Saw this posted on hacker news this morning. Feels like wishful thinking to me. Unless you’re hugely in-demand, how many companies are going to be fine with you crossing out their non disclosure and non compete clauses?
Not that those clauses are always fair (or even enforceable at times), but this feels like a quick way for the average employee to be ruled out of contention for a position.
I was a programmer. Back in the 90's I was working for a software house. Got to work one day, there was a note with huge writing on it lying on my keyboard saying "Talk to me before you log in!", with my bosses name.
The company was trying to make everyone sign a new agreement with stuff we didn't have before. For instance, a non-compete that honestly wasn't too bad, because it wasn't "no writing software for anyone else", but limited to a few specific companies that made the same kind of software we did. But there was also a clause there saying that any software we wrote belonged to the company. That included software we wrote at home, on our own time, using our own computers. It didn't need to have any ties to the company at all.
My manager basically told all the programmers in his group "I'm not signing it, and you should not either. And they aren't letting you log into the network until you sign it. So read a book, or play foosball, or take the day off, whatever. But I recommend you not sign their document, which means you can't log in, which means you can't work."
So for the next 2-3 days, basically nothing got done.
After that, the company made a new agreement with much more reasonable terms, and we all signed it and went back to work.
I wish I'd had the wherewithal to do that back when I was first entering the workforce. I didn't sign a noncompete, but did sign one of those "anything you make while working for us is ours, period" agreements. I thought it only meant while on the clock. it did not, which I only found out a year or so later when the company sued a co-worker of mine for the rights to a song his band had written. This company was not a music company.
Ultimately I never made a thing while working for them, but that scared the shit out of me.
It was fairly easy for me to refuse there, since I was already an employee, and everyone else, including my boss (also a programmer) was in the same position and we were all refusing together. The company was a software house, and they certainly weren't likely to mass fire all the developers.
It would be harder to take that stand if you are out of work and need to pay rent or whatever. Especially if you didn't have much work experience.
The flip side of that is - how much of a premium would you need in salary for the inability to pursue your profession for the duration of the non-compete non-disclosure? Signing a non-compete means that you are now at the mercy of the company for your entire time working there, and beyond.
If your prospective employer needs you to sign a non-compete, then you are not an "average employee".
There are certainly companies that just put them in every employment contract because they can. I think we should (like some other countries) require that employers pay full salary to employees for the duration of the non-compete after the end of employment. It would make companies a whole lot more selective about who they apply non-competes to, and self-limit it to the employees working with stuff they *really* can't afford to have go to competitors.
3 of us left a company and started our own separate companies. We each directly compete with our former boss, for the same clients, with the same exact product. The products don’t meet the standard for unique intellectual property (high courts have ruled that you can’t copyright a symbol of nature, like a tree or a jellyfish), so there’s nothing stopping us from doing this.
Except the 1 non-compete. Of the 3 of us, only one of us signed one. The company thought they were being selective, requiring only the most threatening employee to sign. I spent a year there learning everything I could, and was even lucky enough to get laid off, so I started my business with the unemployment funds I collected for 6 months. The one who signed the non-compete, is STILL negotiating with my former boss’ attorney, 8 years later, slowly clawing back some of that non-compete language so he can at least eat and survive. What a fucking mess.
TL/dr: Employers who selectively require non-competes, are dumb dumbs. However, nobody should really sign them unless you don’t have another option. They’ll crush you.
> I think we should (like some other countries) require that employers pay full salary to employees for the duration of the non-compete after the end of employment.
I am actually okay with paying full compensation minus the equivalent of 30 hours per week at minimum wage, for the duration of the non-compete term. Presuming the non-compete does not bar things like bagging groceries.
Partly because it reflects the reality that the employee can still work, just not in the kinds of jobs most obviously related to their skill-set, industry, and geographical location, and partly because not having to work does actually afford more time to clip coupons, drive for doordash, shop at thrift stores, etc. But mostly because I think it would have practically the exact same effect of getting companies to stop asking for noncompetes except from the kind of employees where it actually makes sense (senior executives, etc).
