In Washington State, where Amazon is headquartered, there is a recent law that makes noncompete agreements unenforceable for employees with incomes at or below $100k per year (RCW 49.62). The original threshold for this was $180k, but Amazon lobbied to change it, presumably because too many of their employees would have been covered under it. Makes sense from their position, but it should be known that they lobby to limit the legal protections of their own employees.
Last week there was discussion either here or on reddit that Amazon has a hard cap for salary compensation at ~160k in the Seattle area.
Dropping the threshold from 180k to 100k would cause everyone who has maxed out their salary at Amazon to have enforceable non-competes.
I'd be curious what types of jobs at Amazon were immediately under the 100k threshold, and what percent of the total Washington state Amazon workforce has a salary of 100k+?
$100K isn't what it used to be. In addition to inflation^1, the death of pensions means that salary and other liquid compensation is now a much larger percentage of total compensation.
For example, in our state, teachers and government employees receive a full pension after 20 years of service. That pension pays out 1/2 of some average of their previous few year's salary. Even if you retire making a relatively modest $60K/yr, that pension is still worth north of $50K/yr over those 20 years.
Salaries that don't include pensions aren't nearly as generous as they sound. $100K/yr without a pension is comparable to $40K/yr with a pension.
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1. Including absolutely incredible housing price inflation in major cities like Seattle which typical measures of inflation don't properly capture).
I think that you would be shocked to find out how little an annuity costs that pays out starting at age 62 (common US federal government minimum retirement age).
I don’t know the specifics of the examples you are thinking of, but pricing the pension value/cost at $50k a year probably posits some extreme assumptions (e.g., start and retire at lowest age, end with a very high salary, take pension with full value immediately, and live a very long time).
> I think that you would be shocked to find out how little an annuity costs that pays out starting at age 62
I think you would be shocked how much an annuity costs that pays out starting at <50 years (like police or other workers with very strong unions get). One million dollars saved up might get an annuity of $30,000 per year.
The post my original reply was to was for teachers and “general government workers”. I gave a typical retirement age for those folks.
Military, police, firefighters, and (iirc) prison employees are a completely different cup of tea. Unions are a part of it, but the element of danger is also supposed to be factored into their pensions (rightly or wrongly). They also can start getting paid as soon as they retire without regard for age (unlike many/most other pensions).
All that said, the reality is actually worse. Structurally those positions tend to give members of those groups a relatively-easy-to-get disability component to their retirement (which can often be huge). They also have functionally similar jobs with higher pay that are designed to goose up their salaries for the last x years that is used to determine their pension.
These pensions are completely out of control, imho. That said, the politics and optics around those jobs make them tough to change to a more reasonable level.
These types of pensions are completely different than that of a typical government worker that doesn’t work in these types of jobs — a complete apples and oranges comparison, imho.
For a civilian employee, the pension basically equates to about a 20% premium on top of salary. Usually pensions are 60% of salary after 25-30 years. It’s not worth as much as you’re estimating, unless those employees get free healthcare or something else.
The crazy benefits that people nag about are for uniformed folks only, as they tend to get overtime based on seniority, and don’t have aggressive caps. Most civilian employees like teachers don’t get anything like that.
US federal civilian pension (FERS) is 1.1% per year after 20 years, so roughly 27-33% of your final 3 years of salary. They also took out the hacks for overtime, bonuses, etc. to prevent the games you sometimes see with state and local pensions.
The caveat to that is as of today you contribute 4.4% of your salary / year into the pension fund, in addition to 401K savings + social security. The Obama administration raised it from 0.8%.
Again, I think that number is probably considerably lower when you include pensions in the calculation. And especially when you include CoL differences between Seattle and the rest of the country.
Even then, sure, it's above median. My point is that it's still "normal middle-class average joe" money, not "basically an executive so there should be different special non-compete rules" money.
Most people do not have pensions in the United States, and those that do don't have it worth 2/3rds their yearly salary. It's not average joe money either, a six figure salary is firmly in the upper middle class everywhere in the country. Including the Bay Area.
It may not "feel like it" but to be alleviated of financial burden and put away meaningful savings puts you above half the country outright.
This isn't the right yardstick, middle class does not mean 'median income'. Its a cultural idea.
Non-conpetes should be reserved for select few in the firm that know the secret sauce, and are paid well enough that a year on the beach will hardly affect their cash flow.
Basically executive level compensation and responsibility.
This clearly does not qualify.
I doubt it. United States gdp per capita is 53k. The median should be a lot lower because of the outliers. Of course that does include everyone not just salaried folk.
Just to put some real numbers on the value of a pension. A lifetime annuity of $30K a year (1/2 of $60K) is worth about $600K if you retire at 60. You can play with different numbers here.
> I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to calculate how much you would have to save in a 401K over 20 years to have that much at retirement.
When making these calculations, remember:
- lifetime annuity
- include death protection (at least in my state, surviving spouses continue receiving pension payments).
- Everything above $19,500 is fully taxed (...and, in fact, not including tax on that $19.5K isn't even an apples-to-apples comparison).
