Contracts you should never sign • Hacker News Board

Re: Contracts you should never sign

#201

Post by TylerE » Fri, Jan 27, 2023, 6:01 PM UTC

toomuchtodo wrote: post #196

TylerE wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I disagree. My employment attorney recently reviewed a "non compete non solicitation" doc for an engagement and said, "it's copied from LegalZoom and is so badly written it will be unenforcible in the jurisdiction and here is why." They earned their $300 for reviewing my employment docs (for reasons beyond this specific issue). When in doubt, seek counsel and follow their guidance.

That's...rather different. You actually consulted an attorney. 99.9% of the people trying this one weird trick do not, often to their great cost.

Re: Contracts you should never sign

#202

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jan 27, 2023, 6:03 PM UTC

TylerE wrote: post #201

toomuchtodo wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. My employment attorney recently reviewed a "non compete non solicitation" doc for an engagement and said, "it's copied from LegalZoom and is so badly written it will be unenforcible in the jurisdiction and here is why." They earned their $300 for reviewing my employment docs (for reasons beyond this specific issue). When in doubt, seek counsel and follow their guidance.

That's...rather different. You actually consulted an attorney. 99.9% of the people trying this one weird trick do not, often to their great cost.

[deleted]

Re: Contracts you should never sign

#203

Post by jrockway » Fri, Jan 27, 2023, 6:05 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #133

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That last paragraph of yours is key the your whole post. It’s a good illustration of how a large enough difference in degree becomes a difference in kind.

If you use the company car for a side hustle in catering, then that perhaps gives the company the right to fire you or charge you for damages. However, they do not get to claim any intellectual property (recipes you invented for your catering side-job).

I agree with that. In the pen example, they should bill you for the wear and tear on the pen (ball bearings and ink aren't free). In the computer example, same deal. Figure out what a flash memory erase cycle is worth, figure out what bringing the CPU out of its lowest power state costs per minute, figure out how many of each were used, and send an invoice!

Re: Contracts you should never sign

#204

Post by nerdponx » Fri, Jan 27, 2023, 6:08 PM UTC

grey-area wrote: post #155

nerdponx wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never had any HR person give up even a comma in a contract like this, even after a full week of back-and-forth negotiating and trying to get them to strike out an individual sentence or change a word. Their attitude is that even if they lose their first choice hire over it, they always have a pipeline, and they'd rather adhere strictly to legal protocol and go with their second-choice hire.

Don't talk to HR, talk to the hiring manager.

They've always just kicked it over to HR. In hindsight I probably could have leaned on them harder.

Re: Contracts you should never sign

#205

Post by jrockway » Fri, Jan 27, 2023, 6:09 PM UTC

meowfly wrote: post #5

The only time I've been burned by my contract is from relocation expenses. I went to a company to take a job and not long into it a reorg moved me to a different team. I left the company and they demanded I pay back my relocation expenses. When I protested that they changed my role to something not what I was expecting, I was told that according to my contract it doesn't matter. The temporary housing I was put in was…

I got paid relocation once, and the contract said that if any employment changes were on their end, I wouldn't have to pay the costs back. (I think this is why there are clauses like "if we don't hear from you for 3 days, that counts as resigning" instead of "if we don't hear from you for 3 days, you're fired". BTW, never go on vacation in a no-cell-phone area over the transition date for a vacation tracking system migration. Learned that one the hard way!)

Nobody should sign a contract where they can fire you and charge you relocation costs; that is not employment but a scam to prop up relocation companies!

If you quit, then it's 50/50 in my mind. My take is that I don't want to be liable anything for quitting; the signing bonus is literally a bonus for signing the contract, not an obligation to do a certain amount of work. Salary covers the work. But I'd probably take a signing bonus that requires some tenure to not have to pay it back. Spend the money after that period. (Relocation is different to me because the disruption in your life is what they're paying for. If you don't like the job, your life was still disrupted. You're not asking for them to unrelocate you.)

Re: Contracts you should never sign

#206

Post by buildbot » Fri, Jan 27, 2023, 6:09 PM UTC

Turing_Machine wrote: post #191

oytis wrote: post #26

> Anything you do with the company property, e.g., work computer, automatically belongs to the company, even if you do it on the weekends. That doesn't sound unacceptable to me. It's not that I'm that strict about e.g. reading personal emails etc. on my work computer, but if it's some side hustle, be it for money or for fun, I think it's honest to take your personal machine for that.

