Amazon sues employee for taking Google cloud job, in new test of non-competes
geekwire.com
geekwire.com
That's nothing compared to this. Seems like a classic case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.
You could have kept the guy, if he was so important to your business.
I'm not a happy Amazon Prime customer today.
So if Amazon never prevails, why do they do it? One of the peculiar attributes of Amazon's action against us is that it was well publicized within Amazon -- and was apparently a result of outrage by a high-ranking executive after he learned that the former AWS engineer not only was working for a competitor, but had the gumption to open source a technology that he developed here. (Ironically, the executive only learned of all of this when the technology itself became a top story here on HN.) My conclusion from this: this action wasn't actually directed at us -- Amazon is smart enough to know that nothing would come of it with respect to our actions -- but rather at their own employees. That is, Amazon's pursuit of the non-compete against our engineer was their way of shooting an escapee in the back -- and sending a sharp message to any other AWS inmates with similar ambitions.
In terms of an immediate effect, Amazon's move worked to a degree: our next few hires from AWS were slowed a little bit by fear of similar action. That said, the fact that we had prevailed against Amazon also gave these engineers the confidence that we could and would do so again -- and ultimately, it didn't prevent anyone from matriculating. It did, however, have one lasting effect: the engineer that was pursued went from thinking fondly of his years at AWS to hating AWS and Amazon with a white-hot passion that still burns today. In the end, enforcing a non-compete is like erecting a Berlin Wall: if you feel you need it, you have much deeper problems...
Since then, I haven't had the stomach to interview or consider another job. After much reflection, I think it all had to do with Amazon.com, the working conditions, and the tone of the place.
I got it in my head that all corporate jobs are basically like Amazon.com: you sign away all of your intellectual property rights, accept working on things you don't control and take home a nice, better-than-almost-everyone paycheck to wash it down.
I could tell strange stories of working at Amazon.com (I was in a non-traditional engineering role) but they seem more or less pointless.
How does someone go from working at Amazon.com to a small workplace, with passion and freedom? I have floundered! And the oxygen is running out.
Anyway, I wouldn't recommend working there.
The problem with Amazon - and other giant companies like it - is that they try to lay claim to everything "substantially similar" to fields the company works in. Because they're a giant company, this means practically everything, so you can work on something completely independently, without using any proprietary knowledge, and still end up screwed because somewhere deep within the bowels of the company someone is working on something like it.
I was referring just to stuff created on the job.
I can write code at home in my free time and it's MINE and I OWN IT.
It's a little like hiring a carpenter and then telling him that he can't make his own cabinets for his kitchen because the company owns everything he makes. Fuck that. I'll never work for a company that does that shit.
It's really interesting how they have resorted to strong arming their engineers with these shot in the back non-competes, and couple it with salary collusion and hiring agreements. Throw in the golden handcuffs (that turn into golden dental floss after a few funding rounds -- long after they've gotten their 60-70 hour work weeks out of the true believers) and you see how they are trying to stymie that labor movement.
It's really a wonder that technology workers haven't started forming some sort of union.
There was a post a few months ago about how software development should be a profession and we should have a strong professional association to help represent our interests. To help prevent things like this amazon case.
As one example, my wife spent three or four years without even having a collective agreement; their old one had expired, and the union hadn't bothered to/gotten around to/nailed down an agreement with the employer. Literally their biggest responsibility, and they were years late.
What they did do, however, was send out a mass e-mail to union members encouraging them not to participate in Ugly Sweater Day, because it could hurt people's feelings (literally, their concern was that people's feelings could be hurt), and other equally worthless wastes of time. Behaviour like that makes me wonder what these people actually do with union dues.
That said, there are also huge benefits; for example, there have been a few cases where people we know have been chosen to interview for a position, only to be told suddenly that the position was no longer being interviewed for – and then finding out that someone with less seniority and less experience was offered the job. Not saying our friend should have been given the position, but they didn't even interview her for it.
