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Comment by kabdib | Hacker News Reader

About 20 years ago I joined a large company in California, where non-compete clauses are essentially disallowed.

A few years later, I moved to the company's offices in Washington State, where non-competes are allowed. Before the move I emailed HR and asked if I needed to sign the WA state employment agreement (with that non-compete clause) and they said "no". I saved that email.

Forward a decade, I resigned to work for a competitor.

That exit interview was fun. :-)

[I was working on completely different stuff at the new company. I do take NDAs and trade secrets seriously].

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It was sad to see WA leaders kowtow to Amazon and Microsoft and limit the non compete ban to those paid under $100k per year. Should have been copy pasted from California law.

They didn't have a new contract for you with the local provisions when you got raises, etc? That's how companies I've worked for have forced new things in.

It depends on the base contract.

I’ve had both cases, with one company coming up with contract “additions” every now and then with super specific terms, including monetary amounts etc. The other companies usually had one single broad contract mentioning that any other provisions would be explicited in the company’s general HR policies. The HR policies get regularily revised, and employees didn’t need to sign every single change.

IMO it probably comes down to transparency. The company going the super granular route had many specific clauses negociated at an individual level, and stuff they wouldn’t want to have in a semi-public document any other employees could look at.

I've never been asked to sign an updated contract for a job.

I've had to sign sort of sub-contracts, e.g., during option awards. I think my main employment contract might have been updated once, when the employer I worked for was acquired, but it was a while ago so I could be mistaken.

I had an employer tie a forced arbitration clause to a stock option refresh.

I have only ever signed a new contract when I changed entities entirely. Within orgs I haven’t had to do so. I’ve changed salary or role 4x in the past year internally and it might as well be updating a db record.

Incidentally, part of making an updated employment agreement binding is consideration (such as a raise). Just telling you to sign something out else you're fired is harder to enforce.

Courts in general require consideration for a contract to be valid, but there is no requirement for that consideration to be proportionate. The company can offer you any new perk, like a free pen, and it counts.

They did not. Raises and promotions happened as usual. The two contracts were mostly the same, with the non-compete section added in the WA version.

I don't think that HR really understood my question, but I sure wasn't going to clarify things for them!

I worked remotely for a multi-state employer in the past. If I was a California employee on my last day, no non-compete. If I was a Washington employee, 1-2 year non-compete. I considered traveling to California to switch job locations and resign.

Most states have separate employment agreements depending on their peculiar regs. Remote workers have made this more "fun" for legal to keep up with. I had to have state-specific lawyers review the overall employment agreement and the specifics of the IP clauses around side-ventures and open-source.

Workers should be free to employed wherever or start a business that's not lifting IP.

These sort of regs needs to harmonized like UCC. California's model is mostly the right one.

What about remote workers crossing country boundaries? Stuff is a lot of fun already, especially in Europe.

We are a fully remote 10 people startup. Everyone is in a different country, mostly in Europe. The only option to make it work is to have everyone as a contractor, because setting up legal entities that can do employment around the globe is not feasible for SMEs.

Also there are some companies selling full employment and payroll option, reporting. They might work for large enterprises, but for us it is just easier to limit the talent pool for those who are willing to work as a contractor and pay then more for taking that risk. Global talent pool is larger than any local talent pool, so you find more staff, more talented staff and staff willing to go for more competitive compensation.

Then, there are countries with regulations against fictitious self-employment. They’ll happily decide that your foreign contractor has been a full time employee, with all the protections of their local law. They’ll also hand you an invoice for all the missing social security and whatever other payments, plus a fine for misreporting.

Payroll companies are, sadly, the way to go here.

I’m impressed that you could locate that email after a decade!

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