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Comment by nkassis | Hacker News Reader

I guess it's to the point that what is in your head is no longer yours. Never had to deal with those kinds of issues personally but if someone told me I couldn't get another job somewhere else for a few years to keep what's in my head safe I'd be baffled.

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If they're your employer's trade secrets or intellectual property, they aren't. If you memorize a particularly interesting C function one of your coworkers writes, that's in your head too. But your company paid for that function, a notion you accepted when you signed your employment contract.

My point being, oversimplifying the issue by saying [pp] "I guess we don't own what's in our own heads" doesn't really move the discussion forward.

I'm still baffled that I agreed to exactly those terms when I hired on where I'm at now (3 years non-compete, including all competitors, vendors, and customers (which is essentially everyone)). But the job prospects were weak, especially for someone with no legit programming experience and a hardware-focused degree (and no hardware firms were interested). It's our stance that since we "train" folks from nothing, if it's in your head we probably put it there.

Don't know that we've ever enforced such an agreement, but it is in ink just in case it's needed.

Disclaimer: This assumes you're in the US...if not I have no idea how it might apply in other countries.

Depending on where you live it might not even be enforceable. Even large companies will put employee agreements in front of you that they KNOW aren't enforceable in a particular state but will do it since they know that most people don't know any better.

I had a particular instance when a company I was working for got acquired by a Texas based company and they sent us the employee agreement they use in Texas to us in California. There were no less than 4 completely unenforceable clauses in that contract. And this was a public company doing this.

If you live in Texas, though, you're screwed.

I not only live in Texas, but we did exactly what you describe to a small group in MountainView. We're private, though, so it (presumably) wasn't your group. I'm fairly certain none of them are still around, if they even came along after the acquisition.

I figure when it comes time for me to move on it'll have to be to a "safe harbour" state that views such agreements as unenforecable.

It would be relative to where you signed the agreement wouldn't it?

Yeah, you're probably right. Or maybe where I was a resident of when signed, or where we were headquartered when signed, or something along those lines. Depends on the wording of the agreement, which I don't have on hand.

I'm not overly concerned about it regardless, as should I leave it wouldn't be to a direct competitor (or likely anyone that could possibly benefit from my industry-specific knowledge) - it'd be somewhere completely out of our industry. And if they want to make an issue over someone as small as me, then I'll just find a new line of work for a few years. There's no way they could claim a "training investment" or "trade secret protection" if I was a programmer and left to become a carpenter or a roughneck or somesuch.

No, the law goes according to the headquarters of the purchasing public company. If they are headquartered in Cali, and you're in Colorado then your contract is according to Cali law. Also, Non-competes are non-enforceable in Cali - just FYI. However this is different from the trade secret situation.

There should be a bullshit tax for having employees sign agreements the company knows aren't enforceable.

I was working at a place for 4 years before they tried to get me to sign one. They said it was standard and wasn't enforceable anyways, and I pushed my point (why bother having me sign if its pointless) and they eventually dropped it. No agreement is better than potentially having to deal with an unenforceable one down the road.

Do you work at Susquehanna?

Heh, no. And assuming you're talking about SIG and not some other Susquehanna, it's a completely different industry. But there are some cultural similarities between us and (what I've read about) SIG.

It has been that way for decades though, engineers are taught that if you come up against a similar problem that you have already solved for a previous company it is ethically wrong to give your solution to the new company.

I find it weird but it is understandable from a competition point of view. If it wasn't this way you would probably see a lot more eager competitive hiring for opposing companies in order to gain an edge.

I have signed confidentiality agreements going back so far that I can't even remember. The list of industries that I can't work in would be moderately long, were it not for some companies simply going out of business. Now if you are not in a business that doesn't have something interesting going on, then you won't be baffled.

Otherwise, expect to deal with this.

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