On top of that, there's the generic benefits of a union environment: more vacation, less nepotism, pension, and – my personal favourite – as long as you show up to work every day and do your job, your salary will increase (more than the legal minimum), your vacation will increase (more than the legal minimum), your pension will keep going up, and eventually you can retire.
So it's kind of a mixed bag. In cases of large, faceless bureaucracies it can help significantly by preventing people from being promoted who don't deserve it, just because they're friends with the boss/interviewed well/bribed someone/etc. On the other hand, large unions are basically another giant, faceless bureaucracy which purports to be on your side but typically operates under its own agenda, and in many cases, appears anti-employer for no reason other than spite.
Union Pros: Job safety, real cost of living increases, pension/retirement opportunity, some protection from unfair hiring/promotion practices.
Union Cons: Silly emails?
Job safety is good, but it does protect incompetents as well. That becomes a poor situation for everyone but the incompetent.
This piece does a good job explaining: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/11/18/programmers-d...
Particularly lovely is the near universal marriage of at will employment agreements with non compete agreements.
>It's really a wonder that technology workers haven't started forming some sort of union.
-The average age kept perpetually at about 28 (meaning only about 5 years work experience)
-The perpetual threat of tech labor imported from overseas.
-The belief that professional association and (gasp!) unions are pure socialist evil or at least are for low paid looser.
And if you think salary collusion and extra legal hiring agreements are shocking, just watch the response there would be to an effective professional association.
Licensure is also a good idea. Of course no legislature will ever pass it nor any company ever honor it with out the clout of very large tech worker organization.
More practical but less honorable would be an organization that fiercely funds large numbers of tech worker lobbyist since that is the only way the system actually works now. Also, since much of their lobbing would align with tech company interests, it would not be crushed with the same zeal.
When you're in a country where you have to get a license to braid hair, design interiors or manicure, you can't dismiss it as some exception that can be ignored.
Licensure is also a good idea.
Sure, if you're already in the industry, it's great. Lots of money to be made by keeping out those who can't afford to jump through the hoops. It's not like poor people really deserve to be programmers anyway.
Should your argument apply to doctors too? No restrictions on entering because people who don't go to med school will be locked out?
But do come over to the US, you can work as a serf under H1B, have no protections and many legal restrictions, accumulate no pension and be fired on your 35th birthday. But you will love the fact the manicurist don't have to have to fill out any paperwork.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/06/21/154826233/why-its-...
But licensure is licensure. The effects are not any less harmful because the people pushing for it are good unionists and not evil right-wingers.
Besides,
This isn’t just a random Utah law. There are more than 1,000 licensed professions in the United States, partly a result of more than a century of legal work. As the country industrialized, state governments wanted to protect their citizens and create standards not just for lawyers and doctors but also for basic services. It didn’t take long for professional groups to find that they also stood to benefit from the regulations. Over the years, more and more started to lobby for licensing rules, often grandfathering in existing professionals while putting up high barriers to new competitors.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/17/magazine/so-you-think-you-...
And the idea that a Midwife should have absolutely no experience or that the preschool Teacher have zero background or your Optician have no education what so ever is pretty nearly crazy.
The only reason to get rid of it is so large companies could emerge to replace your midwife with a minimum wage incompetent.
True, maybe there should not any be requirements for hair braiding. This hardly means all licensing is a bad idea. To stretch one wild story about Utah hair braiding into "all professional associations are bad" takes more imagination than I have.
Eliminating all licensing across the board is shear libertarian crackpot-ism.
The idea that one of the people helping my wife give birth could have no training, or that people are being 'kept out' of the role because they don't have training or experience, seems idiotic to me.
This isn't the 1800's, where your midwife was 'the woman in town who knows the most about delivering babies', and we shouldn't act as though it is.
actual doulas may not wear tye dye or burn incense and I'm sure many provide an excellent service to facilitate some mothers through the childbirth process. Every labor is different. They may also be qualified midwives. And many midwives will also facilitate home births where appropriate for the mother and child. Basically, the US hospital and OB doctor-centric system is ... weird.
