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Comment by sumanthvepa | Hacker News Reader

I worked at Amazon in the early aughts. They had the same non-compete then. I worked around it by going to business school after I left. By the time I took my next job, the 18 months had expired. Plan your post employment very carefully -- both financially and career wise when you join one of the big 4. When you receive a salary offer, calculate the actually salary by assuming 18 months of unemployment.

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Come to California, where the monocle & mustache-twirling set has been forced to settle for slightly less control of the lower castes.

Actually, I'm so glad I now live in India. Non-competes have absolutely no-validity, and good luck trying to enforce one.

Same in California. For people that want the details:

https://california.public.law/codes/ca_bus_and_prof_code_sec....

California Business & Professions Code section 16600 makes clear that any non-compete provision between employer and employee will not be enforceable under California law

Yep, I've seen contracts where they say "Clause x/y doesn't apply in the State of California" and then the employer try to tell me "Well, it's not a non-compete" .. bullshit. It clearly is.

Doesn't stop them from including the clause in the contract though.

(Though nothing is actually enforcable in India like you said, simply because you would probably be retired before the case would get a court date)

Just proves that lawyering is the continuation of bullying after your youth has expired

If you include illegal clauses like a non compete in an employment agreement it can render the whole employment agreement void in CA and other places.

I got the impression from friends that it was a worse situation in India with relieving letters[0], the way it was explained to me you needed your current companies written permission to start a new job and that is frequently abused.

[0]https://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/20945/what-is-...

Not sure if it applies for a high-level software position as much as it would for a regular "consulting" engineer schmuck hire though.

In what respects? I moved back to India for family reasons as well, but not sure I see the net benefits completely

yeah, but then you'd have to live in india.

Not entirely true. See: https://www.mondaq.com/india/contract-of-employment/614370/e...

One thing about California law. If you are terminated involuntarily (1), then you can do whatever you need to do to make a living. Build a competing product, hire your former co-workers, sell to your former customers, whatever. Your previous employer can't deny you future income, not one dime. (1)Involuntarily, except for cause, and those causes must be given in writing at the time you are hired.

> Plan your post employment very carefully -- both financially and career wise when you join one of the big 4.

This is only true of Amazon. As far as I'm aware, none of the others have non-competes (Google certainly doesn't).

So maybe the more succinct advice is, just don't work for Amazon.

I'm pretty sure Google does depending on which State you work in. If it's in California, it's illegal, but if you get hired by Google of NY, they have no restrictions there, so it's probably in that contract.

I'm not sure what happens if you're hired in California and then transfer somewhere else.

Likewise, if you get hired by Amazon in Cape Town, it's illegal. In South Africa non-competes are only legally valid for top-tier exec-level positions, and even then maybe not.

This is incorrect, non-competes in South Africa (I got advice on it once for a gig there) are enforcable is they are reasonable.

For example, if the company pays you your old salary for a year after you leave, the non-compete with be enforceable.

If they just part ways with no reasonable exchange of value for the non-compete period, all you have to claim is this is how you make your crust.

Those folk have a serious legal consititution.

That's false.

Since it's Washington State we're talking about: Googlers who join in WA state do not have a Non-compete in their contract (at least the "rank and file" engineers), even though Google could add it and Amazon/Microsoft have one.

In fact Google took it a step further and tried to lobby to get non-compete banned in WA State:

There was an almost full-ban on non-compete that was proposed a few years ago in Washington State. Google came to the public hearings with full support for the law as it is (which make sense given the status for non compete in California - and how it had gotten sued by Microsoft over one employee, and now again by Amazon). The law would have made it that non-compete are void if laid-off, and void if over 1 year max or if you're not an executive employee.

But Microsoft, Amazon, and the hospitals lobbied hard against it. (Hospitals are using those non-competes on both nurses and doctors apparently)

So the bill got rewritten where it only applies to people with a total comp less than 185k, and where student debt could be subtracted to that 185k. This, again, got fought more by opponents.

Now the ban on non compete only applies to people whose yearly salary (total comp as listed on W-2) is less than 100k, So doctors and tech workers at those companies get nothing out of it, except the clarification that non compete:

- cannot be for longer than 18 months

- if employee is laid off and non compete is enforced, the company must pay base salary for the duration of non-compete.

Geekwire had a good coverage of it over the years:

https://www.geekwire.com/2016/non-compete-bill-stalls-washin...

https://www.geekwire.com/2018/effort-kill-non-competes-washi...

https://www.geekwire.com/2019/tech-leaders-sound-off-washing...

And the original bills: http://lawfilesext.leg.wa.gov/biennium/2015-16/Pdf/Bills/Hou...

http://lawfilesext.leg.wa.gov/biennium/2017-18/Pdf/Bills/Hou...

final bill: https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary?BillNumber=1450&Initiativ...