Anyways, you can add or subtract many tens of thousands to the annual salary equivalent and the point remains the same: without a pension, $100K is not "special person who doesn't need non-compete" money.
>Salaries that don't include pensions aren't nearly as generous as they sound. $100K/yr without a pension is comparable to $40K/yr with a pension.
I don't know how to square this with 12 percent of salary I was contributing towards the state pension. Care to share your math? I agree that pensions are worth something, but not 150% of salary.
Every job in the US saves 15% of your income for retirement. It is called social security. The problem is the politicians control it instead of the individual so the money is not invested but spent. If people were allowed to have private retirement accounts with that Social Security money, everyone would be able to retire comfortably.
I guess you’ve never been in a country with (hyper)inflation or with stock market dropping 90%, and when all of your private retirement money goes up in smoke in a year. the closer you are to retirement age the more interesting it gets.
This isn’t technically true in a lot of ways. Social security is taxed at 12.4% for up to $137,700 in wages, and technically 6.2% come from your paycheck and 6.2% come from the employer. There is Medicare taxes, which could be considered retirement savings in some ways, which is a total of 2.9% (1.45% from both the employee and the employer), bringing the total “retirement” associated taxes at 14.4%. There is an additional 0.9% Medicare tax on all earnings over $200,000.
There is a big difference between money taxed and money saved, and calling money collected from Social Security “savings” is misleading.
> If people were allowed to have private retirement accounts with that Social Security money, everyone would be able to retire comfortably.
The drawback of a capital-only pension system is that ever more and more "dumb money" gets locked into things like ETFs - and more and more shares of "safe" companies get owned by entities which have ... questionable interest in exercising their voting rights.
For example, take big oil or coal companies. Their time to live is limited, last but not least because the demand is going to dry up sooner or later. Normally, investors would shed off these shares or at least push the company to sustainable goals - think car companies here: the long term goal that's most beneficial to society is to shift to electric / hydrogen, while the short-term goal that's most beneficial to next quarter's benefit is to cut r&d and sell high-margin SUVs instead.
The other problem that locking huge amounts of money into ETFs presents is a bit more complex: as more and more marker volume is held by ETFs which have to track the base stock get into a precarious position. Assume a stock drops in value because of a large sell-off, bad news, a Presidential Tweet or whatever, the ETFs the funds have to follow... and sell off, creating a race to the bottom due to oversupply (and the other way around). That means that, as more and more percentage of wealth is gobbled up by "dumb money", the remaining traders gain undue influence since they can essentially force the hands of the dumb money.
And then there is the final drawback: a government backed pension scheme like the German one where current employees pay the pensions of current pensioners in exchange for the in-kind promise ("Rentenpunkte") will weather any economic crash as long as the government keeps existing. A capital-based system is in for a nasty surprise in a total collapse event. The 'rona was a warning sign in that case.
> The problem is the politicians control it instead of the individual so the money is not invested but spent.
You're undercomplicating the story of Social Security.
1. The program was instituted with an eye towards applying to everyone immediately, not 30 years from now. You cannot hand out retirement benefits to people using savings that were never set aside; so the program was always pay as you go. Not necessarily a bad thing but considering the government has low borrowing costs, perhaps it should issue some low cost, long term debt to fund the program. On the other hand, investing on the margin like this is fraught, so /shrug
2. There actually was some investment made when the boomer population came around. They were putting in more money than their predecessors took out and thus we have a surplus. Those boomers are now retiring and drawing down social security surpluses has begun, leading to the '75 cents on the dollar' estimates we've seen
3. The actuarial estimate of the cost of running social security relies on predicting variables far into the future, many of which are affected by the rules of social security itself. Longevity in particular has gone up with time.
4. People on average are not great at investing. They buy high and sell low, they buy the dividend, they don't read the prospectus. They're not even great at saving; it's why we had to institute the SS program as mandatory. Folks pointing to their 401k strategy on HN ignores how the HN crowd is a highly biased sample of the population.
Anyways, even if it were equivalent to $30K, as others have suggested, I think that still speaks to my original point. That doesn't exactly hit my threshold for "wow you're definitely super duper well-paid so we should exempt you from non-compete rules because you're making so much damn money".
The flip side of this is there are a lot of teachers who claim (and probably believe!) they are poorly compensated, but are actually paid well if you factor in the cost of the pension.
$1.2mm/20 years = $60K. So, max out your 401(K). Your before-tax income is now $80K. Of that, you have to save $40K to reach $1.2mm in 20 years. So your pre-tax income that doesn't go to retirement is $40K.
Sure, there might be an employer match, and your money will maybe grow over those 20 years, but unless there's a generous match and your portfolio grows, a lot of that gets eaten up by the 20%-30% taxes you're paying on that extra $40K you need to save. I mean, market returns were good between 2009 and 2019, but beating that tax burden of 20%-30% a year is pretty damn hard.
