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Comment by habosa | Hacker News Reader

I have been waiting for a case like this. The boilerplate SV Software Engineer contract says that the employer basically owns your whole intellectual output. In practice it's extremely common for people to leave FAANG companies and start companies that are basically more agile "forks" of whatever they were working on before. I have seen this so many times at Google. Someone makes a cool internal tool/service, leaves, makes it into a SaaS company.

A famous example is Foursquare. Google bought Dodgeball, which was the original product. The founders got paid then left Google and ... started the same company again but called it Foursquare!

My assumption is these companies don't sue because they can't afford the negative impact on hiring. If you thought Apple would own your mind forever you'd never work there in the first place.

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Your assumption is mostly correct, but there is another BIG reason they don't sue.

Companies don't have the infrastructure in place to track former employees and see what they are doing just for the purpose of filling law suits. So unless they create a Unicorn and become famous, they are pretty safe no matter what.

I once heard a VC Pitch from a bunch of patent trolls who wanted to create a company that you could subscribe to called "IP Insurance", that would then track your former employees and sue them when they violated their contracts automatically. With the added bonus that they would somehow buy the litigation contract from the original company so negative PR would be all on the Insurance company.

"Companies don't have the infrastructure in place to track former employees and see what they are doing just for the purpose of filling law suits."

Couldn't Apple could get into your cloud and see all your data if you use their products?

Not if it's end-to-end encrypted.

> If you thought Apple would own your mind forever you'd never work there in the first place.

Only a very small fraction of Apple's employees will ever attempt to be entrepreneurs. It's no threat to the extreme majority of all employees in Silicon Valley. Outsized total compensation and great benefits is all most tech workers in SV are after, entirely reasonably so.

I agree that it will scare off many employees that are heavily inclined toward starting their own thing. It's an interesting question as to whether companies like Apple are better off or worse off in that scenario. People that are particularly entrepreneur-minded often don't make for great employees (I'm in that group).

Where do you think the outsized total compensation came from? Where do you think the cultural entity known as the Silicon Valley came from. Where do you think the phrase "traitorous eight" came from?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight

California is different than many states in the USA. In many places a non-compete agreement can stop you from going to a competing company. That doesn't just affect entrepreneurs, it affects all employees. The end result is employees can't change jobs as easily and wages are depressed. Non-solicitation agreements have a similar effect.

I don't think I'll ever root for companies enforcing non-compete or non-solicitation agreements. But, if Apple can prove that this guy was working/soliciting for his new company on Apple's time or while using Apple equipment then they may have a case, but it should be a limited case.

> People that are particularly entrepreneur-minded often don't make for great employees (I'm in that group).

No boss, I can't meet that deadline, I'm too smart.

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? You've done it a lot already, and we're trying for something better than that here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please do not deny my right to free speech.

There's no right to speech on HN, but there is a duty: to follow the site guidelines.

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