Thank $deity that strawman was burned to the ground.
Any government issued license is completely incompatible with libertarian values by definition. So no, not straw-man: crackpot.
- Some professional association call for licensure.
- There is a case of bad licensure in Utah.
- Therefore all licensure is bad.
- Therefore all professional associations are bad.
I would cite that reasoning as an exemplar definition of crackpot.
Or more likely since it lists a $30 license as one of the 10 most burdensome "licenses to kill for", it is just plain dishonest.
I assumed that you shared the article's reasoning since you linked it.
Uh, care to share where you read that? What I read was:
"Almost nobody is calling for wholesale abolition of professional licensing. I sleep better at night knowing that the commercial pilots flying over my apartment are trained and licensed."
"A bolder idea, of course, would be for states to get rid of the licensing rules that are doing more harm than good." (emphasis mine)
We don't see this very much, but people don't really demand it either. If people started striking for ownership instead of salary and benefit increases, I'd bet that'd change.
I've always thought that it might be an ideal solution to wage capitalism to force owners to sell equity to their employees at some predictable rate.
That said, I think Computer Programers should unionize. A lot of thought would have to go into the union, but in the end you guys would be making a decent, consistent salary. The union could stipulate that new start-ups are exempt from union rules; until they, if they reach a certain level of success?
In turn, it would require established companies, like Yahoo Google, and Amazon follow union rules. In the end, the cash might be despirsed among the workers, and the Founders might not throw money around like they are printing it up on a string of Epson Printers? "But Mark, I don't think we can spend a trillion dollars on app.com; we have to pay our employees, and the pension fund needs capital?" Would a Programmer, who spent 30 years learning a coracopua of languages, put up with egotistical rich kids, spent so many hours in front of a box, lost weekends because you had to find the errors---like a pension when you retire?
Oh, Amazon will just move to the Amazon. Maybe not?
Hourly based salary would be kind of amazing.
Of course the downside is that it is harder to do flexible hours and such when you are expected to be working 40 hours 9-5 for your pay.
Unions more or less kinda worked when you had largish enterprises with a lot of employees. This is more or less the world described by John Kenneth Galbraith's "The New Industrial State."
This world doesn't really exist any more. It was undermined by lots of forces. I'd say the main force was people being dissatisfied with the working conditions.
In order for collective bargaining to work, there kind of has to be a collective to bargain for. Humans are not naturally attracted to collectives.
The reason is it is competition. Amazon makes games, you can't make games. If you want to do any sort of outside development then you have to ask permission, they can shut you down with or without explanation and they currently have a blanket ban on games. Or game engines, or anything related to games.
This includes starting a blog just to talk about game mechanics or the like.
Technically you aren't actually banned from making a game. It's just that you can't ever publish it, show it to anyone, or talk about it.
Of course if you apply you will get told it is no problem to do outside development.
I am so never working there.
Is this showing up in the contract you have to sign?
In some cases it really does make sense, where you have privileged knowledge by working at the company and directly competing publicly using that unpublished insider knowledge is pretty obviously a bad idea. A lot of companies actually have pretty legitimate review boards that will quickly approve anything not directly competing for public release.
On the other extreme, some companies basically refuse to approve anything for external release: my father as an EE at IBM wasn't allowed to release templates for making labels for homebrew beer bottles. An ex-IBMer on my current team worked on a relatively small piece of software that would have been great to open source (and really not competing with any of IBMs initiatives) but IBM wouldn't allow it, nor did they want the project to be continued or used in any meaningful way.
In places with more diversity in tech employment (say, Silicon Valley) you will find less bullshit contracts like these, since there is more competitive pressure between employers. In Seattle it's Giant BigCorp A or Giant BigCorp B, with a smattering of smaller tech companies (or satellite offices, see: Google).