Also, your money might now grow over those 20 years. Especially the next 20 years. I don't think anyone has high hopes. "Past performance is no guarantee of future results". C.f. public sector pensions, which receive extraordinary protections and pay out the same whether the market is up 5% or down 30%.
That market independence is the major benefit of a pension.
The other not talked-about benefit is that a public pension is doing the investing and maintaining the financial discipline for you. Most people in the United States are not capable of this, as the savings rate has only been approximately 7%[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PSAVERT], and 5 years down the road Once the Covid vaccine is developed and the economy has recovered it will probably return to those levels. Which brings me to the point that it is almost impossible for 99% of people in the United States to save 40k/yr. At a 10% savings rate this is someone making 400k/yr which is way above average even for FAANG companies. So government work might not be so bad afterall.
Every worker in The US is already saving 15% year for retirement. It is called social security. If that system was managed correctly it would be all we need. But instead the money is lumped in with general funds and spent.
That 15% would need to be distributed evenly among workers otherwise it doesn’t amount to much. That is only $5055 for the $33k real personal income from the fed https://free.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N
That $5055 is not much, under the Roth IRA limit and not nearly enough to pay the median rent for a 1br apartment in the United States At $1025/mo per month https://www.abodo.com/blog/2018-annual-rent-report/amp/. IMO it’s time to go full ubi and Soviet housing blocks as we are keeping way too much artificial scarcity in housing. This will only get worse and causes more social unrest as we are currently seeing the beginnings of.
Depends on the state, but yes, generally public pension funds receive extraordinary (literally, as in "more than the ordinary") protection. It's certainly going to be a hell of a lot harder for a city/state to stop paying their pension than it is for your 401k to simply shrink and/or stop paying out 4% YoY. Just ask anyone who's checked their 401k balance this year.
Except that they don't follow the rules necessary for private pensions - they expect that there is always tax money to top it off when it can't get paid. We'll see if that happens.
Interesting. So hard to find trustworthy people, up to the task of supervising such a large sum of money. Extraordinary protections are certainly needed.
These are advantages in public sector recruitment. The public sector is never going to be able to compete with the private sector on pay, but for many people the promise of steady and reliable income and benefits combinded with a good retirement plan is very attractive.
> The public sector is never going to be able to compete with the private sector on pay
Why? I’d rather pay government employees in cash rather than with future tax money from my kids as the politicians and government employee unions will undoubtably understated benefit costs and underfund it.
That's politically tricky -- if the rank and file are paid less than government workers, then it's easy to make ad hominem attacks on the government employees for living a cushy life / excessive spending.
Advantageous to whom? The government can promise money that may or may not be there in the future, and it is up to future generations to deal with it. So current politicians get the best of both worlds - love and sympathy from their constituents who are promised guaranteed income for life, without actually having to figure out how to pay for it.
pensions are a great deal for the government because it doesn't really have to fund them properly. if a private company offers pensions, it has to fund them enough to essentially guarantee that there will be money available for all the pensioners, making pessimistic assumptions for the market and optimistic assumptions about the pensioners' lifetimes. the government usually makes fairly lax requirements for funding its own pensions and relies on the ability to make up any shortfalls in the future from taxes. shifting from something like $40k + pension to a competitive salary-only compensation would cost a lot more money in the short term.
"begs the question", like using "literally" to mean "figuratively", is so widespread that is is difficult to call it an incorrect use of language. However, both constitute what I consider a dismal use of language. (But for different reasons.)
"literally"'s conversion to meaning its opposite represents a loss of meaning in the language; expressiveness dulling into useless ambiguity.
"begs the question" isn't a term that expresses the underlying idea effectively, it merely indicates a failing attempt to sound educated.
In either case, I prefer to educate people on how to use language less dismally. This does make me a pedant.
401k contributions are tax deductible, and they are often matched to some percentage, so it isn’t that bad. You get to sock away around $30k/year pretax, and that grows (or shrinks) with the market.
Uhh, in what way is mandatory payments to the government not a tax? If your unlikely to live to retirement age your still stuck making SS payments. The cap is also 137,700$ so it depends on how close you are to retirement age and if your making catch-up payments.
Also, medicare doesn’t have a cap and is also ignores your 401k.
Let's modify the law slightly: you are now required to invest at minimum 6% of your income into a 401k or Roth IRA. This 6% is, invested in goverent bonds. Caps are increased to compensate. Social security is removed.
Is this a tax? Is it materially different from the universe today?
Social security is an investment, you should consider it as such when budgeting for retirement.
Yes. If I put 12.4% of my income in a 401K (the employer’s half is part of your compensation) and I drop dead before I can use it, my heirs get to keep the money.
A retired couple on SS simply gets their benefits cut if one of them dies. The ‘death benefit’ is a token 250$. In many cases the survivor gets exactly half as much money as the couple would have.
The spouse of a young worker can also receive benefits assuming they have children. But, that’s very much a social program effectively independent of how much money the worker had paid into SS though not their income.
Your spouse can collect either your social security or their own if they don’t get remarried. Your minor children can collect your SS until they are grown. It’s nowhere near what you can do with your own 401K.
