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Comment by wolverine876 | Hacker News Reader

> They implored me to trust that they had "never sued anyone" and "have no intentions to", and I think they honestly believe that. But then why have the non-compete at all?

Exactly. 'That's great; we can resolve that issue easily. Let's just skip the non-compete - you're not using it anyway and I'm not comfortable with it.'

EDIT: A non-lawyer's suggestion (talk to a lawyer before you do this): Skip signing or edit documents (cross out and initial sections you don't like, add words - and initial each change) and then sign and send it back. Don't say a thing; leave it to them to bring it up - most people won't bother disputing it with you.

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Well we have never had to sue anyone because no one has ever actually called our bluff when we send them a threatening demand/cease and desist letter from our lawyers.

So if you decide to call our bluff in the future just know we won’t sue you…because we don’t have to sue, our agreement makes you waive your right to have the case heard by a court in lieu of mediation by a mediator of our choosing, from a mediation company we send all our cases to.

> makes you waive your right to have the case heard by a court in lieu of mediation by a mediator of our choosing

This really should be made explicitly illegal. It should not be possible for an individual to surrender the right to bring a dispute in front of the court.

Who contributes most to politicians - individuals, or corporations and PACs funded by non-listed corps?

And actually, who writes a significant part of new bills, some of which become laws? Yes, corps. It's not surprising then that the legal system has some extra benefits for the corporations.

This is something that's truly atrocious about the move to digital-only copies. On paper, I can mark things up, initial them, send them back. The digital copies let me sign, and that's it. There's no in-band way to indicate that a section should be changed, no way to clarify wording. It's a system designed for contracts of adhesion, and nothing else. Heck, most of them will automatically scroll to the next place for a signature, implying that you shouldn't actually read what you're signing.

The existence of the automatic scroll feature should void the contract. They are actively trying to discourage reading the contract. There is no meeting of the minds.

My offer letter explicitly stated that starting work (and accepting the stated pay) constituted agreeing to all the docs sent over, unless explicitly agreed upon otherwise.

I can't wait to have enough savings to quit and move to california where the employee protections are so much higher.

It's interesting to hear you say that, moments after coming from a thread where people were explaining why California is so terrible.

I feel like the symbol of the 2020s is Chesterton's Fence[1], people chafing against restrictions and then having to reinvent them. I'm sure that some people are indeed fleeing California, and will then immediately start reinventing it.

Not that that's necessarily a bad thing. The reinvention could be like a clean-sheet reimplementation that's better than maintaining a smelly old code base. But that only works if you know all of the reason those code smells are there, and don't simply re-start the same process to recreate the same bugs.

[1] https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Chesterton%27s_Fence

Maybe we could keep the protections for labor and drop the many additional protections for landowners.

I wonder if that would be necessary. San Francisco is kind of a special case as a small peninsula. That puts limits on the ways it can grow. You could probably build more housing units but you'll rapidly run into limits on streets, utilities, schools, etc.

I don't know how much the issue is with the rest of Silicon Valley. There used to be a lot of undeveloped area not too far from Palo Alto.

Texas may want to avoid the wrong kind of over-dense housing, since they've got plenty of land, though there are also reasons to encourage people not to commute multiple dozens of miles per day.

>I wonder if that would be necessary. San Francisco is kind of a special case as a small peninsula. That puts limits on the ways it can grow. You could probably build more housing units but you'll rapidly run into limits on streets, utilities, schools, etc.

I'm going to push back on this. Manhattan is less than half the size of San Francisco and has nearly four times the population density. The Bronx is roughly the same size and has double the population density. It isn't that San Francisco can't expand, it is that it doesn't want to.

You know what Manhattan has that SF doesn't.

Subways[1].

Sure developers would love to build more chicken coops for tech bros. But they absolutely don't want to kick down coin to pay for the subway system needed to support that density.

[1] Oh yea SF has BART which was built 50 years ago and not expanded since. And the central subway which is 1.7 miles long, not open yet after ten years of construction and 20 years after it got the green light.

I agree, which is my underlying point: they don’t want to expand! The lack of public transit is a problem plenty of people have been yelling about for decades, as you mentioned. Developers, citizens, and the city council have all proven over the years they are unwilling to do what needs to be done to make expansion possible.