In the contracts I've seen with these kinds of terms, usually there's a way to disclaim things you've already worked on, such that those specific items are excluded from the contract. So, for example, if you were working on some open source lib already, you can enumerate it in the contract and that won't be covered. Of course, this still greatly limits your freedom to start new things while employed.
It sucks. It's a blight on our industry.
So you sign a non-compete, but if you ask you get told that things like games or open source contribution are fine.
Then you come in and you find out that internal policy is that you need approval for everything. That's not that unreasonable, and they are usually not too slow. for most things they don't have a blanket ban.
THen you don't quit immediately because you don't want to hand back your signing bonus, but once you it that one year mark it becomes an option and many people do quit at that point.
Which sounds at least semi-reasonable until you realize that the people sitting on this committee have zero incentive to approve requests, while at the same time incentivized heavily to reject requests - since there's personal cost to them if something they approve ends up being used by a major competitor.
I'll leave it to the reader to guess how often things get rejected from open sourcing...
I personally think it should be illegal unless amazon volunteers to pay the employee his regular salary for the period he is not allowed to compete.
The same way that if you're not paying for a service you're the product if you're not paying your employee you should have no right to demand anything from him anymore.
Ok that's a bit extreme but could as likely be the case for some people.
So if you want perks you will have to pay for them prices may differ depending on the clause but they need to be clearly outlined in the contract.
Not to mention clauses like non competes should be extremely expensive since their tying your hands for a significant amount of time.
I sincerely doubt their paying enough extra for all the classes you see in a regular American contract.
You could argue amazon might be but what about all the other companies that present you basically the same standard contract?
Are they really paying for them or are they just taking advantage of the fact that the work force in America will most likely accept any ridiculous clause in their contract to get a job?
If each one actually had a well determined price tag you would see most of the unnecessary ones disappear really quickly in an attempt by the companies to save money.
So contracts should have to be itemized? "$150/month for attending meetings, $300/month for writing code, $50/month for reading your email"?
You have a set of obligations on one side, and a number of compensations (salary, perks, etc) on the other. The latter is the payment for the former.
Not to mention clauses like non competes should be extremely expensive since their tying your hands for a significant amount of time. I sincerely doubt their paying enough extra for all the classes you see in a regular American contract.
Isn't that for the candidate to decide?
If each one actually had a well determined price tag you would see most of the unnecessary ones disappear really quickly in an attempt by the companies to save money.
Or maybe they'd just lower the regular salary to end up with the same value.
People assume once you finish working for a specific company you're done and you have no more obligation to them so if they want these perks they need to specify how much extra they are paying for them.
The real problem with contracts today is they can trow whatever they want in and make it as complicated as possible in the hope that you don't read it when signing it.
If they were required to give you a summary of the important bits this exploitation would be harder to pull off.
One of the most common principles across a wide range of jurisdictions is for the default assumption to be that the salary compensates for the tasks and duties carried out in the contract period only.
Further, there's a public policy concern, in that non-competes in extreme cases can make a person unemployable during the period, and force this person onto welfare programs, and society as a whole thus have an interest in ensuring that consideration for potentially making you unemployable is made explicit and coming due if/when you're actually prevented from taking up a job.
This is very important, and something that very often gets lost in discussions of employment contracts, minimum wage etc etc.
The prospective employee needs to make rent. The prospective employee needs to eat. These are very basic and powerful motivations and we (as a society) should not let business take advantage of these to low-ball on pay or impose onerous contract terms.
If someone is an existing employee and you want them to sign a new employee agreement, you need some additional consideration besides "we let you keep your job," such as an increase in pay.
IANAL but 'icebraining is accurately describing US law. We nerds in the US need to fully internalize what the law is before we can fight it.
Contracts require consideration[1]. If we agree you will give me $400 tomorrow, that is not a contact. If we agree that I will give you $200 today and you will give me $400 tomorrow, that is a contract.[2]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consideration
[2] There are other components that make contracts legal; technically I'm only describing the consideration aspect.
Then lets make it an obvious cost by making unpaid non-competes illegal.