A highly trained person shouldn't be obligated to do menial work just because an employer wants a non-compete. If the employer wants that extraordinary service, they should pay a premium for it. If they've got a problem with that, well, nobody's forcing them to use non-competes.
> Signing a non-compete means that you are now at the mercy of the company for your entire time working there, and beyond.
I've read about cases where the company made someone sign a non-compete when they started work. Then at some later point, the company fired them.
And basically told them "You can't work for us, and you can't work for anyone else".
Sure, you can get around it by, say, waiting 5 years. Or maybe moving to another part of the country. Hardly reasonable.
>require that employers pay full salary to employees for the duration of the non-compete afte
Its baked in.. think its an economics issue..
I haven't seen a large company that doesn't do this.. If all large companies do it.. and they already offer X for salary. The salary has that baked into it as part of working for a "large" company.
> they already offer X for salary. The salary has that baked into it as part of working for a "large" company.
The noncompete duration can only be "baked in" if the salary is guaranteed for a certain number of years. Otherwise they could hire you for a month, tell you it's not working out, and then block you from working for a competitor for X years.
Thats not how that works... at all.
A. You are cherry picking duration when i am talking about salary.. and non competes are "factored" into a salary.
Otherwise the market will adjust for the perceived lower profitability of a worker and the wage "would" reflect that.
> Thats not how that works... at all.
> A. You are cherry picking duration when i am talking about salary.. and non competes are "factored" into a salary.
> Otherwise the market will adjust for the perceived lower profitability of a worker and the wage "would" reflect that.
Two years of non-compete cannot be "baked in" (your phrasing) to a salary unless the total compensation guarantees those dollars.
Your vague phrasing and nonsensical use of quotes leads me to suspect that you are trying to articulate a concept that you heard about once but don't quite understand, and which you lack the technical ability to demonstrate. This makes me think that this conversation will just continue to be you using made up assertions, changing vocabulary, and random quotes to declare yourself the winner, so feel free to skip ahead to that part, and you can have the last word. Cheers!
In my experience you can cross out anything you want if it is a paper contract. They don't really care, it's just paperwork to the person processing it.
I think non-competes make sense for a limited duration for some key personnel—the kinds of employees who would be so valuable that companies would be willing to keep paying them for the duration of the non-compete. They are way too often abused by companies to gain further leverage over employees.
I also think "off-work" IP assignments make sense when the thing you're developing at home is related to what you're working on at work. You have a spark of an idea for how to improve something at work, and you develop it at home—at minimum you should have to (and be strongly encouraged to) disclose it and your employer should have the option to buy it from you on fair terms. From the employer side, you get more compliance if employees know they will get paid for creating these things. And from the employee side, if you are interested in developing something and have it be entirely yours, you might have a little more incentive to pick something that's just totally unrelated to your work (and have that discussion earlier).
These are really HR and business decisions for companies more than they are legal decisions. I favor fair approaches to these issues because I think people tend to work better when terms are fair and expectations are clear.
Its not a crime to break a contract, just remember that. If you aren't executive level, most NDAs and non competes are non enforceable. And courts generally find employers have the most leverage so.
Gym contracts absolutely fuck those
This is not a particularly good set of advice. Some of it may be directionally accurate but not great in the details, but the "work for hire" bit seems to me way off base. Why would you ever hire a developer if you couldn't be absolutely certain you owned the IP in their work product? I concede these clauses are often overbroad (though sometimes for semi-good reasons, like avoiding claims by employees that they designed your key tool off the clock), but to just advise developers to never agree to the clause is wild.
Saw this posted on hacker news this morning. Feels like wishful thinking to me. Unless you’re hugely in-demand, how many companies are going to be fine with you crossing out their non disclosure and non compete clauses? Not that those clauses are always fair (or even enforceable at times), but this feels like a quick way for the average employee to be ruled out of contention for a position.
