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: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Saturday March 24 2018, @03:23AM (7 children)
I was presented with a non-compete that basically excluded me from employment anywhere in my industry for a period of 5 years following termination, I refused to sign. I was told "everybody else signed it." I replied "maybe that's fine for everybody else, I'm going to need to work in this industry after this is over." They modified the agreement to remove the overly broad exclusion and I signed.
Learning more about it later, that agreement wasn't worth the paper it was written on in the first place, would have been thrown out as 'unconscionable,' which is apparently very common. However, even if it wouldn't hold up in court, I'd rather not be in court in the first place. As it turned out, the company relocated to a place I wasn't willing to go after about a year, and they found a new job for me with another company in town and arranged a transitional period of a few months where I worked for both while the new company's funding got up to speed - so, really cool handling of the transition on their part.
Even more absurd was another place that laid off the whole staff (30+ people) just before Christmas with basically zero notice, with partial potential callbacks in February. Around March they started circulating "you agree not to sue us, sign here, and by the way this agreement is confidential you are not allowed to tell anyone about it" letters. I asked what I got in exchange for signing, their answer "nothing." Needless to say, I never signed. Apparently their investors wanted to screen the staff and only re-hire the really stupid ones.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: -1, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday March 24 2018, @03:28AM (6 children)
I was recently presented with a non-compete agreement.
My response: It involved angry Blacks. [soylentnews.org] Fuck y'all!
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 24 2018, @03:48AM
It was an ordinary day in the city. The weather was nice, and everything was running smoothly. A perfectly ordinary day, you might say. But for one man, it was one of the worst days of his life.
Panicking. A man was panicking in the middle of the sidewalk. Wallet. He had lost his wallet, which contained several thousands dollars in cash! Someone would surely find it and pocket the money for themselves! The man just knew it. As the man continued to despair, a woman walked up to him with something in her hand. His wallet.
The man checked the contents of the wallet. Relief. Everything was there. His relief then turned into immense gratitude as he thought about how honest and kind the woman must be; she could have pocketed thousands of dollars for herself, after all. The man pondered about how he would repay her for her generosity, but nothing came to mind. Then, a lightbulb lit up in the man's mind; he knew how to repay her. A grin appeared on the man's face.
Slam! Slam! Slam! A man was seen punching a woman in the face on the sidewalk whilst violating her. That alone would be fine, but something was different about this man's movements. An astute observer would realize that the man's every punch and thrust exerted massive amounts of gratitude. His gratitude was enough to bring casual observers to tears. Even when the woman screamed, the man did not stop; it was the least he could do to repay her for her kindness. Yes, he had chosen to return the favor by forcibly turning her into what she was always meant to be: A breeding sow. 'What a lavish reward,' everyone watching thought.
Several years and several babies later, the woman finally broke. By that time, the man had already repaid her kindness. No, the reality was that the woman's kindness had been repaid the very moment the man laid his precious hands on that filthy sow. The man, thoroughly satisified with the whole ordeal, smiled and ventured forth into the great unknown. The endless unknown...
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Saturday March 24 2018, @04:42AM (4 children)
No, you weren't. Just more fiction from Drunk Uncle.
You claim to be in California (San Diego) and you claim to work as a technician. No California employer is going to bother trying to get a junior employee to sign an contract with an unenforceable clause.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 24 2018, @04:49AM (2 children)
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/understanding-californias-ban-on-non-compete-agreements_us_58af1626e4b0e5fdf6196f04 [huffingtonpost.com]
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Saturday March 24 2018, @05:38AM
Another lawyer disagrees:
http://noncompetehelp.com/california-non-compete-during-employment.html [noncompetehelp.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday March 24 2018, @05:43PM
Then there's severability - the standard clause that says "we're overreaching in several other parts of this contract, and we know it, but we're not telling you which ones. When the shit hits the fan and you start pointing out that pieces of this agreement were illegal, we reserve the right to ditch them and hold you to the rest."