From the government’s perspective they would suddenly need to pay for many programs like:
Supplemental Security Income (SSI).
The SSI program pays benefits based on financial need and is intended for low income individuals and families.
If SS taxes where not paying for that money then it would need to come from the general fund. Similarly, with SS doubling your income from 50k to 100k doesn’t double they payout at retirement age. Instead, money is being shifted to support the less fortunate. Further, a married couple with one worker get’s a 50% larger payment than if that same worker never married.
In the end social security doesn’t act like a self funded retirement program.
19,500 is your contribution, I think employer matches are limited to 50% of that (at least mine is, so something like 28,750/year total). The contributions are pre income tax (but not pre-Payroll tax), you pay income tax on the out (but not payroll taxes), when you’ll likely be in a much lower tax bracket.
> I think employer matches are limited to 50% of that
No, I they can be much higher than 50%. I think the NFL does a 200% match.
There is a $56,000 total limit though of employee + employer contributions. So assuming that an employer wants to do the max match that still has the employee contribute 19500, then that employer should have a (56000-19500)/19500 = 187% match.
>1. Including absolutely incredible housing price inflation in major cities like Seattle which typical measures of inflation don't properly capture).
I'm sorry, but what? Rent or Rent equivalent is absolutely a part of US regional inflation measures.
edit: The BLS publishes a Consumer Price Index published by for Seattle metro area^1. The breakdown^2 quite literally includes housing as part of the basket of goods, listing about a 3 percent increase for that section yoy, and I believe the weighting is typically 1/3 of the total index. Seems like it's capturing it just fine?
The union contract I was party to with a state university used one; seems like a no brainer when your staff is regionally concentrated.
EDIT: And rent is part of the national CPI as well. It just doesn't reflect narrow regional trends because why would it? Those are outliers, and not particularly relevant national news media, and even those news stories that do cover it would use the more specific Case-Shiller indecies to tell the story.
>Last week there was discussion either here or on reddit that Amazon has a hard cap for salary compensation at ~160k in the Seattle area.
I don't understand - are you saying that Amazon pays nobody in Seattle more than $160k? I can't believe that's true. How are they employing competent senior people for so little? Are they paying their corporate lawyers that low?
I've heard of Amazon's hard $160K salary cap many times over the years. The rest of the compensation is through stock and bonus. It wouldn't be unreasonable for a senior engineer hired in at total annual compensation of, for instance, $350K, but only $160K of that will be in salary.
I'd guess they have some leeway make exceptions to the cap, and I have no idea if it applies to management track positions.
They do have a max salary limit. When you first join, before your stock vests they give you an extra hire on bonus. This has clawback restrictions, something like you lose a quarter of it when you leave before 2 years (someone current there will know the rules better). So if you were going to make lets say 200k a year you'd get that extra 40k divided into 4 quarterly parts to equal it out. Then after you start getting stock this 'extra' goes away. I had an offer like this a few years ago, but I don't recall the exact details of clawback.
It's still kind of amazing that so many people go there, I guess it's that great big top line number when you add in stock. I know so many people who left there before 2 years, cause they hated it so much. What are the places that don't suck there?
Your sign on bonus is paid monthly over two years. The first year you get paid more of it since you only get 5% of your RSUs, the second year you get paid less since you get 15% of your stock vest.
There is no clawback - I checked my paperwork. I think one of my friends told me that he did get part of his bonus when he was first hired. In that case there would probably be a clawback.
Does that not cause people cash-flow problems? In my experience things like mortgages are based on how much you're guaranteed to be paid and if you just say you hope to get a bonus and you hope your shares are worth something they won't be happy.
If your total compensation is something like a quarter of a million as an Amazon engineer does that mean you have to live much more frugally for your first year until you get your bonus and shares?
Yes, but this is offset by Amazon's sign-on bonus. According to online sources, Amazon's stock vesting schedule is:
5% in year 1, 15% in year 2, 40% in year 3, 40% in year 4.
This is unfavorable compared to other top-paying tech companies, however Amazon may offer a sign-on bonus for years 1 and 2 to help even out the total annual comp.
Not really, that offsetting by sign-on bonus is a lie too: other companies not only offer a higher sign-on bonus, but also monthly or quarterly vesting in even chunks.
Yeah, Amazon's compensation structure is really bad compared to other FAANG companies. Perks are worse (pre-Covid-19, at least). And most people seem to think work-life balance and company culture is worse.
On the other hand, AMZN stock has done much better than Facebook, Google, Apple over the last five years, so at least they have that.
> On the other hand, AMZN stock has done much better than Facebook, Google, Apple over the last five years, so at least they have that.
Yes, but you don't have to work at AMZN to buy their stock. And RSUs are just another name for 'cash compensation, that was immediately spent on buying company stock'.
True. But if your target comp over the first four years was hypothetically $900K based on salary+bonus+RSUs and the stock went up significantly during that time you would end up making more. Of course if the stock goes down....
