They made me an offer I couldn't refuse (1997)
jens.mooseyard.com
jens.mooseyard.com
To which the HR person at the orientation had said, "Don't worry Google wouldn't do that." And this individual said, "I'm sure they wouldn't, that's why it seems like a no-brainer to put it into the agreement, it just says they won't do something that you and I both agree they would never do. I can't sign the document as written without this." The HR person took the updated version off to someone (presumably legal). And then after lunch this person was not in the group (I had seen them eating lunch) So when we had finished up, before my mentor had arrived I went out and found them waiting on the circle for a ride and asked them what happened. They said, "Google said no and also said they were rescinding the offer of employment."
And that told me everything I needed to know about how Google really thought about things vs what they said they thought about things.
If you work for a big tech, there's a huge range of stuff that's related to your employer's business, which means you have to tread carefully.
[1] They rationalized this when I was there with their "20% time rule" which was time to work on what ever you wanted, but working on whatever you wanted still belonged to Google because they had a unlimited right of first refusal to productize whatever it was you worked on.
What you describe doesn't really provide much signal about this, because a big corp will always have a huge interest in having uniform working contracts. Exceptions are possible but only worth the headache with them for fairly high level employees. So even for a clause that they really wouldn't care much about, you'd expect a similar reaction.
Then what they choose for that uniform tells us a lot.
Then when the work contract came up, there were some unusual clauses about my salary that I was not comfortable with. They first said that it was OK to ignore the clause as they would pay my salary as explained orally. I insisted that they write the work contract as they plan to pay me. After about 1 week of back and forth, they admitted that the clause was indeed unusual, was there for historical reasons and that they plan to change it in the future. However, they said no clause in the contract could be changed as of now, as it was the same contract for every employee, and no past had employee ever complained about it.
Unfortunately, I ended up declining the offer, as I considered the risk was not worth it.
I don't believe that any corporation would ever reward me for any reason; so without a side project, I wouldn't have hope... How would I get out of bed in the morning to go to work, without hope?
For me; day job is survival, that's it. I do it well because I'm well practiced and I need good output to provide me narrative cover but I don't trust any of it. I'm not invested in my day job at all. I assume it's all a PsyOp and I could lose the job any day for any weird reason. I act and pretend constantly and I care about nothing and no one and I trust no one...
I literally believe that if I worked for some big tech company which was actually rewarding employees for real, that they would stop rewarding employees as soon as I became one. I've encountered a situation like this in the past. Horrible situation. The secret to happiness is just don't expect anything and do unto others what they do to you.
I don't think therapy would help me to be honest. My problem is not psychological; it's that I need more money to buy my time and freedom. One time I was earning a modest passive income for about 3 years while working on open source projects; I was quite happy then and the fact that I didn't trust anyone was not a problem as I wasn't forced to interact with anyone.
I guess one positive aspect about this feeling of 'not caring' and putting on a mask is that it comes across as confidence and it gives me more control. I can say unexpected things and control other people's emotions to some extent.
When you're always willing to throw away the entire relationship in every interaction, people tend to respect you more for some reason. It's like; if you don't value the relationship, it signals high status or something. I suppose this is the trick that psychopaths use?
I've related elsewhere[0] my story about how Google laid me and half my team off 2 weeks before we were set to receive a six-figure retention bonus following an acquisition.
In the original Q&A with corp dev just after the acquisition was announced, someone pointed out that the contract we were offered allowed for that sort of thing. Google's representative said something similar to the parent comment: "Don't worry, that's not something we actually do."
It was especially galling because, after a round of layoffs a year or two prior to the acquisition, that startup had issued retention bonuses to those of us who were left. Unlike Google's subsequent post-acquisition bonus, contracts for those bonuses explicitly stated they were payable even if we were subsequently laid off or fired, as long as we weren't fired for one of a few specific reasons like embezzlement or harassment or other serious workplace misconduct.
It was such a marked contrast and, like the parent comment, it told me all I needed to know about how Google really feels about its employees, and how very literally true the old saying of "you can't trust what you don't have in writing" is.
Big companies are soulless.
The real rule as always is do not get in a legal fight with your employer
Two days later the network admin of the company stopped by my desk and whispered in my ear, "They're looking at your employment contracts. Whatever you showed them, they are trying to figure out if they can take it for free." (I guess he was reading all their emails...)
Bad news for them: they'd been in such a bind to hire me originally that I'd taken a pen and scribbled out a large chunk of my employment contract before we signed it. I'd never have thought to try it, but someone with bigger balls than me had done it the day before on theirs and told me about it.
If the software is different from what all 4 companies would produce and it is all built outside of business hours, it gives you full leverage.
If any specific company tries to imply that their claim is valid, they cannot do this without validating the claims of 3 other companies... Thus preventing themselves from obtaining the full ownership rights over the product.
The company which actually wants your software would be better off just paying you and accepting your simple version of reality than trying to create complications for themselves by inventing some elaborate legal fiction.
My company was acquired by another company that had in-house lawyers. California Law states that you have rights to your own IP, when produced on your hardware and on your own time. So, I was careful to air gap all my work on a separate computer. Meanwhile, the acquiring company ask me to sign an employment agreement. Its terms restated the California law in very ambiguous terms. I couldn't tell if I was declaring rights to my own IP or signing away my rights. So, I asked them: "which is it?" Their replay was "Yes." ... I was an employee for a day.
You're right that California has IP assignment limitation clauses that override anything in the boilerplate employment contracts. I know one person who blew up their job offer by trying to get it modified to limit the IP assignment clause, but the company had a hardline stance that they didn't do one-off contracts with employees. Later they realized their state had already limited IP assignment, so the entire battle was moot.
Things that are done in the course of employment (but aren't part of the contractual obligations) would often need to be disclosed and the company could license it. IP would typically still be owned by the employee.
Obviously things done outside of work would be even more clearly owned by the employee.
I wonder if any other country has a similar system.
Many states in the United States have limitations on IP assignment that protect against overly broad contracts.
Employers write their contracts as broadly as possible with the understanding that state limitations will limit any overly broad claims.
California (where Google is headquartered) is one such state with IP assignment limitations, though I'm not sure how much of that was in place when this article was written nearly 3 decades ago.
Apple is also headquartered in California, so the same applies.