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from the do-they-want-you-more-than-you-need-them dept.
Sumit Khanna has a blog post with the title, Why I Don't Sign Non-Competes:
[...] Over the course of the next fifteen years, I would be asked to sign non-competes several more times, always prior to employment. I've always refused, and until recently, I've never been denied a position because of that refusal.
A non-compete is a type of contract issued by an employer, typically part of the standard work agreement, job offer or non-disclosure agreement, which states that the employee agrees not to start a business that competes with their current company or to work for their company's competitors, for a set length of time (typically one year) after leaving or being terminated. If that sounds like an illegal contract, in the state of California, it is.
What are soylentils' experience with non-compete clauses?
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday March 24 2018, @08:06AM (1 child)
After accepting a job offer, at the very last minute they asked me to sign the most amazing employment contract I'd ever seen. It was truly a work of art:
Had I signed it I would have given my employer the rights to every line of code I had ever written, all of my inventions, all of my everything.
It is common for IP assignments to exclude any IP that the new employee specifically declares as having been created before signing that contract. This wasn't like that: it specified that I was assigning them everything I had ever done.
I replied that I could not sign that contract. That left them in a fix as they were hiring me to replace someone who resigned in the middle of a project.
They backed down and said I didn't have to sign it.
I then proceeded to work for them with no contract at all. About an hour before the end of my last day at that company, they suddenly realized that I never signed an NDA. The NDA they requested I sign was quite reasonable, so I signed it.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Saturday March 24 2018, @03:10PM
I was asked this as well; and was told everyone else signed it, and if I am not going to, what have I invented that I haven't published yet that is so secret, do I have something to hide, aren't I proud of my accomplishments, etc.
I said I am not going to list out a bunch of things that may help them as a business without being compensated for it, unless via the generousity and kindness of my desiring to use tools I made during the course of my employ with them to the benefit of them and their clients. But I am not giving it away for them to use forever.
That same place tried to make it so I couldn't do any network consulting within their "range", which they turned into "anything that can be remotely accessed via a secure or insecure connection, due to the inherent difficulty in establishing a boundary in The Cloud"
We had that contract rewritten, and I left within a few months due to those terms being more than just symbolic of how they tried to run their business. One of the actual employees there left to go work at a job closer to home and for more money (so, he wouldn't be coming back even if they offered something to counter that)--and they took him to court for taking a job at a "potential customer" since he was on their payroll as the IT guy, and this denied future profits apparently.
He'd blindly signed everything and thought it was weird I even read the documents because you have to sign them to get the job so what difference does it make?
I didn't have any issues at all regarding the non-complete when I left... since it didn't apply to me and the contract I ended up signing didn't include any of the stuff I struck out and said to revise or no deal.
You might not be able to get as much money as you want when you resist these things and choose not to solely focus on that salary/hourly rate, but sometimes this sort of freedom is one of those things that are worth getting paid less for. (That said, if the whole thing stinks, then don't sign if negotiations are going nowhere--remember, it's not just what you agree to, but they learn about how you are as a person and you them as a business when these deals are negotiated. Be a pushover and you'll get treated like one... demand respect, and you just might get it.)