I think I heard that Amazon bases future grants on the assumption that the stock price will increase 15%. But I can tell you that my salary+bonus+RSU when they made an offer was based on the stock price not changing.
No. My mortgage looked at taxes, which show the value of shares I received each year (and bonuses). Plenty of people earn income outside a salary - think of a successful sales guy, where most of their income is commissions.
The banks include RSUs if you have two years of history of receiving them. Otherwise they ignore the stock plan.
The same goes for the sign on bonus, they ignore the bonus portion of comp unless there is two years of history and an expectation that it will continue.
Source: I have been at Amazon for 2.5 years and checked with a LOT of banks.
That's salary. It's not uncommon for total yearly comp to be north of $300k, and very likely closer to $500k/yr. It's just paid differently. I'm not sure why their base is so low though.
Does seem strange - what happens when you want a mortage on a Seattle-price house? Do you tell them you only get paid £160k but you're definitely going to be getting a big bonus this year. Who would believe that?
Income is income in the US. Doesn’t matter if that income is monthly or one big check at the end of the year.
They look at what they can verify on your taxes. So let’s say you made $350k at Amazon last year, that’s all they really worry about. Doesn’t matter if only half of that was salary. They’d still consider your income as $350k and use that to approve whatever amount you’re looking to borrow.
If you just started at Amazon they wouldn’t be using your income to verify anyway. They’d want your previous work history going back, in some cases, 5 years.
I've heard from a few former Amazonians the same story: Amazon puts a hard cap on stock grants too, so if the stocks grow and you're due to a stock refresher, that stock refresher is withdrawn on the grounds of "your current stock has grown enough already". The total comp numbers are just OK in Amazon too.
2. People who are there previous five years are quoting their TC w/ current stock prices, people who recently onboarded do not have the same strike price and will be less.
3. Golden handcuffs, and apparently non-compete.
It sounds nice on paper, but spend some time in Downtown and go to a few Amazonian bars and you'll figure out alot of the downsides. Especially if you're at any of Amazon projects that aren't really..working e.g. Blue Origin.
Lobbying is legal in most (all?) of Europe too. It's a slippery activity to pin down, not amenable to banning because it consists of nominally innocuous activities. You can put degrees of limitation on activities that reduce what you'd call lobbying, but I don't see how you could make it fully illegal.
Lobbying itself is not bad: legislators need information to make decisions about things, and lobbying provides them with it.
The bad, and frankly unbelievable part, is the whole "money is speech" and the fact that it's OK for lobbyists to just transfer money in many different forms to politicians as a firm of persuasion to vote for/against certain pieces of legislation.
There are three terms that definitely make a noncompete unenforceable if any one of them is satisfied. If none of them are satisfied, then enforceability would be determined the same as it would have before this new law.
The first term is that it is unenforceable:
• Unless the employer discloses the terms of the covenant in writing to the prospective employee no later than the time of the acceptance of the offer of employment and, if the agreement becomes enforceable only at a later date due to changes in the employee's compensation, the employer specifically discloses that the agreement may be enforceable against the employee in the future
or
• If the covenant is entered into after the commencement of employment, unless the employer provides independent consideration for the covenant.
The second term is that it is unenforceable:
• Unless the employee's earnings from the party seeking enforcement, when annualized, exceed one hundred thousand dollars per year.
The third term is that it is unenforceable:
• If the employee is terminated as the result of a layoff, unless enforcement of the noncompetition covenant includes compensation equivalent to the employee's base salary at the time of termination for the period of enforcement minus compensation earned through subsequent employment during the period of enforcement.
So...if you earn more than $100k, and you were properly notified of it when hired (or paid to accept it if it was added on later), and you are not leaving due to a layoff or they aren't willing to keep paying you while the noncompete runs out, then it might be enforceable.
Amazon limits cash Corp to $160K and pays the rest in stock so the law might have covered 100% of their employees. Would have expected to see them quickly take that to $190K though.
What other states in US have don't enforce non-competes?
Adding some context: as I understood, L1B is a "transfer" visa for "existing" employees, which under "existing" often mean record of employment being outright forged, or being put on very low key position with explicit intent of later L1B transfer. L1B is supposed to be of lesser value than L1A, which opens much more options for an employee/corporate serf to away.
I believe the change is due to the later being a much easier door to US for a lot of people from low income countries where Amazon runs captive outsourcing centres. They didn't want people to scout for another, better jobs around the moment they stepped into US, even if that mean the next hiring company had to do its own L1 for them.
All L1 visas are internal transfers; they require extensive documentation of the role being performed outside the US for an extended period, and tie you to a specific set of responsibilities in the US; and they are not transferable once in the US - you can’t move to an L1 at another company, because you haven’t worked for that company outside the US. THe difference between a and b is just the kinds of roles that are eligible for transfer.
If you are on an L1 and you quit or are dismissed, you lose your immigration status and have to leave the US.
> L1 are dual intent visas, which means you will be able to seek employment through sponsorship or green card application tho.