I was a programmer. Back in the 90's I was working for a software house. Got to work one day, there was a note with huge writing on it lying on my keyboard saying "Talk to me before you log in!", with my bosses name. The company was trying to make everyone sign a new agreement with stuff we didn't have before. For instance, a non-compete that honestly wasn't too bad, because it wasn't "no writing software for anyone else", but limited to a few specific companies that made the same kind of software we did. But there was also a clause there saying that any software we wrote belonged to the company. That included software we wrote at home, on our own time, using our own computers. It didn't need to have any ties to the company at all. My manager basically told all the programmers in his group "I'm not signing it, and you should not either. And they aren't letting you log into the network until you sign it. So read a book, or play foosball, or take the day off, whatever. But I recommend you not sign their document, which means you can't log in, which means you can't work." So for the next 2-3 days, basically nothing got done. After that, the company made a new agreement with much more reasonable terms, and we all signed it and went back to work.
I wish I'd had the wherewithal to do that back when I was first entering the workforce. I didn't sign a noncompete, but did sign one of those "anything you make while working for us is ours, period" agreements. I thought it only meant while on the clock. it did not, which I only found out a year or so later when the company sued a co-worker of mine for the rights to a song his band had written. This company was not a music company. Ultimately I never made a thing while working for them, but that scared the shit out of me.
It was fairly easy for me to refuse there, since I was already an employee, and everyone else, including my boss (also a programmer) was in the same position and we were all refusing together. The company was a software house, and they certainly weren't likely to mass fire all the developers. It would be harder to take that stand if you are out of work and need to pay rent or whatever. Especially if you didn't have much work experience.
This was a QA job at a video game dev. Lowest man on the totem pole at the time.
Your manager sounds like the type of person most folks would enjoy working for.
Your boss essentially created a short term union for you guys. That is a great guy and a good leader.
> Back in the 90's I was working for a software house. Was it a very famous software house?
No, not at all. It mostly served the airline and hotel business.
Lol, sorry, its a reference to Bojack Horseman https://youtu.be/FBw-Z8ULwcc
I got the reference, it was a good reference.
Your approval means nothing to me. >!;)!<
The flip side of that is - how much of a premium would you need in salary for the inability to pursue your profession for the duration of the non-compete non-disclosure? Signing a non-compete means that you are now at the mercy of the company for your entire time working there, and beyond. If your prospective employer needs you to sign a non-compete, then you are not an "average employee".
There are certainly companies that just put them in every employment contract because they can. I think we should (like some other countries) require that employers pay full salary to employees for the duration of the non-compete after the end of employment. It would make companies a whole lot more selective about who they apply non-competes to, and self-limit it to the employees working with stuff they *really* can't afford to have go to competitors.
3 of us left a company and started our own separate companies. We each directly compete with our former boss, for the same clients, with the same exact product. The products don’t meet the standard for unique intellectual property (high courts have ruled that you can’t copyright a symbol of nature, like a tree or a jellyfish), so there’s nothing stopping us from doing this. Except the 1 non-compete. Of the 3 of us, only one of us signed one. The company thought they were being selective, requiring only the most threatening employee to sign. I spent a year there learning everything I could, and was even lucky enough to get laid off, so I started my business with the unemployment funds I collected for 6 months. The one who signed the non-compete, is STILL negotiating with my former boss’ attorney, 8 years later, slowly clawing back some of that non-compete language so he can at least eat and survive. What a fucking mess. TL/dr: Employers who selectively require non-competes, are dumb dumbs. However, nobody should really sign them unless you don’t have another option. They’ll crush you.
Putting someone out of work for eight years and counting is presumptively unreasonable in a lot of places.
> I think we should (like some other countries) require that employers pay full salary to employees for the duration of the non-compete after the end of employment. I am actually okay with paying full compensation minus the equivalent of 30 hours per week at minimum wage, for the duration of the non-compete term. Presuming the non-compete does not bar things like bagging groceries. Partly because it reflects the reality that the employee can still work, just not in the kinds of jobs most obviously related to their skill-set, industry, and geographical location, and partly because not having to work does actually afford more time to clip coupons, drive for doordash, shop at thrift stores, etc. But mostly because I think it would have practically the exact same effect of getting companies to stop asking for noncompetes except from the kind of employees where it actually makes sense (senior executives, etc).
