Comment by raiyu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by raiyu | Hacker News Reader

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I think saying that marketing isn't AWS's strength misses the point. As the VP of product marketing he most likely had access to revenue by porduct line. As a result he would know which segments of the product suite are growing quickly, showing promise, and which others have missed the mark.

That information is extremely valuable to a competitor that is trying to catch up to AWS'. This information can also be passed along verbally and be 99% as a effective as having an up to date detailed revenue breakout spreadsheet.

So in this case he is taking some "secret sauce", which can be disclosed without ever being able to prove that it was.

Imposing an 18 month window where that person can't work at a direct competitor is sufficient enough to make that information somewhat stale and no longer as effective.

I'm personally against non-competes, but I did want to point out that there is cause for concern here. Also, as the VP of product marketing, he could have gone on to any job he wanted in any other cloud provider that wasn't a direct competitor, such as say Slack, Twilio, Box, Dropbox, I mean the list is pretty long. So it's not like his hands were tied in the job market. And certainly he signed the agreement originally, and should have modified it before hand if he was concerned. So it is possible that his boss at AWS is a bit irritated that he did not live up to the agreement that was signed. And as a VP you can't really claim that you "didn't know" about the non-compete since you will be doing a lot of hiring and imposing that very same clause on all of your hires.

That line of argument is mostly a joke based on Corey's history of griping about AWS's terrible marketing.

The key argument to that point is made later in the piece. The boss of the person who's now being sued also left Amazon for Google recently, also for a similar position. He also had all of that same knowledge. But he was based in California, so Amazon couldn't sue him. But if this is really such a critical factor worth suing over, why would Amazon allow someone in that position to be based in California at all?

Also, to say that Slack, Twilio, and Dropbox aren't direct competitors is absolutely wrong. The way the non-compete is written, Amazon could sue over him going to almost any other company, because Amazon competes with literally everyone these days.

In any case, given that his hiring boss told him it was not a big deal, and given that HR knew where he was going and didn't warn him off, your suggestions that he "should have known" ring hollow.

Yes, the key point is AWS actually tries to enforce these non-competes. If you are past a beginning engineer you'll be in terror of amazon suing you if you leave. All my friends (who are experienced) have lived in worry after they left. Noncompetes are a terrible, horrible idea.

The Washington state legislature considered legislation blocking them. They got noncompetes removed for sandwich makers (companies literally made people making minimum wage sign non-competes!), I think the threshold was 100k or something. But amazon pushed very hard. Tell your wa state leg rep that you want to end noncompetes.

Unless you live and work in California. Many think this is the main reason Silicon Valley exists.

Verbal agreements carry legal weight. He should definitely put the hiring manager on the stand. Then the hiring manager needs to choose between perjury and admitting he said the non-compete will not be enforced.

"No one has ever" doesn't mean "we never will".

Does the NC span the gap between AWS and Amazon? It should be pointed out that AWS is a different company than Amazon, with a different CEO, corporate structure, etc. They roll up to Amazon but I'm not sure if the NC will span that gap. So maybe really identifying the bounds of where the NC can apply would be helpful.

But to your point if it does that's just down right dangerous. Amazon competes with just about everyone either directly or indirectly.

It does, as mentioned in the article.

Thanks! Must have missed that.

> So in this case he is taking some "secret sauce", which can be disclosed without ever being able to prove that it was.

Then Amazon should be suing for breach of NDA. In the article Corey points out that these are enforceable in all US states.

How would Amazon prove such a breach occurred?

(I believe that NCs are net negative, but I'd imagine that it's hard to get evidence of an NDA breach in these circumstances.)

Same way every other company does. They just need to provide enough evidence to justify discovery, at which point they get access to internal emails and other normally confidential information if they can demonstrate they may contain relevant evidence.

They'd need evidence that a breach occurred. Right now they can instead imply that a breach might occur, without producing any solid or even circumstantial evidence.

Put otherwise: they are using the non-compete to try and achieve the ends of an NDA, without the hassle of proof.

Correct. Why shouldn't they do this? That's why they have the noncompete in the first place.

If a company bars you from working for a competitor, it should be forced to continue to pay your salary during the blockade.

That way, the non-compete actually costs the company something, so they don't just apply them as a blanket, and the employee doesn't have the risk of not finding a job due to the non-compete.

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