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Comment by shareometry | Hacker News Reader

I have never understood why employees accept the restrictive clauses which assign ownership for any side projects to the employer. I am not a lawyer, but this has always struck me as amounting to a type of serfdom. If you are seen as a 24/7 unit of the company, and anything at all that you creatively produce can be claimed by the company, then your working capacity and creative capacity is essentially owned entirely by the company while you are employed there. You are not being paid just for your time and the work product you produce during that time. Rather you are literally selling an aspect of yourself. Does that sound reasonable at all? (of course, California has some protections against this. but that's just one state)

I would really like to see people rallying against many more things like this.

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Because the rent is due and I have no money?

Maybe for a lot of the higher end HN devs out there, they can walk and be reasonably certain they'll pick up work in under a month. Personally, I've known a LOT of people (some in software too) that need 6-9 months to find any work in their field. Yeah, Uber and pizza delivery make some ends meet, but for a 'real' job with a 401k and benefits, it can take a LONG time. And at the end of that timeline, they can offer you really anything and you know you have to take that offer.

Anecdata: I'm in biotech and got offered 55k on the Peninsula at the end of about 2 months of interviewing for that particular company. They were the only people that would interview me over ~9 months of applying (caveat: biotech isn't doing well right now). The minimum wage of my 'stop-gap' auto mechanic job in a particular city is 60k. The biotech company would not budge at all.

They tolerate it because it’s largely unenforceable.

That is one reason.

Many people aren't even aware of such draconian policies they are signing up for. And companies are probably counting on it too.

It is also possible that even the owners of the company (especially small, family owned companies) aren't aware of these dumb policies. They just trust their lawyers to write up the contracts. There was a comment recently on HN - employee reads up the contract, goes to the owner to ask about some clause, and the owner himself is surprised and calls the lawyer to sort it out.

Big companies that spend shit ton of money on lawyers have no excuse - they're likely doing all this intentionally.

It’s like they select a box for “maximum liability protection” not realizing some of it provides no protection at all

My understanding (from working with lawyers in the past) is that it is enforceable in some states and unenforceable in others. I'm not a lawyer, though, and so don't really know first-hand.

I had one success simply not signing a non-compete I was handed on orientation day. I returned the packet of docs without that one and never heard a thing about it.

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