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Comment by pg_bot | Hacker News Reader

If you negotiate an employment contract make sure that there is some sort of break up fee in case a company tries to pull this sort of nonsense on you. There's no reason why someone should be able to upend your life without due compensation. Accepting a job offer is not something that is done on a whim for most people, so it should be fairly easy to add in a clause that states "If this offer is rescinded for any reason after it has been signed by both parties, {{COMPANY}} agrees to pay 9 months of the negotiated salary to {{EMPLOYEE}}"

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In 99% of the cases the candidate has exactly 0 leverage to negotiate this and the person on the other end will be laugh at this notion.

Instead of weird fantasies about power that doesn’t exist, how about we acknowledge the skewed relationship between a(n) (prospective) employee and an employer like the rest of the civilized world and do away with “fire at will”.

If something like this happens in the EU, then it’s likely the company would at least be on the hook to pay the salary for the duration of the initial contract that was signed (often 6 month minimum). I say likely, because of minor variations between countries, but it’s a given in most countries.

If only workers could organize or something…

The union isn't going to care about someone who never worked for the company.

This is a good point. It is a shame that there aren’t unions organized around professions like pipe fitters, lampworkers, or crane operators. There is no conceptual framework for a non-company union

Somebody got their information about unions from the wrong news outlets...

Very well. Please share an article about a union intervening to fix this.

In some places in Central Europe and Nordics, some companies has contracts that telhas a penalty if any of the parts terminated before the start day. In one case I signed one that the company of me would pay the total of 3 salaries if any of us terminate the employment agreement in advance.

> If you negotiate an employment contract

In the United States and many other countries, most people don't have employment contracts.

Your offer letter is a not an employment contract.

> so it should be fairly easy to add in a clause that states "If this offer is rescinded for any reason after it has been signed by both parties, {{COMPANY}} agrees to pay 9 months of the negotiated salary to {{EMPLOYEE}}"

This is a wild fantasy.

In what world do you think a company would agree to 9 months of salary for a rescinded offer? Maybe if you're taking a CEO role, but not for an average employee. I have no idea why you think "it should be fairly easy" to get a company to agree to this.

Let's assume for a second that you got a company to agree to this 9 months of pay for rescinded offer clause. If they wanted to rescind your offer, they'd take one look at that clause and decide to hire you for 1 day or 1 week or 1 month and then lay you off.

I don't know who gets employment contracts that allow negotiation like that (certainly not regular developers under $150k), but my hunch is it would never have been people they're rescinding offers to.

Good luck getting something like that in writing at any big tech company

It's honestly not that hard. Given that both parties are serious about working together, even considering rescinding a signed offer is ridiculous. There aren't many reasons why a company could legitimately back out of an employment contract, and those can be added to the fine print. If the company want to be protected against potential criminality or an injury that would cause you to be unable to perform the duties of the job you can write that into the contract.

Everything is negotiable, you just have to ask.

Curious if you've ever done this personally? I've only ever worked at companies with tens to hundreds of thousands of employees, and my perspective has been that the bureaucracy is such that any nonstandard interaction with the company is pretty much off the table.

A good analogy might be those interactions are off-the-menu but very much on the table, you just need to state your case and be worth it for them to entertain the detour

Same. I asked to make a minor revision to my contract at a 400 person company (related to a noncompete clause that was probably unenforceable anyway - I didn't even ask it be removed, just asked that the industry it applied to be specified). "Legal" said this is our standard contract, we're not just going to change it for you.

> It's honestly not that hard

I'm sorry, but getting a guarantee of 9 months of salary for anything is actually extremely hard when negotiating contracts.

You also seem to be confused about the prevalence of "employment contracts". Aside from a few executives, most employees don't have employment contracts. Your offer letter is not an employment contract.

Employment contracts are actually very prevalent. Are you conflating the United States with the entire world?

Easy, every big tech company has stricter contracts outside of the US. The companies are not the problem, the US is.

(Having worked as the CTO of an eBay Inc. company in Germany)

This is so out touch that it is laughable

With what leverage?

Software devs have no union to back them up, and in a tight job market there are many desperate candidates who would sign the employment agreement as-is within minutes of receiving it.

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