The famous legend of NYC is that they had the vision to build infrastructure beyond current needs.

Now, it's trendy to view any investment by democratic government as wasteful, and to reduce the taxes by which the community makes that investment to nothing.

What will happen to future generations, who have us as their forbears rather than the visionary New Yorkers.

There's plenty of investments. It's called suburban sprawl, and some people even think it's a tax ponzi scheme.

2 of the 3 subway systems in NYC were built by private companies.

It was only later that all were merged into one publicly-managed one.

That was also when expansion basically stopped.

> You know what Manhattan has that SF doesn't. Subways.

Well, yes. And deep bedrock and fairly stable geology that makes them possible.

If Japan (earthquakes) and the Netherlands (built on swamp) and Shanghai (swamp) can do it so can San Francisco.

Shitty soil and earthquakes in combination is a bad combo.

https://www.businessinsider.com.au/earthquake-expert-san-fra...

Well and there is also the old Bart tunnel and more modern Central Subway. And then there are the subway tunnels they have built/building in Los Angeles.

Snippets I've read over the years seem to say that subway tunnels and deep foundations don't tend to fail in earthquakes because they to move with the ground around them. And because they are already structurally strong.

Basically the lack of mass transit to support higher density is because of lack of willingness to pay for it. Unwillingness to pay for public infrastructure is due American economic ideology. Not anything specific to San Francisco.

It's perpetually curious to me when people blame CA problems on a lack of upzoning and then ... move to much less dense places with plenty of NIMBYism.

Sure, you're getting away from the problem, but not because anyone there has a solution - just because they haven't been hit by the same problem to the same extent yet, because "sprawl outwards" works for a long time when you have less geographical boundaries.

Those people probably either (or both) of do not understand the nature of the issue(s) and/or are just as happy being somewhere where they won't be issue(s) for a long time as somewhere that's managed to prevent them in perpetuity.

Because you don't need (though it can still be good) upzoning if the population is low and housing cheap.

That doesn’t seem odd to me. People do what’s best for them, and even if they underatand the dysfunction of North American urban planning well they’re not in a position to fix it.

> People do what’s best for them

People have many motives, including themselves, their communities, their businesses, their countries, their co-workers and neighbors, strangers on the street, etc. If they only acted selfishly, there would be no community, country, business, etc.

Perhaps “people need a place to live” would have been a better way to phrase that.

Any solutions to North America’s urban planning woes will take decades, if they happen at all. I don’t fault anyone who can’t wait that long.

What's strange to me is how people, particularly those in California, think that banning non-competes were somehow a California idea or that CA is the only state that does that. Yes banning non-competes is one of the things CA got right. People who complain are concerned about the things it got wrong. The idea that if you want non-competes then you must also accept insane regulatory burdens isn't really tenable when you look at the other states that ban non-competes and don't suffer from the same problems as California. There are low-regulation red states like Montana, Oklahoma, and North Dakota that have the same non-compete bans that CA has and many other states such as Utah and Texas place severe limits on them, whereas there are high-regulation states such as Massachusetts that allow non-competes.

Please don't try to turn the non-compete issue into a california good-or-bad issue because it's just not a california thing.

Note that MA somewhat recently passed legislation that more tightly limits the power of non-compete agreement: https://www.laboremploymentlawblog.com/2018/08/articles/non-...

I didn't know that -- it's good news. From a free market point of view, you obviously don't want to restrain trade, so that is the right-wing justification for bans. The left wing justification would be about increasing the power of labor. For both right and left leaning states, there seems to be an ongoing battle about non-compete agreements, and there is no reason for the pro-compete side to frame this as purely a left or right issue as there are allies to be had on from all sides of the political spectrum.

California is really great in a lot of ways, but the issue that really drives people away from it is cost.

> EDIT: A non-lawyer's suggestion (talk to a lawyer before you do this): Skip signing or edit documents (cross out and initial sections you don't like, add words - and initial each change) and then sign and send it back. Don't say a thing; leave it to them to bring it up - most people won't bother disputing it with you.

My actual lawyer's advice is that doing this can be viewed by a court as "fraud" if it looks like the intention was for the counter-party to miss the changes. It's their problem if they miss changes, but it's your problem if you used deception to cause them to miss it. This exact thing that you suggested is what he told me I shouldn't do if I want it to hold up in court.