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: -1, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday March 24 2018, @05:13AM
Yeah, good point. Guess we'd better leverage the fact that no juniors are gonna get hired anytime soon while Visa hires are going to steal American jobs. Americans don't like that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 24 2018, @03:35AM
Non competes are nothing more than means to squash competion before it is even born and keep employees under fear of being unemploied if they do not behave like tamed dogs.
Fuck those. Fuck those, big time.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Saturday March 24 2018, @03:56AM (8 children)
Look, most non-competes are way too broad, and therefore unconscionable. You can get all principled if you want and refuse up front to sign such an agreement. That's not a bad route to go. Or, you can sign it, then ignore it as not being worth the paper it's printed on. It's not too different than a shrink-wrap EULA. Bunch of scary legal sounding bull designed to cow you. So if, in their opinion you break the non-compete, and the party you signed with learns of what they consider a breach, what are they going to do about it? Sue you? Please. Maybe blackball you, give you bad references? That's more likely, but they've got to be careful about that one too.
One time I took a gig at a company that insisted on the non-compete. To add to the insult, they also demanded I work for them on a 1099 basis. I signed up, then I was able to ignore the non-compete agreement because their former customer wanted to deal with me directly and cut them out. I told the customer of the non-compete and they took care of it.
The whole deal was a mess. First, the team that worked on the software engineering project was told that if they didn't land the customer, they wouldn't have jobs. So, what did they do? Severely underestimate the time and work it would take, of course. They proposed to port the customer's proprietary database operations, with all its cruft, jury rigging, and layers built up over at least a decade, to a different, open database-- in six weeks time! Said they could do it, with their incredible Agile-fu. The DBA they hired was rolling his eyes at the wildly optimistic schedule. The management doubled that to 3 months time. If possible, you always add more time to a schedule to deal with unforeseen problems, and there are always some of those. Still, the customer was very skeptical that it was possible to port the whole enchilada in just 3 months, but they took the deal.
And so the team got to work, and ran into issue after issue. They hadn't accomplished anything by the time the 3 months was nearly up, and that's when I came on board. I was the crack programmer they turned to in desperation. I managed to salvage part of the work they'd assigned to a truly terrible programmer, but it took another 4 months. The customer had received absolutely nothing and was very angry, threatening to sue. They held off only because I was making progress, and was able to give them something useful 4 months late. They wanted a little more polishing, and that's when they decided to deal with me directly, and I'm guessing they persuaded the software engineering business who'd hired me to not try to enforce the non-compete so I could work for them, in exchange for not being sued. Or, maybe they didn't say anything about it, figuring rightly that the software engineering business wouldn't dare make a fuss, and told me a little lie just to reassure me. Whichever way it went down, I never heard a peep about it. So much for the non-compete agreement LOL.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday March 24 2018, @04:34AM (4 children)
So you sign them, and not give a fuck about the consequences. This is Klingon guile. Today is a good day to die. In Earth contract law, when you sign an illegal contract, all terms are null and void. Non-disclosure contracts are valid, however, non-compete contracts are null and void.
This is how White Earthian scum work around them: You cannot disclose professional details of an NDA, but you can use what you have learned to circumvent non-competes to use the knowledge you do have to exploit what you do know to use your knowledge when employed by someplace else.
White Earthian scum such as Apple tried and failed to circumvent this wholesale by colluding illegally with the Whites in charge of Damdung, Jewgle, Crapple, Hwahuawei, Ching-chong Ding-Dong.
But they failed.
This is why we voted for Donald Trump. When the cheap labor of your crappy foreign engineers and their wives in the cafeterias are discovered and blown the fuck out, Whites will take over in the engineering labs and their imported wives will be kicked out of being the cafeteria staff.
Nice try, shitbags. USA! USA! USA!
(Score: -1, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday March 24 2018, @04:44AM
Holy shit, I just found a fat bottle of hooch in my fridge.
I'd like to dedicate this one to the Madames Le Pen, Frauke Petry, Viktor Orban, Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, Geert Wilders, and all others in the spirit.