Green card application takes forever and is never certain. It will take years, all while you have to stay with the same employer (unlike with H1B visa). And if you are an Indian national, then it goes from "multiple years" to "closer to a decade or longer".
As for "through sponsorship", this has nothing to do with L1. "Sponsorship" means finding an employer that would be willing to file for an H1B visa for you. Whether you have an existing L1 visa or not has no bearing on that process. It is no easier for another employer to file for H1B visa if you already have an L1 visa. Finding a company willing to sponsor your H1B is the exact same process and difficulty with L1 visa as it is without one.
L1A is pretty much guaranteed a green card within a year(EB-1C), L1B is harder but also very much doable within the 5 years limit for B.
Overall if you come as an executive or managerial staff or are promoted to one within your employment you have a fairly easy green card to attain that H1B and many other visa holders don’t.
As for the rest don’t underestimate the value of local networking and recruitment.
Yup. And it's one of the big reasons that Silicon Valley is a force in the world. Without the "Traitorous Eight" and the Fairchildren, things could have turned out very differently. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight
I don’t this is true. With rent prices in SV getting out of control people have started leaving the city, with most heading to texas or further east. If the decision to live/work in CA was based around the protections provided by CA then why is the exodus starting?
Off the top of my head, a few reasons: After 60 years of growth we're hitting practical limits in terms of finding space for people. The technology we have created has made distance less important. And between outsourcing, tech oligopolies, and "blitzscaling" (where VCs burn money to destroy competition), it has lately become harder to jump ship and start a company.
Plus we're really talking about processes on different scales. Individuals moving elsewhere doesn't say much about the pace of creating companies to pursue novel innovations.
I'll also note that CA not having non-competes makes it easy for people to leave and start companies elsewhere. The real question is whether those new companies will create dynamic local scenes of their own, in the same way the Fairchildren did here. If they don't, and if Silicon Valley keeps being a hub of innovation, that's a great sign that banning noncompetes still matters.
To be clear, I’m not arguing against CA’s ban on non-competes. But the problem of rent prices isn’t due to SF running out of space, it’s due to increased regulation around permits [1]. And this directly affects the rate of innovation unless there is enough room to house the people needed for the innovation in the first place. Further, and this part is unclear on your position, the foundations of teleconferencing we’re made outside of SF, and used by SF companies to create things like zoom. To say SF invented teleconferencing is a stretch. And lastly starting a company isn’t hard. Invest time into another project, and eventually you’ll create a business from it. VCs shouldn’t be step 1. New scenes have also popped up elsewhere, Hyderabad, Austin TX, Tel Aviv so Im not sure where that part is coming from.
Most times when I see a non-compete, I tell them I won't sign it and the company will just remove it. Only recently in Chicago did I have to walk away from two jobs because they wouldn't change their employment contracts:
If a company isn't willing to negotiate their work agreement (and I understand this is difficult with a legal department; they prefer to have unified contracts for all employees based on their start year), then there is no "meeting of the minds" when it comes to signing that agreement. It's not a work contract at that point, it's an EULA.
I personally know people who were told by potential employers they couldn't be considered because of non-competes. They are unethical and they should be banned national wide in the US and not just in certain states like California.
Non competes have their place. But it should cost the employers to enforce it.
The most obvious way is to require paying the employee their previous average total compensation, while still allowing the employee to work outside the non-compete. There should also be some form of “as time goes on you need to pay more to prevent them from taking a competing job”. If you don’t want to pay someone to not work for a competitor, then your non-compete should not be valid.
Pretty much what we have in France. Over here it doesn't have to be the full salary; only enough to be deemed "reasonable" by a judge, and judges working in courts related to employer-employee litigations tend to be more employee friendly.
If it isn't paid, the non-compete isn't enforceable.
It also requires a few more limits to be enforceable:
- "reasonably" limited in time
- geographically limited
- a specific activity / role
So they usually aren't ever enforced, because most of the time employers don't find them worth it.
It covers high-priced sales executives, C-levels, and very senior engineers just fine. Those are the positions that might reasonably take sensitive financials or trade secrets with them.
Joe Blow Web-developer? There shouldn't be a need. And if there is, pay him for the duration.
They do this in finanance, New York has relatively enforceable non-competes. Typically they'll pay you your full salary for the period of time you're not working.
Nothing about the definition of the word “contract” suggests they have to be negotiable.
Noncompetes are not inherently unethical and should absolutely not be outlawed. If a company wants to pay you $500k to not work and you are willing to be paid $500k to not work you should have the right to come to a mutual agreement with them on the matter.
It’s a free country, if you don’t like the noncompete, find some other place to work. No one is forcing you to sign it.
The fundamental notion of contracts is, as they said, a meeting of the minds. "You do what I tell you or else" is pretty far from that.
Whether or not they're "inherently" unethical is a matter for philosophers. But in practice, they're clearly used heavily as an anticompetitive measure and to exploit labor. Those are definitely unethical, and contrary to free markets.
Your last line is willfully blind to labor history. Quite a lot of employers have done their best to make sure other options are limited. Employers definitionally have a huge power advantage, and there's nothing wrong with leveling the playing field to prevent exploitation.