When I left Amazon, I also left Washington for California, in large part because of this. I'm highly specialized, and I wasn't about to take an 18-month hiatus in my career. You would think Washington state would work harder at keeping their high-tax-revenue tech workers around.

> You would think Washington state would work harder at keeping their high-tax-revenue tech workers around.

Washington State has no income, capital gains, or payroll tax. All we[0] have are consumption taxes that people with lower incomes are forced to pay more of as a percentage of their incomes versus people with higher incomes. This is doubly so since people with higher incomes have the financial leverage to minimize consumption taxes[1]. There's little tax-based incentive to attract and retain people with high incomes. If anything, we are somewhat of a drain on the overall society because we price out and displace people who don't have those incomes while we pay, on a percentage-of-income basis, comparatively little back into society relative to what we're earning.

I'm certain some people will come along under me and crow about how this is the whole reason why they moved to Washington instead of another but I am not particularly moved by any reasoning someone might put forward.

0 - My bias: I am a very well paid employee living in Seattle so I include myself in this but am also active in advocacy for levying taxes on myself and people like me for a more equitable tax system in this city, county, and state.

1 - Buying in bulk, buying a single higher-cost good that will last longer than lower-cost goods that must be replaced, evading taxes by traveling or buying online and accepting the risk of not being held accountable for paying the consumption tax

While I also live in Washington and would be fine with raising taxes to be more equitable, higher taxes here would certainly increase the relative attractiveness of California. I'm already right on the edge of deciding to move due to having lived most of my life in sunny regions and really disliking the gloomy weather here. I don't think that would be a typical response though as most people would still prefer the lower cost of living in WA.

> I'm already right on the edge of deciding to move due to having lived most of my life in sunny regions and really disliking the gloomy weather here.

I'd say that's valid enough reason to move on its own. I've lived in Seattle for forever and the weather is one of the things that has kept me here through economic ups and downs.

The cost of living is only "low" here for people like us who are already doing very well for ourselves and I'm not at all enjoying the yawing inequity becoming increasingly wider. I'm not someone who pines for the "better days" of yesteryear or wants to cling tightly to some treasured local watering hole. We need a sane tax policy and a sane housing policy otherwise this all comes to a crashing halt.

Lobbying for it in Washington is to hurt Microsoft and Amazon while doing nothing to them. If they lobbied for a full ban in Montana, I would give them credit.

I have been working for Google NY since 2014 and I do not have a non-compete nor does anyone else I know of. Maybe it's different at the director and above level but that's above my pay grade.

In a European office I was in they added signing them as a part of promo to L6.

Please don't assume things you don't have any knowledge of. Lots of companies don't put things like non-competes in their employment contracts just because they can.

Amazon was the best offer I got out of undergrad. I came very close to doing some very bad things to myself when I got rejected from Facebook and Google after my onsites and was depressed for months.

Please have some empathy for people like me that can't waltz into any job and don't say things like this.

99% of developers probably can't even get onsite interview at FAANG, for the context.

Neither does Apple. This topic of non-competes came up in an antitrust investigation by the House: https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU05/20190716/109793/HHRG...

So say you join Amazon and after 1-2 years you're no longer happy, is jumping ship to FNG (+Apple/msft) out of the question?

Seems a little overzealous if you are a rank and file

Even in the states where these agreements are enforceable, they usually only are enforceable for a job in the same role, a competitive business, and the same physical location. I worked for a company for about a decade with an agreement like this; the people who left usually got out of it by lying about where they're going, working remotely for a while, or getting their next employer to change their title.

That's interesting. At first glance, I thought you were suggesting "just switch roles completely!" But, you aren't saying that, you are saying the new employer just needs to be clever in creating a role with a different name.

But, then again, for some roles a public presence is needed, like public speaking. You can't temporarily have the role of "janitor" and go out and speak authoritatively about AWS at a conference with that role. Maybe people will get the joke after understanding the true state of these agreements.

Wait, do we even have conferences anymore?

lying is just never a good strategy. everyone talks.

Maybe. Are you important enough to get administrative attention after you're gone, or does your HR department only care as much as they have to complete their offboarding checklist?

People may talk, but the reality is that nobody is listening.

Companies are not sending private detectives, to follow engineers to their new job, and finding out specifically what they are working on, and if the contract is enforceable or not.

Mostly, people just forget about you, once you leave. People get away with lying all the time.

> You can't temporarily have the role of "janitor" and go out and speak authoritatively about AWS at a conference with that role.

It is my understanding that you can often get away with being a lot more subtle than that. Things like throwing a proprietary product name in your title, a title that sounds more like a manager, etc.

Not "AWS specialist" to janitor, but AWS to "cloud deployment engineer" or simply "member of technical staff "

But you don't want to ever be put in that position.

