481–490 of 567 posts
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I always respond with "if it's never enforced, then you'll be fine with me taking it out" Then I strike the offending passage out on both copies of the contract, sign and hand it back to them. Your move. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Do you really do this, and is striking out a line of a contract binding?
Great, if these documents are credible, this is exactly what I was implying[1] yesteday. Here, listen to Altman say how he is "genuinely embarrassed": "this is on me and one of the few times i've been genuinely embarrassed running openai; i did not know this was happening and i should have." The first thing the above conjures up is the other disgraced Sam (Bankman-Fried) saying "this is on me" when FTX went bust. I b…
"this is on me" --> "look at what a great leader I am, taking responsibility for other people's mistakes" "i've been genuinely embarrassed" --> "yep, totally not my fault actually" "I should have known" --> "other people fucked this up, and they didn't even inform me"
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Do you really do this, and is striking out a line of a contract binding?
IANAL but I've seen strikes throughout contracts, and then an initial+date from both parties. Weird how in 2024 an initial that's so easily forgeable can be legally binding
Were they really stupid enough to think that the amount of money being offered would bend some of the most principled people in the world?
Whoever allowed those clauses to be added and let them remain has done more damage to the public face of OpenAI than any aggravated ex-employee ever could.
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I’ve heard of some pretty aggressive non-competes in finance, but AFAIU (never worked in Connecticut myself), it’s both the carrot and the stick: you get both paid and a stiff contract if you leave with proprietary alpha between the ears. In tech I’ve never even heard a rumor of something like this.
It’s got a term - “garden leave” and yeah it was prevalent in finance. I say “was” because I think some states are changing laws wrt/ non-competes and this calling this practice into question.
First of all, taking any code with you is theft, and you go to jail, like this poor Goldman Sachs programmer [1]. This will happen even if the code has no alpha.
However, noone can prevent you from taking knowledge (i.e. your memories), so reimplementing alpha elsewhere is fine. Of course, the best alpha is that which cannot simply be replicated, e.g. it depends on proprietary datasets, proprietary hardware (e.g. fast links between exchanges), access to cheap capital, etc.
What hedge funds used to do, is give you lengthy non-competes. 6months for junior staff, 1-2y for traders, 3y+ in case of Renaissance Technologies.
In the US, that's now illegal and un-enforceable. So what hedge funds do now, is lengthy garden(ing) leaves. This means you still work for the company, you still earn a salary, and in some (many? all?) cases also the bonus. But you don't go to the office, you can't access any code, you don't see any trades. The company "moves on" (developes/refines its alpha, including your alpha - alpha you created) and you don't.
These lengthy garden leaves replaced non-competes, so they're now 1y+. AFAIK they are enforceable, just as non-competes while being employed always have been.
[1] https://nypost.com/2018/10/23/ex-goldman-programmer-sentence...
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Employees are replaceable. Outside of a very specific few, they have very little leverage. If an employee loses trust and leaves or “quiet quits”, they will simply be replaced with one of the hundreds of people clamoring to work for them. This is why unionization is so great. Just as Reddit users stay on Reddit because there is nowhere else to go, the reality is that everyone worships leadership because they keep the…
Yes, that "very little leverage" is why engineers & researchers near the bottom of OpenAI's career ladder are getting paid 900k/year (2/3rds funny money, admittedly, though in practice many people _have_ cashed out at very large multiples).
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Employees are replaceable. Outside of a very specific few, they have very little leverage. If an employee loses trust and leaves or “quiet quits”, they will simply be replaced with one of the hundreds of people clamoring to work for them. This is why unionization is so great. Just as Reddit users stay on Reddit because there is nowhere else to go, the reality is that everyone worships leadership because they keep the…
Employees are replaceable, sure, but that doesn't mean that you can't squander your good will with competent employees and end up only being able to hire sub-par employees.
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Do you really do this, and is striking out a line of a contract binding?
IANAL but I've seen strikes throughout contracts, and then an initial+date from both parties. Weird how in 2024 an initial that's so easily forgeable can be legally binding
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I have worked for multiple startups (Malwarebytes, Vicarious, Rad AI, Explosion AI, Aptible, Kenna Security). Not once have I seen an exit agreement that stated they would steal back my vested equity if I didn't sign. This is definitely not "standard restrictions".
Anytime someone tried to get me to sign a terrible contract, they always said “This is just standard stuff.”
They could have been cool. They could have been 2001 Google. They could have been the number one place any new PhD wanted to work. But no. The MBAs saw dollar signs, and everything went out the window. They fumbled the early mover advantage, and will be hollowed out by the competition and commodified by the PaaS giants. What a shame.
We have to look at the reality that the worst excesses of the new Silicon Valley culture aren’t stemming from the adults sent to run the ship anymore, and they aren’t stemming from the nerds those adults co-opt anymore either.
The worst excesses of the new Silicon Valley culture are coming from nerds who are empowered and rewarded for their superpower of being unable to empathise.
And I say that as someone who is back to being almost a hermit. We got here by paying people like us and not insisting we try to stop saying what we think without pausing first to think about how it will be received by people not like us.
It’s not a them-vs-us thing now. It’s us-vs-us.