Contracts you should never sign • Hacker News Board

Re: Contracts you should never sign

#261

Post by matheusmoreira » Sat, Jan 28, 2023, 4:31 AM UTC

pixl97 wrote: post #229

matheusmoreira wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing about online service agreements is they have pretty much zero leverage against you. So what if you violate their little terms of service? Worst they can do is ban your account. Their "take it or leave it" bullshit holds no water.

This depends on the nature of the transactions you're performing. For example, play that game with Paypal.... whoopsie, they're holding a quarter million of your cash and aren't going to let it go for six months. Of course where this much is at stake reading those agreements is very important. But take a middle ground. You join a forum and make a side business where you're selling some kind of product to their member…

Of course. If you have hundreds of thousands of dollars in a PayPal account, they have the highest possible leverage over you: they are literally holding your money. If you have a Steam account with hundreds of video games on it and an estimated value of tens of thousands of dollars, you're obviously not going to screw around and risk getting banned. Once money has exchanged hands, it becomes serious business.

There's no reason to care about some random blog or forum's terms of service though. Block their ads and surveillance capitalism all you want, they can do nothing.

Re: Contracts you should never sign

#262

Post by matheusmoreira » Sat, Jan 28, 2023, 4:57 AM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #258

matheusmoreira wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dishonorable? I don't think so. They're the ones trying to trick employees into immoral and illegal obligations. They only have themselves to blame if it blows up in their faces. They played the game and they lost.

An honorable person would refuse to sign such an agreement, or would honor it, enforceable or not. Nobody is making you sign it.

If an agreement is unenforceable, it's almost certainly abusive and exploitative in nature. I mean, it actually got to the point that the agreement was overridden by law. Doesn't even make sense to talk about honor in the same context. Would honorable people propose such an agreement?

They're likely banking on that sense of honor to make you hold yourself to obligations they can't legally hold you to.

Re: Contracts you should never sign

#263

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jan 28, 2023, 6:10 AM UTC

matheusmoreira wrote: post #262

WalterBright wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An honorable person would refuse to sign such an agreement, or would honor it, enforceable or not. Nobody is making you sign it.

If an agreement is unenforceable, it's almost certainly abusive and exploitative in nature. I mean, it actually got to the point that the agreement was overridden by law. Doesn't even make sense to talk about honor in the same context. Would honorable people propose such an agreement? They're likely banking on that sense of honor to make you hold yourself to obligations they can't legally hold you to.

[deleted]

Re: Contracts you should never sign

#264

Post by harvey9 » Sat, Jan 28, 2023, 9:16 AM UTC

sumtechguy wrote: post #217

ModernMech wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But in reality if you stick to these rules hard and fast, you'll basically never accept a job offer. That's clearly an exaggeration, but many-to-most of these clauses are in every boilerplate contract. In the tech industry, yeah, but there are industries that aren't so employee hostile where you can find better contract terms. I'd have to say in my experience, the tech industry is one of the worst when it comes to…

The funny NDA's are the ones where they think they have a 'secret sauce'. Then you get in there and find out they are using some off the shelf API's exactly as intended. You start asking exact questions and they do not understand how you know so much about their product already.

How is it that someone smart enough to be able to read the docs and connect up to the API can still be unable to realise that they are using something that others can also use?

Re: Contracts you should never sign

#265

Post by harvey9 » Sat, Jan 28, 2023, 9:54 AM UTC

CrimsonCape wrote: post #233

I work in an industry that is very much “at-will.” I signed an “Employee Handbook Acknowledgement” which says “I understand and agree that the handbook is not a contract of employment, or a promise or guarantee of continued employment” The “handbook” contains statements like “company owns all employee creations and IP ,etc etc etc” It’s ambiguous enough to seem to apply to side projects. What is your opinion of this?…

Sounds that way to me too. Do you have an actual written contract of employment which the handbook attemps to tack clauses onto?

