Hacker News Reader

Comment by krebby | Hacker News Reader

As a counterpoint to this, a few years back I was freelancing for a fairly well known startup. My first day on site their lawyer gave me a contract with a clause saying something to the effect of if the company found my work unsatisfactory I would redo it free of charge. I brought this up to the lawyer and he immediately agreed he wouldn't sign something similar (also that he was surprised that I actually read the contract since it was otherwise fairly standard). He struck it out and we both initialed.

No issues came up but I've since felt vindicated in doing a close reading of anything more important than an EULA.

View on HN

Arguably that's a bit different though. If I hire a contractor to do a job (whether construction or software) for a fixed price and they do a sub-standard job, it's really not unreasonable to expect that they'll correct deficiencies prior to final payment. (If I'm paying them hourly and there are no other conditions in the contract, then it's probably on me though.)

Finding something "unsatisfactory" is an incredibly vague term and does not necessarily mean someone did a substandard job.

This is why civil suits exist. Generally such attempts at exploiting clauses made in bad will get settled out of court.

Usually contracts with a do-over clause like that also include very specific, objective measures of what makes a job sub-standard (like not being able to pass certain engineering inspections, in the case of construction jobs). A contract that just says "I can make you re-do this work if I'm subjectively unhappy" is insane.

Things tend to be more formalized in a business context but my experience with contractors, etc. at home is that it's often pretty loose, at least for relatively small things.

There's quite a big difference between voluntarily making a few tweaks to something to keep your client happy, and giving them a legally enforceable right to unlimited and uncompensated re-work until they're satisfied.

Satisfaction clauses like that are the thing I always tell my contractor friends to look for. No sane person would agree to it but the corporate lawyers often manage to sneak it in.

It’s usually enforceable but it’s also almost always negotiable.

Careful, the surprise may be fake, because it was struck out and you both had to initial--if it was so weird, why did they just not give you a new copy that didn't have the clause?

I don’t understand what you mean, can you clarify? What is the difference between striking out vs printing a new contract, and why is one choice or the other correlated with the surprise being fake?

I suppose theoretically one could imagine a malicious company having a contract with language that is favorable to the employee, and then striking that out after the employee has already signed, with the intent to claim that the employee signed with knowledge of the struck clauses. But then again, if contracts were ever intended to be the end-all of legal dispute then one would think they'd use something less easily forgeable than mere initialing.

The lawyer was surprised that someone actually read the contract, not that the contract contained a satisfaction clause. The lawyer was probably already aware that the clause was there, and it's a standard contract that they use for all contractors.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com