191–200 of 395 posts
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There is the small issue of whether or not your personal integrity allows you to sign an agreement you do not intend to abide, regardless of the legality.
Well, somebody is trying to impose something so absurd onto you that it is illegal, and you still have moral issues about lying to him?
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What's wrong with it exactly? If I hired a flooring company to lay down some hardwood, I'm not going to tell them "now, don't go doing flooring for my competition for the duration of this job." What's the difference? You're right that it's fair for employers not to hire me if this is my demand. I never meant to imply otherwise. Employers can require all sorts of terrible things. Our recourse is mostly to either negot…
> What's the difference? The difference is that you didn't spend lots of money researching a better type of floor-laying and then have the flooring company come in to lay the hardwood according to your specs. If you had, you might want to protect that secret.
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I hear this advice about contracts of adhesion all the time, "just red line out the parts you don't like, just like in that scene in 50 Shades of Gray." Who in the software industry still gets offers like that? Everyone I know gets a DocuSign PDF they sign digitally. There's no opportunity to alter the document. There is basically no non-confrontational way to do this. If a software developer has a competing offer, s…
Quoting Herb Cohen's "You can negotiate anything" about signing leases under unfavorable terms: "In rare cases where a person still hesitated to sign his or her name, I might add 'The legal people won't approve of any changes'. Keep in mind that the legal people didn't even know they wouldn't approve of any changes. Nevertheless, the phrase worked like a charm, since 'legal people' projects, on a wide screen, a power…
Worth remembering, especially for those just entering the software field: by the time a potential employer gives you an employment agreement to sign, they've already decided they want you. At that point, it's on them to give you a palatable offer. They may include a noncompete clause for one of two reasons: 1) to prevent you from working somewhere else at the same time, which can create all sorts of conflicts of inte…
I've never been presented with one (and hope I never will) so this is hypothetical, but I have a hard time imagining even doing that. A company is paying me to work for them, they're not paying to own me. When I'm off the clock, my time is my own, up to and including doing paid work for anyone else I want. I'd make an exception if they increased my pay accordingly. But considering that they're asking for 4.2x more of…
As an employee, every company I've ever worked for has given me one. Few have been negotiable, but pretty much all have openly stated/agreed they weren't enforceable in CA when I raised concerns.
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Well, as President Donald Trump gets paid a base salary of 400k. As another poster pointed out the difference between 40 hours / week, and 24/7 is 4.2x. That would mean that "more than enough" for a normal salary is $95k.
That was me. And $95,000/year is a pretty good salary. Don't forget the free room and board on top of that.
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What? Only if you're very inexperienced will this be tricky, once you're senior nobody bats an eye when I ask for things to be changed in the contract. A contract is part of communicating how we will work together. Demonstrate that you're competent by clearly communicating the changes you want and why you want them and if they react back poorly then you dodged a major bullet, since they'll also communicate poorly in…
I've been working in software for a long time, and have been asked to sign non-competes over a dozen times by now. I'm a contractor, which makes it much easier to turn down (how the hell could I possibly keep working with a non-compete?), but the OP is correct in that almost everything is a PDF nowadays. You have to bitch and scream to get a contract changed. Most naive workers won't understand that there's a negotia…
What's so immutable about a PDF? I'm thinking about my most recent job where when the contract arrived in my inbox it had a salary 10% lower than I expected. I was disappointed and anxious about how to continue. It was a good job, but I didn't want to take a pay cut. I sent off a quick email clarify it, unsure how it was received. An hour later I got a short apology and a new contract.
Asking is free. It's as they say - you never know if you never go. If they still resist, then you've done the hardest part of starting the conversation, and it's up to you to see if you want to continue with the negotiations.
Worth remembering, especially for those just entering the software field: by the time a potential employer gives you an employment agreement to sign, they've already decided they want you. At that point, it's on them to give you a palatable offer. They may include a noncompete clause for one of two reasons: 1) to prevent you from working somewhere else at the same time, which can create all sorts of conflicts of inte…
Actually there is a third reason: An employee leaves and takes proprietary tech to a competitor.
The standard answer is: Well that's what an NDA/Confidentiality clause is for so you don't need to worry about that.
Unfortunately it doesn't really work like that. You can't just purge your brain of something you've been working on for months or years. On top of that it's nearly impossible to prove that a confidentiality infringement was made unless code or hardware was straight up exported/copied and implemented.
Especially in the case where a megacorp hires away someone from a startup, the startup can't reasonably sue megacorp for this type of thing because it would cost too much and be basically a total loss.
Effectively it happens like this:
Employee 1 was implementing a novel computer vision algo for Startup X.
Megacorp approaches Employee 1 with 3x salary offer and stock.
Employee 1 leaves startup to work on a similar project for megacorp.
Startup can't ask what Employee 1 is working on because Employee 1 and Megacorp have an NDA.
Megacorp comes out with a new product that implements the algo, except it was implemented by the team Employee 1 was on which had been working on the same problem for a while and not just Employee 1 themselves.
I've seen this happen first hand, so it's not like it doesn't go on.
There are a million "reasons" why people are ok with this situation and just blame it on the startup not being competitive with salary, but increasingly that's basically impossible.
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> "When I'm off the clock, my time is my own, up to and including doing paid work for anyone else I want." At least one of the reasons for a non-compete clause is to make sure you're not doing stuff on the clock for your employer, and then getting double-paid by a competitor for essentially the same end result but without the competitor having to pay for the whole process of getting that result. Like, if they're payi…
Generally this is covered under a confidentiality agreement, which forbids the disclosure of the company's intellectual property. The designs you mention in your example would be considered work-for-hire, and (depending on how specific/proprietary they were) if you sold them to a competitor on the sly, you might be in violation of such an agreement. So no, a noncompete - even one that only applies to the time you are…
Confidentiality doesn't work that well because proving that a former employee disclosed proprietary information is very difficult.
However, the ex-employee is generally paid at full salary for the time that they're unemployed, which seems like a very fair arrangement all around.