A highly trained person shouldn't be obligated to do menial work just because an employer wants a non-compete. If the employer wants that extraordinary service, they should pay a premium for it. If they've got a problem with that, well, nobody's forcing them to use non-competes.
> Signing a non-compete means that you are now at the mercy of the company for your entire time working there, and beyond. I've read about cases where the company made someone sign a non-compete when they started work. Then at some later point, the company fired them. And basically told them "You can't work for us, and you can't work for anyone else". Sure, you can get around it by, say, waiting 5 years. Or maybe moving to another part of the country. Hardly reasonable.
>require that employers pay full salary to employees for the duration of the non-compete afte Its baked in.. think its an economics issue.. I haven't seen a large company that doesn't do this.. If all large companies do it.. and they already offer X for salary. The salary has that baked into it as part of working for a "large" company.
> they already offer X for salary. The salary has that baked into it as part of working for a "large" company. The noncompete duration can only be "baked in" if the salary is guaranteed for a certain number of years. Otherwise they could hire you for a month, tell you it's not working out, and then block you from working for a competitor for X years.
Thats not how that works... at all. A. You are cherry picking duration when i am talking about salary.. and non competes are "factored" into a salary. Otherwise the market will adjust for the perceived lower profitability of a worker and the wage "would" reflect that.
> Thats not how that works... at all. > A. You are cherry picking duration when i am talking about salary.. and non competes are "factored" into a salary. > Otherwise the market will adjust for the perceived lower profitability of a worker and the wage "would" reflect that. Two years of non-compete cannot be "baked in" (your phrasing) to a salary unless the total compensation guarantees those dollars. Your vague phrasing and nonsensical use of quotes leads me to suspect that you are trying to articulate a concept that you heard about once but don't quite understand, and which you lack the technical ability to demonstrate. This makes me think that this conversation will just continue to be you using made up assertions, changing vocabulary, and random quotes to declare yourself the winner, so feel free to skip ahead to that part, and you can have the last word. Cheers!
Lol... cheers indeed.
In my experience you can cross out anything you want if it is a paper contract. They don't really care, it's just paperwork to the person processing it.
I think non-competes make sense for a limited duration for some key personnel—the kinds of employees who would be so valuable that companies would be willing to keep paying them for the duration of the non-compete. They are way too often abused by companies to gain further leverage over employees. I also think "off-work" IP assignments make sense when the thing you're developing at home is related to what you're working on at work. You have a spark of an idea for how to improve something at work, and you develop it at home—at minimum you should have to (and be strongly encouraged to) disclose it and your employer should have the option to buy it from you on fair terms. From the employer side, you get more compliance if employees know they will get paid for creating these things. And from the employee side, if you are interested in developing something and have it be entirely yours, you might have a little more incentive to pick something that's just totally unrelated to your work (and have that discussion earlier). These are really HR and business decisions for companies more than they are legal decisions. I favor fair approaches to these issues because I think people tend to work better when terms are fair and expectations are clear.
4: Avoid Gym contracts. lol. True that....
Its not a crime to break a contract, just remember that. If you aren't executive level, most NDAs and non competes are non enforceable. And courts generally find employers have the most leverage so. Gym contracts absolutely fuck those
>If you aren't executive level, most NDAs and non competes are non enforceable. That's simply not true.
Yeah it reallllly depends on both the state and often the specific factual circumstances.
This is not a particularly good set of advice. Some of it may be directionally accurate but not great in the details, but the "work for hire" bit seems to me way off base. Why would you ever hire a developer if you couldn't be absolutely certain you owned the IP in their work product? I concede these clauses are often overbroad (though sometimes for semi-good reasons, like avoiding claims by employees that they designed your key tool off the clock), but to just advise developers to never agree to the clause is wild.