I forget the details because, frankly, it had no impact on me, but at one company, I remember a new executive simply not being able to fulfill some of the duties of his new role for several months until his non-compete expired. If the company wants you bad enough, they will find a way to make it work.

I and many of my colleagues worried about non competes at Amazon. But mine wasn’t enforced and I’ve never heard of a “rank and file” individual contributor or non-exec manager having it enforced. My impression is it’s only worth it for VPs or other very high level employees. But the scare tactics evidently do work, in terms of scaring employees to stay or to jump through extra hoops (moving states even if they don’t want to) to avoid enforcement.

Has anyone here had a company try to enforce their non compete, and can share their insights?

I've only heard of noncompete agreements being enforced out of spite against someone who has quit on bad terms, not because of a genuine interest for noncompetition.

When I was leaving Amazon, the logic was generally -- don't go to the same org in a different company. E.g. if you work in S3, don't go to Google Cloud Storage. If you land in ads or maps or search or whatever, that should be fine.

Though, it's really up to Amazon whether they want to keep you unemployed for 18 months, which is (in my mind) totally unethical to even have in the contract in the first place.

Why is that you, and other people here, are treating a contract like it's law? Companies can put pretty much anything they want in a contract, it does not mean its enforceable. You have to take into account your jurisdiction.

Somehow I think the legal bills fighting Amazon will be higher than any lost pay, and you might not win.

There are a lot of people who simply don't have the resources to fight a non-compete clause. Do you think a fresh grad working at Amazon 1-2 years in an SWE role is equipped to take on Amazon's undoubtedly massive top talented legal team if they choose to litigate? The law may be on their side but the resources to pursue it may not and any reasonable doubt of being incorrect could be financial or even career suicide.

If a business can get even a small fraction of its labor to follow unenforcable/essentially illegal requirements, they've made significant headway, even if they don't ever choose to attempt to litigate. Over time, those practices can become normalized and set industry standards where they become more and more successful.

I think it should be illegal to even stipulate such requirements in contracts to begin with to prevent businesses from eroding labor rights over time. There should be massive fines in place that penalize even stipulating those sort of clauses to make sure businesses only include reasonable language/requirements.

This is ultimately what it comes down to. Contracts between very rich/powerful entities and relatively poor/powerless entities, in practice, can contain anything the rich/powerful entity wants because the poor/powerless entity cannot afford litigation. Cell phone contracts, car leases, employment agreements, basically anything written by a company and targeting an individual--just read one of them. All the clauses protect and benefit the company, and very little good is in there for the individual. And they are take-it-or-leave-it: There's generally no negotiation or ability to add individual-favoring terms [1]. Try negotiating the legal terms in your cable bill and let me know how that worked out for you. Contracts among equals tend to be more fair because each side is on a level playing field.

1: Yes, I am aware that there are a few software engineers out there with specialized skills who have successfully managed to negotiate some non-salary terms out of their employment agreements. Congratulations, you are not representative of the general employee population.

You negotiate with your feet by walking away and finding another company that has terms that are more to your liking. You may not have the power to rewrite the contracts presented to you, but you have the agency to choose where you want to work.

A union-like organization could allow workers to pool money to fight these fights.

Please, call it a guild or mutual aid society. Software developers don't like unions.

It's also a chilling effect on many potential employers, especially small ones. When I was with a very small consulting firm, if someone interested in employment had a non-compete that was remotely relevant--or even an NC that wasn't very clearly not relevant--it was a very short discussion. Management just wasn't prepared to take even a small risk.

How would you know? What would someone intentionally violating noncompete mention it to an employer?

Lying to a potential employer is a pretty bad first step. If I caught you doing it, say because someone mentioned it in a casual conversation, I'm going to fire you the same day. Same with lying on a resume even if it's utterly irrelevant multiple years later. It's also going to color any future professional interaction because you're an untrustworthy individual.

I'm pretty sure I don't want to be in a position where I'd be fired if a 10-year old lie came out.

Interesting, wonder if some startup that didn't want to deal with the risk could just have a checkbox if you have a current in-effect non-compete agreement and just pipe those applications to /dev/null? Maybe if more companies were picky, people would fight back and try to negotiate better agreements... but then again probably depends on location, In Silicon Valley you can be a more picky potential employee compared to say rural Ohio.

What do you mean by Big 4? I thought that was an accounting industry thing.

Or just don’t work for Amazon. I don’t know of any of any such clause at Microsoft or Google.

I had a 6 months no-compete at Microsoft.

Do they ever enforce it?

Never heard of it being enforced.

Lol what? You can easily with to another FAANG from amazon

I think the implication is the average engineer at Amazon isn't capable of getting into another FAANG, because Amazon is the easiest/least well paying company in FAANG.

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