That way if it is just a part of compensation the company can offer less up front salary and handle non-compete clauses by continuing to pay your salary.
In the case of trade secrets, I would not have an issue fulfilling the clause, provided it was worded in such a way that it did not preclude me using skills gained on the job for a different employer. Otherwise it impacts my ability to provide for myself in future, so I can't take the job unless there is financial compensation over and above a normal salary.
For a non-compete I would probably tell them I was just not willing to sign at all as it would definitely impact my ability to provide for myself in future.
But at that point I think it's perfectly reasonable to offer a compromise - "as this restricts my ability to find future work, I will need to be paid for the duration of the clause, or I cannot accept the job"
Also in this scenario, employers generally won't make you sit out for the full length of the non-compete. They may have you sit out for a few months until the critical product you were working on launches and they can claim first mover advantage, etc. Since it is now a business case, it generally makes no sense to make old employees sit idle for a year.
Either way, that just tells you the compensation for the non-compete should be at higher than your usual salary, does it not?
These and other anti-employee clauses (e.g. excessive IP assignment) persist because many programmers simply don't care while others who do care are awful at negotiating compared to their interlocutors who do this for a living. When you try to push back, the standard response you will first hear, an outright lie, is that this is a non-negotiable mandate from their legal counsel and that no-one has ever complained before. If they do budge on their initial terms, they will make it seem like an unprecedented concession that warrants concessions on your end. It's a truly absurd game of back and forth.
I'll agree they'll act like it's totally weird you are complaining. Standard salesman techniques.
And companies will usually negotiate these. Usually.
I once had an otherwise nice job offer where the employee agreement contained the following three poison things:
1. you cannot work for any competitors or customers for a year (it was a consultancy, so potentially every employer in the country was off-limits)
2. you assign us your IP rights while you work for us and for a year after you leave us
3. you agree this will not limit your ability to find work.
They totally stuck to their guns. They said legal wouldn't let them change it. I had concerns and they "took the matter seriously" which amounted to telling me, really hard, that these clauses didn't really matter and they wouldn't enforce them, and, y'know, they probably weren't enforceable anyway.
I walked away. Apparently many other people don't because they continue to get new employees. I heard the horror story here on HN a few weeks ago [1] about someone who no one would hire because he signed something with clause 2. I'm more satisfied than ever I was right in walking away.
Since the job was in California, it was a perfectly reasonable agreement for me, but since it was my first job I probably would have signed it anyway.
Similar to the smoker who buys a pack of smokes and ignores the warning on the side; that will never happen to ME, yet turns and buys the lottery ticket thinking happy days are right around the corner.
I have worked for companies that have non-compete clauses, and 'All your IP belong to us' clauses, and I make sure my hiring letter says I am at all times free to work for whom I want, and that anything I create outside of company time without using company equipment is my own.
If all the good programmers refuse to work for a company that tries to impose those clauses, then evolution will win out and those companies will be stuck with mediocre programmers, put out mediocre products, and die.
That's a bit harsh.
The company knows what it's doing. Employees often don't. And in tech, there are no unions or widely-subscribed (and non-employer dominated) professional organizations to push back.
As Adam Smith notes in his Wealth of Nations (book one, chapter 8):
What are the common wages of labour, depends everywhere upon the contract usually made between those two parties, whose interests are by no means the same. The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as little, as possible. The former are disposed to combine in order to raise, the latter in order to lower, the wages of labour.
It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms. The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3300/3300-h/3300-h.htm#link2H...
There's a reason unions exist, and even more reason why companies and their owners fear them.
Wait, he open-sourced code he worked on at Amazon, or he open-sourced code he worked on in his own time whilst happening to be employed by Amazon?
If the former, it's hardly surprising the executive was upset.
Edit: Or option 3, he open-sourced code he developed working for you. In which case the executive is being utterly irrational.
Otherwise I could easily imagine several meetings led by the hired engineers that are basically titled, "Processes, Methods, Algorithms, and Secrets I learned from Working at Amazon".