Re: Contracts you should never sign

#266

Post by telebell » Sat, Jan 28, 2023, 12:47 PM UTC

TylerE wrote: post #189

thwayunion wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-competes are dog-eat-dog "fuck you" territory for me. I don't even bother negotiating. I happily sign non-competes, but will never sign a non-compete that's actually enforceable . If their lawyers want to lie to me about what's legal in my state, I'm happy to let them engage in unfair and deceptive behavior right up until there are actual damages. More importantly, I would also happily fight them in court if it c…

Very, very, bad idea. Never sign something you disagree with because you believe it to be unenforceable.

I’m a lawyer and a few years ago negotiated a “we own everything you make” clause in an agreement for a batch of engineers who were being hired at the same time. We couldn’t get the clause changed - as others have said, BigLaw drafted it, the employer didn’t want to change it - but we did get an email after back and forth that said they had no intention of enforcing that clause for stuff you make outside of work. So I sent that email to the engineers and they can hold onto it in case there’s an issue in the future.

Reasonable companies don’t want to get a reputation for litigating employment clauses like this. Sure, there are outliers, but nobody wants to be on the front page of HN for suing an engineer over a side hustle. Especially not in this labor market!

Side note: it was delightful to me that the engineers carefully read the agreement and one of them consulted their own lawyer. Most people don’t do that.

Re: Contracts you should never sign

#267

Post by IshKebab » Sat, Jan 28, 2023, 2:03 PM UTC

moron4hire wrote: post #53

kibwen wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> many-to-most of these clauses are in every boilerplate contract Contracts are entirely negotiable. If there's a job you want, but the contract contains an objectionable clause, tell them that you're willing to accept if they strike that clause. If you're at the point in the hiring process where they're showing you the contract, that means that they've sunk resources into you that they don't want to throw away. And…

In 20 years, I've never seen a company that was willing to negotiate over the employment contract of an employee . As a freelance consultant, I had free range to negotiate, but as an employee, the contract was always presented as "take it or leave."

I've done it a couple of times. Recently I started a new job where they had a "we own all of your IP you create at any time" clause, which is ridiculous. They agreed to change it to only include IP related to their normal business which I think is fairly reasonable.

Re: Contracts you should never sign

#268

Post by antihero » Sat, Jan 28, 2023, 2:20 PM UTC

Does getting fired in America go on some permanent record?

Re: Contracts you should never sign

#269

Post by 7steps2much » Sat, Jan 28, 2023, 3:40 PM UTC

nhchris wrote: post #83

7steps2much wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you make that pen available to me under these conditions? Sure. If you "just give" me something without any conditions then no, you could definitely not claim that story. But if you make that pen, your property, available to me explicitly only for work and nothing else? It's your property, not mine. I only have whatever rights you grant me to it.

> If you make that pen available to me under these conditions? Sure. Let's leave aside whether the law (in whatever country) permits such a one-sided contract, and ask - should it permit it? There are plenty of contract terms that are illegal (i.e. not backed by law), such as usury [1] or various anti-competitive practices, because their enforcement is seen as either unfair, or a detriment to society, regardless of w…

> because their enforcement is seen as either unfair, or a detriment to society

I mean, I do agree with you in general, its just that I do not see this issue as a detriment to society. If someone demands massive interest rates on loans that you need to survive thats definitely unethical.

A company demanding that you do not use their laptop so that you can work on your side projects at home ... well, that doesn't quite sound as bad. There is nothing stopping you from just buying your own device.

Thats like saying "only use the company car for work stuff" ... it just doesn't seem that unfair or unethical to me to be honest.

Re: Contracts you should never sign

#270

Post by tukantje » Sat, Jan 28, 2023, 5:26 PM UTC

somecompanyguy wrote: post #154

after a lifetime of web development [started in 1996], you should ask yourself "can i build a full product". if the answer is yes, don't sign contracts and start your product. employers don't pay what you're worth. you can save them 250k in a 2 week period and they won't know you did it and definitely won't pay you like you did. they might even toss you to the side thinking "oh my nephew makes websites". you might ha…

I see this sentiment a lot but just because you are capable, doesn't mean your product will financially do better than working for said employer (i.e. you might be more valuable as part of that large machine).

How do you propose to go at it in said scenario?