the contractual time is up. This allows you to go ahead with your plans while saving you from all potential headache. Of course, never brag about this online.

Ok, thanx for the advice. They do pay me quite ok and offer me stability, so I would be very open about this to my boss. I was thinking about building something unrelated using the same tech first, for fun and possible profit. Then later I can decide what to do. I already did look for another position (at another company) specifically to have more freedom in this regard, and they (the boss) knows this.

Re: Strapped startup declines acquihire, Apple poaches key engineers; NP, says court [pdf]

#360

Post by hef19898 »

jsjohnst wrote: post #336
wdb wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think quite a lot of people can speak French, but have a similar stance against the French people, why would we speak French if you can't bother speaking differently language like English.

And further compounding the issue, in a specific part of France, they will give you shit for even trying to speak French. It doesn’t matter if you have good vocabulary and decent grammar / pronunciation, they still will refuse to speak to you or worse insult you for even trying. This certainly isn’t an issue in all of France, just one specific area that I’ll avoid naming to not offend folks from there.

Having been to most corners of France so far, I cannot confirm this. I can confirm so, that French have a tendency to not like speaking English at the very beginning of a conversation. They do appreciate so, if foreigners try speaking French. Some even all of a sudden can speak English.
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