I don't condone the behavior at all, sending a legal team after an individual and their new employer for just switching jobs is unnecessary harassment.
Amazon has been going downhill recently. Startups are taking away some of their AWS customers with easier to use interfaces (some people just want a monthly cost for a VPS or cloud intranet).
Their retail site has been cutting corners and the search is inherently flawed because so many of their items are not sold by Amazon but 3rd parties who charge random amounts and there is very little quality control. It shouldn't take over a week to process simple orders and there should be a way to disable the "transferred to local carrier for delivery" because that can delay the order substantially (I've had to drive to the post office to pick up orders before) and their support just tells me that there is not way to change that in the shipping system.
Now is a good time for a competitor such as Wal-Mart to take back a large share of the US online shopping market from Amazon. Even if Wal-Mart just offered 2 day "shipping to the store" that would be great. I could order any item online and they would group the items where I could pick them up at the service department.
Hilariously, in Washington State, you can even enforce a non-compete when you fire the employee.
No pun intended?
The original employer must continue to pay a "significant" part of employees pay as long as non-compete is in effect and has to state clearly that they will do so in 14 days after the employee has left the company. Otherwise the non-compete is void.
Yes, companies that enforce them are rare and complete dicks, but they can and some will. Companies that won't don't need them either, so either way the negotiation about the non-compete becomes a very brief one.
They said no.
When I left them, they tried to do a non-compete on me. I pointed out that the agreement that I had signed didn't include one (since CA doesn't allow them) and they tried to go behind the scenes with lawyers anyway.
Let's just say that it worked out pretty well.
Realistically I'd argue it's more on the high end of the "B" tier, but that's neither here nor there.
Amazon's attrition rate is insane. Not high, insane. This should tell you a lot about what it's like to work there. I too learned a lot, and it continues to pay dividends on my resume, so I guess that's how they get away with it.
"The suit, filed June 27 in King County Superior Court in Seattle, seeks to take advantage of a more favorable climate for non-compete deals in Washington state, where the terms of such deals have generally been allowed, if considered reasonable. Non-compete clauses have repeatedly been found invalid in California, where Google is based."
The article doesn't say Szabadi was or currently is geographically employed (is his current contract with Google in California or Seattle?), which I assume would have a bearing on the suit's strength
[1] http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=1290227502038697...
[2] http://www.whitecase.com/files/Publication/dcf3d85c-1c1b-4bf...
"This agreement is entirely enforceable under the laws of the state of ____, under the jurisdiction of a binding arbitrator chosen by the employer, except for injunctions which are handled by the ____ District Court in ____ County?"
Am I missing something?
Whether or not that should be legal is a different matter. Sometimes if all employers are doing it, it can result in an unfair and unhealthy environment for employees, however, sometimes if all employees can switch jobs willy nilly and take clients with them (especially those with strong relationships with clients), then it can become an unhealthy environment for employers.
It's called competition.
e.g. "Progress comes from monopoly, not competition" — Peter Thiel
That said, lack of non-compete enforcement is often credited as one of the contributing factors to California's excellent startup environment.
Certainly seems to be Amazon's pitch that it is in fact fairy dust when they're driving their competition out of business.
Intellectual property is also a government-protected monopoly, created for the advancement of society.
Basically I'm saying that monopoly can be good or bad depending on the specifics. So competition can be very destructive in some cases.
Win by providing better products. Anything else shouldn't be encouraged by the legal system.
Also, sometimes it's not feasible/possible to design a system where clients aren't so reliant on individual employees. For example, in the legal and finance professions, certain key people have so much knowledge regarding certain deals / events, that you can't just swap them out. It is a major investment on the part of a company to train and get someone up to speed on a piece of business, and one way to mitigate the risk of them leaving is to have them sign a voluntary agreement to not compete for x amount of time.
Obviously, this can be abused in situations where employers have the upper hand. But in many high powered positions where highly qualified people have a lot of leverage against their employer, it could help reduce costs a lot (for the end consumer also, since the risk of someone leaving and taking the business would just raise the prices you have to charge to mitigate that risk, as opposed to a non compete).
