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Comment by rendaw | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

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 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!

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