This one goes out to restitution to the unlawful actions committed during the NATO bombings of Serbia. [youtube.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Whoever on Saturday March 24 2018, @04:45AM (2 children)
You voted for him because you want non-competes to be enforceable? Wow, that's weapons-grade stupidity.
It's liberal states like California that make non-competes unenforceable.
(Score: 4, Informative) by DeathMonkey on Saturday March 24 2018, @06:15AM
Wow, that's weapons-grade stupidity.
And Eth is the hydrogen bomb in that analogy!
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday March 24 2018, @08:13AM
"weapons-grade stupidity"
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DeathMonkey on Saturday March 24 2018, @06:42AM
Look, most non-competes are way too broad...
My experience is the exact opposite! (this doesn't prove anything I just thought it was slightly amusing at the time)
Got an email from the HR drone, subject Non-Compete agreement. I had been working there for a few years already so I'm thinking this is going to be a problem...
I read the thing and it's like half a page.
It says I'm not allowed to take the sales call-list, start my own company, and then try to sell all of them steel.
I got the very distinct impression that someone had taken the call list, started their own company, and then sold them all steel.
Considering I was the EH&S Manager I didn't have a problem signing. I would rather die than do sales.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday March 24 2018, @08:11AM
Suppose A Inc and B Corp are in the same line of business.
If you sign a non-compete for A then B won't touch you for fear of getting sued by A.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by termigator on Sunday March 25 2018, @09:18PM
But non-competes are legal any many (US) states, so you cannot blindly ignore such a clause. I know California and Texas do not allow it. And if you are dealing with situations where you live and work in a state that does not allow it, but the company that employs you is incorporated in another state that does, things get a bit grey.
I was involved with this situation where a company I was doing independent contract work for wanted to hire me as a regular employee. The employment contract had a non-compete (company in state that allows them) but I lived and worked in a state that does not. The non-compete was quite severe, and likely would even be considered as such in their own state, and them risking the entire contract void, but assuming their state would upheld, what is not clear is if the laws of their state could be applied to me. What brief research I did on this matter gave no clear answers.
Since I was not willing to take the risk, and out of general principle, I stated I cannot agree to the contract with a non-compete. In my case, the full-time employment offer was rescinded, and I stayed an independent contractor. IMO, the owner of the company was too naive about the matter and letting their legal counsel have too much say on the contract.
My general advise: Do not sign any employment agreement with a non-compete, and as other have suggested, request it be removed. If they refuse to do so, do not sign, go elsewhere. If you are desperate and need the job, restrict the non-compete to only apply if you terminate employment. That way, if they fire you or lay you off, there are no restrictions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 24 2018, @04:45AM (2 children)
But no one checked whether I returned them signed. I hadn't.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Saturday March 24 2018, @05:53AM (1 child)
In many regions, you can also just line out the offending paragraphs.
These days with everything electronic you could probably get away with asking for the digital copies "for your lawyer to review" or some similar excuse. Then edit them until suitable by keeping the fonts and layout the same, print, and keep a copy after they too have signed it.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by anubi on Saturday March 24 2018, @08:34AM
Oh, I will do that a lot, once I feel the situation is hopeless. I will let on like I am in agreement, their eyes all light up like someone who just won the lottery - they may have sorted through hundreds of suckers to find one that will go for their papers... then I start lining it out and initialing.
They have a fit! You can't do that!
Seeing the letdown look on their faces was about the only thing I got from several hours of wasted time in a job interview. What kind of fool do they take me for giving me all this businesstalk weaselworded thingie for me to agree to anyway? I would have thought any sane person would be pissed if someone handed him such a thing. All so one-sided.
The way they word those things, they can hire me for a day, then I can't work for anyone else for five years? I retaliate by saying that all the work I do I retain full rights over, and they have license for the ONE I build for them. You know, when they do that kind of crap to me, I have this irresistible urge to return the treatment in kind.
If they did their car mechanic that way, no-one in town would touch their car with a ten foot pole. They would all leave the guy, all dressed up in his suit and tie, wagging his pen... Agree to this! Sign here! Agree to that! Read the Terms and Conditions! These are Binding Legal Documents! And once you fix my car, you are out of the repair business! Don't you want the job?
