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Maybe it doesn't go that sideways? But if it does, don't be surprised. Be prepared.
It is common for consulting or professional services contracts to include non-solicitation clauses. In other words, the client company may have already committed to your employer that they would not hire any of its employees for the duration of the contract and for some time after. If you were not involved in the negotiation and signing of the engagement agreement, then you probably don't have any way to find out if…
Any agreement not to hire employees without including the employees in the negoation would be illegal therefore void in most countries. Including the US where Apple and Google (maybe someone else) were caught having agreements not to hire from each other. It removes the ability for the employee to find the best salary/option/etc for themselves.
They may never want to promote you or let you move to another team if you're "The Expert"(TM).
The company was pretty bitter about it and switched vendors, and the CEO would often bad-mouth the vendor at speaking events with other small company teams.
Nobody was really nasty to the former colleague, although there was some light shade thrown their way as well.
You don't mention company size but if these are boutique shops or startups with sub 20 employees, and you aren't a role they regularly hire for, expect reputational damage to your new employer, you, or both in whatever sphere of influence your former employer has.
Something I have not seen mentioned - just beware you might end up "stuck" at the new company doing nothing other than working with/on that very same piece of software you're currently working on. They may never want to promote you or let you move to another team if you're "The Expert"(TM).
What ended up happening is that I got rolled into their (relatively broken) normal software development process. Advice and solutions that they would have previously asked for and let me solve turned into protracted internal meetings and discussions and seemed to carry a lot less weight than they did before. What would have been a simple meeting and SOW discussion and contract got turned into months of debate, meanwhile I was just helping random teams do bug fixes. The relationship completely changed and I ended up leaving about 6 months in when I started to feel like I was losing my edge and not being nearly as effective as I could be.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any agreement not to hire employees without including the employees in the negoation would be illegal therefore void in most countries. Including the US where Apple and Google (maybe someone else) were caught having agreements not to hire from each other. It removes the ability for the employee to find the best salary/option/etc for themselves.
There is a difference between overall no-hire agreements (which indeed won't stand in many places) and specific clauses covering only people involved in a common project (and that often don't strictly prevent hiring, but e.g. require compensation).
Clauses such as "If you hire this person you owe us X for an introduction fee" however would be more likely to be valid.
If so, why didn’t they?
That’s where the footguns rest.
I work for a consultancy in the UK. Occasionally someone leaves us to join a client. Our contracts with our clients prevent "solicitation" i.e. trying to encourage some to leave us to join them. In practice we never use those clauses - it's almost always better to maintain good relationships and reputation with clients. Plus it's legal for our employees to move jobs to them, it's just the solicitation bit that's not…
I have seen same thing, it is no solicitation but if someone joins on their own then it is not a breach of contract. In fact, I learned about this because once I asked one of our vendor (also friend) to apply for a job in our company, in front of my boss. My boss immediately corrected me that we cannot make such a comment.
Later she told me it is totally fine if he applied on his own but any hint of solicitation from us will disqualify him or get us in trouble.
Also with the same vendor, I had seen their people joining our company quite a bit. And they continued to do business with us.
Perspective context: Am CTO who has converted consultants to staff before. There is nothing stopping you personally from changing roles like everyone says and non competes are not enforceable in California. However B2B contracts usually don't have any such limitations, so there might be a liability for damages between the client and your current company. This is the main reason you need to raise this up to people who…