It is a huge problem if that guy can then turn around and use the contacts he gained through Amazon to compete with Amazon. He is basically turning Amazon's network of contacts into his own and then selling that access to a competitor. It is basically the sales/bizdev equivalent of taking Amazon code and handing it over to Google for a price. Amazon shouldn't have to pay money to negate that risk.
Technically, even in California, if he did something like that it would hold under any reasonable non-solicitation agreement I believe. It is the exact reason these agreements exist.
I'm not 100% sure that is what happened but it sounds like it.
If you're buying a guy with a rolodex, do you really own his rolodex or are you renting the use of it?
If said rolodex was created on Amazon's watch, with Amazon resources, you can make a pretty decent claim to ownership, but if those contacts pre-dated Amazon, then (not legally speaking, morally) can Amazon really lay ownership on it?
> If you're buying a guy with a rolodex, do you really own his rolodex or are you renting the use of it?
Both. His job is to convert contacts into customers. If contacts become customers, his obligation is not to re-sell the same customers to the next company.
> If said rolodex was created on Amazon's watch, with Amazon resources, you can make a pretty decent claim to ownership, but if those contacts pre-dated Amazon, then (not legally speaking, morally) can Amazon really lay ownership on it?
Key bit from the article was: “Szabadi was involved in developing, implementing and managing Amazon Web Services’ strategy for many of its partners, and was the first point of contact for most partners who were considering working with Amazon.”
I'd say, morally, its quite reasonable to say "No, you can't solicit business from our customers for X months." Amazon is just playing it cautious and being negotiated down to that position.
What makes Amazon different than the past few centuries of commerce?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-compete_clause#History
That is why non competes are centuries old.
Turn it around. How would you feel if you solicited business from Customer X, hired another consultant to perform 50% of the work, then they turned around and stole Customer X from you because of the contacts/access they gained from when you hired them?
Non-competes always sounded to me like an incentive for companies to behave bad. "Well, Bill cannot work somewhere else as long as we compete, so we don't have to treat him well. And the customers he brought in won't be going anywhere else for the time being, so we don't have to treat them well either. Perfect."
Same industry, same basic clientele, 0 competition from Amazon, 0 grounds to hit him with the noncompete.
The classic use of non-competes is for salespeople or high-level service people (lawyers, consultants, etc) not taking their customers with them when leaving.
Ask any startup founder who had a better product and failed against the bigger competition.
This really doesn't help things on that front.
If you really want to know what they're like on average, dig up their recruiting and retention numbers. ;)
AWS, while absurdly expensive vs. metal IMO, is also something a lot of people have built on, and it's evolving so fast that no one has caught up to it, even when companies like Rackspace, IBM, etc. recognize it as an existential threat.
In response to several comments stating or implying that you can simply not sign or negotiate a non-compete, I agree, but I think it's worth pointing out that, at least in my experience with several (East Coast) companies (I have no experience with Amazon), none of them sends you a copy of their non-compete with your offer letter. What I have always seen happen, instead, is that after you've fully resigned your previous employer and show up for your first day of work at the new company, HR hands you a stack of 100-200+ pages of employee handbook, travel policy, IT policy, etc., and various employment agreements, requiring you to sign all the documents before you can start working. Buried in there may be a non-compete, potentially disguised as another type of agreement. Yes, you're free to read them all (and you should), and you're free to reject them. But if you reject them you're rejecting the job, and now you're stuck with no income until you find another job. Admittedly I think that's better than agreeing to a bad non-compete which could last a lot longer than the time to find a new job, but it's not an easy thing to do.
I strongly recommend what I do now: after receiving and before accepting an offer even verbally, request to see all employment agreements that I'll have to sign upon starting with a new company. All have been fine with sending them to me (and if not I would immediately reject), but I would not have known about them and had time to review them if I hadn't asked in advance.