I'd rather go fix guitar amplifiers at the music store than have to put up with these suit-guys. It may not pay as well, but at least I won't be living with a bunch of suit-guys always hovering over me with the threat of lawsuits over some document. Besides what use does a big business have hiring technical artisans anyway? For me, everything is done with my tools... for them, their tools are pens and documents, and I find it perplexing how they stay in business having no deliverables but promises, handshakes, and lots and lots of brochures.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by anubi on Saturday March 24 2018, @05:23AM (2 children)
I am of the strong belief that these are presented to the prospective employee to see how obedient he is, how gullible, will he "do whatever it takes" to get the job done?
What is good for the goose is often wanted to be withheld from the gander. They are looking for cheap and expendable solutions to their needs.
I stood up to several when they asked me to sign it. I got burned on the first, learned from that, and now ask them to sign my own little paper that they would pay to re-educate me and pay the difference between the average wage of a thirty-years experience analog design engineer and what I was retrained to do for the rest of my life should they lay me off, as five year old skills are no longer much of use.
I was seen as belligerent.. I questioned authority. Subsequently not hired.
Most businesses can't take it if you do business the way a business does business. They want you to sign their papers, not the other way around. They will ask you to sign ten of their papers... they won't sign a one of yours.
The leadership types are paid enormous amounts for their skill of finding the worker bee types who will work for the lowest possible wage. So its to the leadership types best interest to find ones that still think corporate executives value the guy who says the engineer won't work there more than they value the engineer who can make their thing work.
I think the business types are just "testing the limits" of how much shit a prospective employee will take before they walk away, just as an employee may test the limits of his employer to see just how late he can show up for work before the boss replaces him with someone else, or a television executive tests the limits of his audience to see how many ads he can shoehorn into the content before his audience turns the TV off and finds other things to do.
Each requires expendables for test purposes... an employee, a job, an audience, and each got something more valuable in return... data on what it took to destroy the expendable.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Saturday March 24 2018, @05:56AM (1 child)
The real nastinesses I would like to see verified as invalid are the non-disparagement clauses. I would not touch one but there are great many that have.
Companies are acting in all kinds of ways that are bad for their employees, society, their own industry, and sometimes even themselves. However, we do not hear about it because too many end up signing, and believing in, the non-disparagement clauses they sign on the way out, usually while there guards are standing there with their stuff and the management is threatening to withhold pay or severance pay if it is not signed.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Saturday March 24 2018, @08:06AM
Yeh... isn't it funny how business thinks this kind of thing is OK, but they want the right and ability to use stuff like credit scoring.
And of course, hold harmless, if the data is wrong.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(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.)
(Score: 2) by looorg on Saturday March 24 2018, @01:07PM
I don't think I have even seen one since the late 90's. I thought they went out of style, not to mention how horribly illegal and unenforceable they would most likely have been. I didn't sign it then and I wouldn't sign one now (unless they compensate me for the time I am unemployable) . If I can't work for your competition who am I going to work for? Considering they can claim almost anyone to be their competition if the companies are just large enough. They tend not to come with those golden parachute deals either where they pay you to sit around and do nothing for a couple of years. So why on earth would one sign those? I guess it might flatter some people believing themselves to be special if they sign it, beyond that I just don't really see it working.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by isj on Saturday March 24 2018, @03:53PM
In Denmark non-competes are legal. But there are two catches. For the duration of the non-compete the employer must pay 50% of the usual pay to the employee. And the duration is limited to 18 months. The 50% pay is reduced by the pay from any "suitable work" the employee has found. The courts interpret "suitable work" narrowly.
So if you are a software developer and resign or get fired (with or without cause), there is not even a requirement for you to try to find a new job - you still get 50% pay. If you chose to try being, say, a chef then you still get 50% pay because it is not "suitable work" for you (provided you have not been a chef before). So when you are presented with a non-compete you should think "cool - paid vacation/sabbatical"
The end result is that non-competes are rare and only used when they are really needed. I think it is a reasonable balance.