Another wrinkle on "company property" you have to watch out for: When I was in grad school, a professor in my department left to take a job at another university. The beancounters demanded the return of the department-issued computer he'd had...in 1985. Of course, that was many, many computers ago, and what almost certainly happened was that he'd transferred the machine to a grad student or whatever when he got a new…

When I worked in tech support at my University, we 100% knew we were never getting it back but had to ask like once a year anyway because government. Public money means excessive tracing for any asset!!

Re: Contracts you should never sign

#207

Post by nerdponx » Fri, Jan 27, 2023, 6:10 PM UTC

kmoser wrote: post #160

riskable wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At big companies they will not change the contract for a single candidate. No way. Not unless it's a "big deal" sort of job where the executives are involved. They'll just tell you to go pound sand. The correct course of action is to cross out the clause, put your initials next to it, then sign the document. It is the responsibility of the company to have someone review contracts for such things but they never do; th…

This. You always have the power to change the proposed contract to suit your needs, and let them balk if they don't like it. This assumes it's a contract you can actually edit (whether on the computer or mark up with pen); for non-editable things (e.g. DocuSign contracts), I'm not sure what you'd do if you can't print it out pre-signing.

For the latter, I've sent them a "diff" over email containing the changes I required before signing. They didn't accept any changes to the document itself, but they did let me create a separate document with clarifying language.

Re: Contracts you should never sign

#208

Post by nerdponx » Fri, Jan 27, 2023, 6:11 PM UTC

johndhi wrote: post #177

whatshisface wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are still right about EULAs. The terms and style of negotiation are "we do what we want and change things when we feel like it, and you check accept or stop using the software," and guess what that implies about using the software - they do what they want and change stuff when they feel like it and you accept it or stop using the software. Contrast that to the open source pattern of making the license a header i…

I agree that, from the user perspective, I'd prefer if all of the software terms and EULAs I sign online were more favorable to me. But I think it's a major overstatement to say you'll save yourself a headache by not agreeing to one-sided terms. They are literally everywhere. This very website we're posting on right includes these terms in its terms of service: We reserve the right, at our sole discretion, to change…

Indeed. This is the classic hole in the economics argument about market forces. You can easily set up a game theory model of the prisoner's dilemma with many players, in which the payoff from deviating is so small that "everyone colludes" becomes a stable equilibrium.

Re: Contracts you should never sign

#209

Post by matheusmoreira » Fri, Jan 27, 2023, 6:12 PM UTC

riskable wrote: post #132

swader999 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of doctor and vet contracts are like that because they are likely to get a large local client following just by joining a practise that the practise has spent years cultivating.

There's an easy way to solve this problem without non-competes: Treat your employees better . Usually by paying them more . The entire concept of going to work for someone else is that it's supposed to save you a lot of trouble having to sell your services on your own/run your own business. If it has become so much more profitable for doctors to leave and start their own practice then they should be doing that becaus…

> it's supposed to save you a lot of trouble having to sell your services on your own/run your own business

Can't stress this enough. Show up, attend to patients as scheduled then go home and enjoy life. All the boring details are taken care of. It's definitely more profitable to start one's own practice but the comfort of working at such places should not be underestimated.

Re: Contracts you should never sign

#210

Post by smeej » Fri, Jan 27, 2023, 6:16 PM UTC

cj wrote: post #123

phphphphp wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can believe that they're careless and used the wrong copy of a document but I'm not sure I understand why you're signing an agreement like that on exit: you've signed it on hiring so that regardless of the outcome of your employment, you're bound to the anti-poach. The only reason I can think that they'd ask you to sign the agreement again on exit is that they wanted to bind you into something new -- what explanati…

> The only reason I can think that they'd ask you to sign the agreement again on exit is that they wanted to bind you into something new In the Clerky boilerplate employment docs, used by many YC companies, the employment agreement contains a Termination Certificate along with a clause that says something like “upon leaving the company you agree to sign the Termination Certificate in the appendix”. So technically, in…

Yeah, this was the situation, that I had agreed when I was hired to sign the agreement when I left. The issue was just that the summary of what I "had agreed to" when I was hired that was presented in the termination agreement wasn't actually what I had agreed to when I was hired.

I was leaving of my own accord, so no severance involved, which was why I told them I was happy to stand by the terms I'd already agreed to, including signing the termination agreement, but I wouldn't be signing a document that contained new terms.