One company I interviewed with years ago, which had a terribly restrictive non-compete that I rejected, took the attitude that: 1. I had nothing to worry about because they said verbally they'd never enforce it. 2. I had to sign it anyway because everybody has to sign it, no exceptions (but their verbal assurance of non-enforcement should be good enough for me). 3. They questioned my integrity and belittled my concern because (in their words) I was planning to leave the company before I'd even started. Glad I avoided that company - with that attitude, probably would have been a terrible place to work. Back then (unlike today) I'm not sure I would have had the self-confidence to fight that fight on my first day.
First, I feel your pain here, word for word. I didn't have the same experience as you did in clause 3, but clause 1 and 2 were exactly as I've experienced.
I'd like to say this means we were dealing with the same company but I know we probably weren't.
Second, IANAL, but there is a difference in case-law between making someone sign a non-compete as part of a job offer, and having someone sign a non-compete as part of continuing employment. I'd try to argue that making you sign an agreement on your first day counts in the latter class. But IANAL.
Also, dropping an IP agreement on someone after they quit their old job is unconscionable.
I have no idea what the outcome of the case was, but Bedier spent almost 3 years at Google.
For executives, is not uncommon that they stay one year in the "garden leave", having all the perks too.
When I left Autonomy, I had such a "garden leave" for 3 months. I stayed at home and received normal salary. Was nice, but boring.
The central question is: did he really knowingly sign a non-compete agreement and is it lawful in the jurisdiction?
Yes, he signed the contract, which was likely a 20 page standard issue paper that was mostly written by Amazon lawyers in small print.
Now most of us don't send a copy of employment contracts to our layers and discuss it with them for hours before signing (that's kind of expensive).
That's why there are some limitations on what can go into a contract in some places (at least in Europe, but I assume the U.S. has something similar). For instance they can't write in there that you will be their slave, providing unpaid work without the ability to quit, be beaten as motivation and lawfully enforce it, even if you sign the paper.
Other things need to be explicitly clarified to be accepted at court. For instance, if a big software corporation would add a clause to their license agreement on page 25 that your house belongs to them if you click on "I Agree", it would most likely not hold ground in a court. If they explicitly explained this to you (with a few witnesses), it might be heard in court.
The question here is (and it's far from clear cut) is if this contract holds it's ground in court.
Back to the central point: this means, that Amazon might have to prove that they made a good effort to clarify this clause in the contract explicitly and it's lawful in the state he worked. That's up to the court to decide.
Now if they can prove that they did make a good faith effort to clarify his contract, he agreed and then went on and willfully broke it, then he is in a troublesome spot.
INAL, this is not an advice for anything and I'm not liable for any of the above.
Why? It is not immoral to break a contract. It happens all the time in good faith. The "wronged" party is only entitled to provable damages. Which as long as he isn't running away with trade secrets, or cold calling his old clients, then what provable damages are there?
Contracts are a civil matter. It is immoral to write a "punishment" clause into a contract and nobody should have to "live with them".
Easy to say, and then one day you get an offer for a job you really, really like.
> By signing offers with non-competes, you're literally acknowledging this is acceptable.
Not at all. Very few (if any) of these terms are legally binding. The only way to actually find out is to have them challenged in court.
If anything, the only way to stop this is for people to keep accepting jobs tied to non compete agreements so that we can finally see how legally viable they are. Seems like we are about to find out.
My point is not whether non-competes are legally binding. It's the fact that when you sign a contract, you and your employer are agreeing with the terms set forth in good faith. You shouldn't sign employment agreements that you have no intention of fulfilling.
Starting a new job should be a good thing for both the employer and employee. Both should be on the same page.
Why not if some clauses of the contract are unenforceable or simply illegal and you really want that job?
Oddly, before that incident I was in the "man, just negotiate them, it's all right" camp. Like the joke about a liberal is a conservative who hasn't been mugged yet, it really changed my outlook, and I'm now in favor of legislation nuking those things from orbit.