> "You do what I tell you or else" is pretty far from that.
The "or else" here is you walk away and seek out an agreement with someone else. You're not forced to sign a contract just because it's not negotiable.
> Those are definitely unethical, and contrary to free markets.
I don't think it's unethical or exploitative to pay someone $500k to sit on a beach and relax for a year. Many non-competes are also industry specific, so you can even double dip and get a job while collecting your gardening leave payout as long as it's not within the same subfield you used to work in.
You can argue that certain low-wage, low-skill employees need a paycheck every two weeks or starve, and these people have zero leverage or ability to walk away from a punitive contract, but highly paid tech workers don't fall into this category. There are plenty of options out there for you if you don't want to sign a noncompete. Some people like the idea of getting paid a bunch of money to not work, just because you don't like noncompetes doesn't mean you are entitled to force your personal preferences on other people against their will by outlawing such agreements.
Sometimes non-competes are so lucrative that employees sue their own employers to force them to uphold them even when the employers don't want to.
You're arguing against a straw man. The original poster was clear enough: negotiate the contract, if the company won't budge then don't sign. That is your leverage.
There is a question about whether or not the contract is ethical, but that's irrelevant to the original point. Which is simply this: contracts should be negotiable. If they're not, use your leverage.
ALL contracts are negotiable, it's just a matter of which parts. Your salary is part of the contract, and everyone should be negotiating that.
> You're arguing against a straw man. The original poster was clear enough: negotiate the contract, if the company won't budge then don't sign.
Where did I say that you're not entitled to refuse to deal with companies that won't negotiate with you? Of course you're free to walk away if you the company doesn't want to negotiate with you, but the company isn't doing anything wrong by not wanting to negotiate and there is no legal or moral requirement for them to negotiate.
> contracts should be negotiable
Disagree. Contracts can be whatever the entity who draws them up wants them to be. If you don't like it don't sign it.
Non-negotiable contacts are totally fine and legal. They are called adhesion contracts. Not everything that is enforceable in a negotiated contact is enforceable in a contract of adhesion.
You are taking a very small percentage of noncompetes, the ones where people get paid well for doing nothing, and acting like that's the common case. The sit-on-a-beach ones are negotiated by people with very high leverage. I've never heard of a friend in tech getting one; the only people I know personally who have gotten them are finance quants with PhDs and long track records.
You conveniently omit what I'm referring to above with "those", which is not the four-leaf-clover, sit-on-a-beach contracts. It's the rest, which involve no pay and foreclosed employment options. Those are indeed unethical (in that they exploit power to create negative-sum outcomes) and contrary to free markets (in that they reduce both supply and demand to advantage a powerful market player).
I don't think it's unethical or exploitative to pay someone $500k to sit on a beach and relax for a year.
Generally, that's not how non-competes work in the US. They are typically unpaid. WA just changed their laws. CA mostly outlaws them all together. Most other states allow them.
You're also possibly arguing for a position of higher power as an employee than is typical. Most employees don't have the luxury of forgoing offers based on contract language that HR promises won't be enforced (until it is).
> It’s a free country, if you don’t like the noncompete, find some other place to work.
There is actually a much better solution than this.
The better solution is to sign the contract, and then completely ignore it, afterwords.
The reality is, that in many top tech places it is extremely difficult to enforce non-competes. And it is perfectly possible, most of the time to get away with ignoring them completely.
But it is all about making you no compete without paying you.
Company could for example still keep you hired for that time, without requiring you to perform any work for them. I don't believe non-compete ban would apply for that time, since you are technically still their employee so you still have your responsibilities as long as you are being paid.
That law is about imposing it on employees without giving them any choice. If you can freely negotiate, it isn't stopping you from signing it[1].
Besides a company could still keep you employed without requiring you to work for them to prevent you from working for a competitor. The thing is that they would rather not pay and prevent you from finding a job at another place, and that's what the law protects from.
Don't directly refuse the non-compete. They will just say it is non-negotiable "to protect the company" etc...
Instead insist that they include a severance clause that continues to pay you during the term of the non-compete. Either they are serious about the non-compete and will pay you, or they will drop it at that point.
Don't just sign away a deal point for nothing in exchange.
The nice part about making a good-faith effort to negotiate the non-compete is that if the negotiation fails, that is excellent documentation that it is a contract of adhesion and as such unconscionable to public policy.
But if you have to accept it to get the job, does that not render your point moot? Or is your point you could accept it then ignore it because of this good faith attempt?
"An adhesion contract is a contract drafted by one party (usually a business with stronger bargaining power) and signed by another party (usually one with weaker bargaining power, usually a consumer in need of goods or services). The second party typically does not have the power to negotiate or modify the terms of the contract. Adhesion contracts are commonly used for matters involving insurance, leases, deeds, mortgages, automobile purchases, and other forms of consumer credit.
