Tell HN: Beware confidentiality agreements that act as lifetime non competes

I think the Chinese law is effective in this regard: in order to maintain any non-competition agreement, the company must continue to pay you a monthly compensation amount equal to 30% of your total monthly income when you were at the company. Whenever the payment stops, the non-competition agreement is automatically void.

Non-competes (including stealth non-competes like the OP mentioned) are being abused by US employers seeking leverage over their employees.

In fact, 12% of hourly workers earning $20 or less had to sign non-competes. These workers do not have access to corporate secrets. It simply reduces their power to negotiate with their employer.

https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2021/non-compete-cont...

It's funny how states like Washington are notorious for enforceable non-competes, to be "business friendly".

Meanwhile California bans non-competes, and its GDP is 4th largest in the world if it were a country!

"incumbent friendly" vs "startup friendly"

OTOH, beware letting yourself be intimidated by scary looking but unenforcable clauses that are all over contracts. In doubt, spend a bit of money on a lawyer to figure out what your real situation is.

I know of several cases where lawyers said "don't bother arguing with them about clause X, just sign it and ignore it".

So happy my union managed to ban broad non-competes in my country ~8 years ago. Now it needs to be very specific if they want to enforce it (not just "development work in the same industry" which most contracts had back when I graduated), only applicable for maximum a year, and they have to pay your salary for the time they stop you working somewhere else.

sounds crazy. in my country, adding anything that prevents you from finding work in the future to a contract is kind of invalid.

you do get non competes etc., but it never holds up in court as you can easily prove it prevents you from finding jobs.

i wish for you in your legislation there might be a similar law, otherwise these things are really evil. i mean, its like prison in some fields niche enough, and those are exactly the fields prone to such overly protective clauses

I once declined a job offer because the non-compete made no sense. (It was many pages, claimed that I would be paid during the non-compete period, and impossible to read.) I basically concluded that they (the company) had a lawyer that was basically wanking off.

In some countries that's illegal. So when presented with a contract that contains such claims, I have 2 options:

1) ask them to remove it... and so I risk not getting the job

2) don't say anything, and sign it

If I'm really interested in the job, I'll go for option 2 because I know they cannot enforce such claims, so I'll be fine.

I wish "inevitable disclosure" were totally turned on its head. If I were in charge, proving inevitable disclosure would happen would result in nullifying the NDA instead.

New definition for the word Irony:

AI companies protecting their IP.

If I understand it right, those NDAs work as non-competes if “confidential” is defined as restricted just on the basis of some relationship to the business, which is pretty weird attack of legalese on common sense. Let’s say I used some relatively simple chain of thought to derive X about my job at Z. The fact that Z uses or does X is probably confidential, and that’s ok. This would be how I understood a broad definition. But what kind of reasoning would conclude that X is confidential per se, preventing me to use or do X elsewhere, effectively making doing my job impossible? It just doesn’t make sense.

This is a state level thing. As is whether IP produced outside of your job, on your own equipment, is yours.

I moved from New York to California a bit over 20 years ago in large part because I personally encountered this (the IP ownership bit), and preferred to live under California's rules.

It is worthwhile to read https://www.paulgraham.com/america.html. Point 7 talks about how easy it is for regulations to accidentally squash startups. I believe that the fact that California makes neither mistake causes us squash fewer startups. It is not sufficient to have made Silicon Valley a startup hub, but it was likely necessary.