I ended up signing a contract that said "cannot work for any customers, competitors, or suppliers for twelve months" of a global company that worked with every industry and most companies. I went the route of hiding my next jobs in LinkedIn after I left.

> It's their problem if they miss changes, but it's your problem if you used deception to cause them to miss it. This exact thing that you suggested is what he told me I shouldn't do if I want it to hold up in court.

I did not at all suggest trying to cause them to miss the changes. I suggested (with the caveat of asking a lawyer), "Don't say a thing; leave it to them to bring it up". That's a common negotiating tactic, even in amateur or interpersonal negotiations. I'm not imaging they won't see it, I'm imagining they won't want to create problems for themselves by bringing it up.

> I'm not imagining they won't see it

As my lawyer put it, if the communication goes like this:

Employer: "Okay great! Just sign these and you can start."

Candidate: *edits documents*

Candidate: *signs documents*

Candidate: "Okay great! Here I've signed 'em. Can't wait to start!"

That _might_ be fraud, regardless of your intent. Because there was no reasonable expectation that there was any negotiation even going on in the first place where any changes could have been expected to have been made. It sounded like different courts might have different opinions on the matter, but he strongly recommended against it.

As long as there was some version of negotiation going on "hey here's the changed document feel free to sign it and get it back to me" then you don't really need to tell them every little thing that changed, if they miss something it'll be much more likely to still bind in court.

If one party edits a legal document before signing it, and then the other party doesn't read it before accepting it, then that is on the receiver. This tactic is used by lawyers on each other all the time. It's not fraud.

I'd hesitate to rely on your advice here. Here's a relevant story:

https://a16z.com/2014/02/06/why-i-did-not-go-to-jail/

More specifically to this exact discussion, see California Civil Code 3399:

> When, through fraud or a mutual mistake of the parties, or a mistake of one party, which the other at the time knew or suspected, a written contract does not truly express the intention of the parties, it may be revised on the application of a party aggrieved, so as to express that intention, so far as it can be done without prejudice to rights acquired by third persons, in good faith and for value.

This would allow an employer to seek reformation. It's not clear to me as a layperson if this reformation could apply retroactively or not.

Or this interpretation of the consequences of a recent case in Virginia: https://www.virginiabusinesslitigationlawyer.com/when-negoti...

The actual decision: https://www.virginiabusinesslitigationlawyer.com/wp-content/...

The facts of this case do not mirror exactly what we're talking about here, so I'm definitely not trying to give legal advice. Maybe this wouldn't apply -- reading through it, it's a bit more egregious than what we're talking about here.

It's pretty eye opening how comments like this gets down voted.

Is providing legal information with authoritative sources in a thread like this somehow offensive?

(I've wised up personally, never try to do that myself again lol)

They are not using it but just imagine that company gets acquired by people who do those kind of things.

Contract with company is not contract with current management only. I don't know who will be there in 2 years in charge.

My current company was acquired by a bigger company like a year ago, fast forward one year - even bigger company is now owner of our parent company.

Not to mention that the person making the assurances -- hiring manager, or even worse, recruiter (who may not even be an employee!) -- is not likely the person who makes the decision to enforce the clause.

That's a pretty good idea for emailed PDF documents. Typically, I have received a link to a signing service, and editing is not enabled by their UIs of course.

In that case, you simply need to email back before signing with the changes you need made. The company will do that to you if they get something wrong (wrong start date, incorrect pay or bonus percentage), so it is completely reasonable to have a conversation about what adjustments you need made to your contract. The worst they can say is no. And if they say no, that's a sign that you should really think about what you are signing.

A fundamental of negotiations (and human relationships) is not wanting to create problems or appear to be a 'trouble-maker'.

In a recent personal situation, it was obvious serious mistakes were being made and it was obvious what the solution was - painful, but certainly better than the alternative. However, we hadn't yet experienced the consequences, and predictably another other party railed at me for making things unnecessarily complicated.

Employees at businesses don't want to be seen as trouble-makers and have their offers rescinded.

A (manipulative) trick to negotiations is to put the other person in the position of being the trouble-maker.

How do you do this when contracts are signed digitally nowadays?

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