Courts carefully scrutinize adhesion contracts and sometimes void certain provisions because of the possibility of unequal bargaining power, unfairness, and unconscionability. Factoring into such decisions include the nature of the agreement, the possibility of unfair surprise, lack of notice, unequal bargaining power, and substantive unfairness. Courts often use the “doctrine of reasonable expectations” as a justification for invalidating parts or all of an adhesion contract: the weaker party will not be held to adhere to contract terms that are beyond what the weaker party would have reasonably expected from the contract, even if what he or she reasonably expected was outside the strict letter of agreement."
Trying to negotiate (in writing) and getting it denied makes it abundantly clear it is a contract of adhesion. This significantly weakens the contract's validity on abnormal clauses.
Wouldn't it work the other way around in this case?
Since you tried to negotiate about the non-compete it should come as no surprise that there is a non-compete and you could reasonably expect it to be enforced. In fact since they signaled that they really want the non-compete, your expectation of it being enforced should go up.
Preventing surprise and refusing to be complicit in grossly unfair and unequal negotiations are separate purposes of the courts. The surprise part is more for dealing with the contracts that are part of everyday life that are too lengthy and numerous to have everyone read, understand, and agree to everything. In that case, the courts will enforce what reasonable people would actually understand and agree to.
An email asking how much of a salary drop it would take to drop the non compete (thus giving Amazon the chance to negotiate) and them replying with "its non-negotiable" should go quite far, the problem is you have to wait until Amazon sues you to actually see if it'll work.
Your best bet would be to retain a lawyer as soon as you get an offer and tell him to do his best to get you out of the non compete, and the legal strategy will vary greatly depending on the state in which you are being hired.
can you explain that? If I don't like what the grocery store did, I can sue them, and people do win those. If they don't like me, they could sue me or block me from the premises. What's the adhesion angle here?
This is common in bonus-heavy industries like finance and companies gladly sign it because their requirement is to pay you the base salary equivalent. If bonuses represent 90+% of your comp, the base salary is a small price to pay for the represented deterrence
I don't work for Amazon, but a similarly giant tech company, and I idiotically signed the non-compete because I was excited to work for one of the brand-name companies.
The non-compete specifically says that I am not allowed to open source any software, and until very recently, I wasn't allowed to even open a Github issue. The wording specifically says that they own anything I conceive of while working for them.
I shouldn't have signed it, I'm always working on personal projects and it's kind of depressing that I only realistically have the option to either donate my project to my corporation so that, at best, they own all rights to it and probably never open source it, OR not-release anything so that I have plausible deniability if/when I quit.
It's hard to imagine moving away from California and its moonlighting law. With it, I own everything I conceive of and work on during my own time, as long as it doesn't conflict with what I do at work. I'd imagine that if you relocated here (your company probably has an office in Silicon Valley), many of your restrictions would be lifted.
A company in California that I worked for allowed me to list all side projects that I was working on to exempt them from the "we own your brain" type of paperwork. This allowed be to continue those projects. However, any new projects would be subject to company ownership.
I am not a lawyer, but it is my understanding that in california even though your contract might give you permission to own what you do, you do own it regardless if you do it in your own time. that's the common understanding.
I worked for a large company in California and the law prevented me from doing just about anything because it could be plausibly construed as conflicting with the company's business.
The law is much more favorable to employees, and the legal definition of conflict of interest is more narrow than the company would like you to believe.
That can happen any time anyway. But they would have to show damages. And even though you'd be on the hook for legal fees - at least initially, defending such a simple civil suit isn't that big of a deal financially.
When I looked into something similar I found that while companies will fight tooth and nail to not sign away rights to a specific idea/effort, the law is very much on the employee's side as long as you don't use corporate equipment to do it.
Agreed, they'hen I looked into something similar I found that while companies will fight tooth and nail to not sign away rights to a specific idea/effort, the law is very much on the employee's side as long as you don't use corporate equipment to do it.
1) Competing with your current company while moonlighting.
2) Leaving your current company and using any knowledge you gained there against them.
3) Leaving your current company and using your skill set at an unrelated company.
Contracts forbidding 1 & 2 are usually defensible both morally and legally. It’s 3 where the metaphorical water gets murky, since overly broad contracts of this type basically deny workers the ability to work and earn money for the duration of the noncompete, if enforced.
I had a similar one that claimed all IP to the full extent of the law, and anything beyond that extent, they reserved the right of first refusal to purchase it if sold.
Of course, it also required arbitration of anything around that area.
They seemed surprised when I brought it up as onerous!
Edit: This was in the UK where these seem to be becoming the norm.
> They seemed surprised when I brought it up as onerous!
Careful on that one. A good negotiator will always want you to think that what you want in your favour is surprising, onerous and that nobody has asked for that before.
The open source part you described is different from non-compete, and is way more common (and makes more sense). https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/09/developers-side-pr... offers a good explanation why this is needed from employer's point of view. (disclaimer: I linked that article mainly for the explanation part. I don't necessarily agree with all its advises)
I don't know which giant tech company is your employer. But at least Google has a very streamlined internal process you can apply for to let Google release the copyright of your side project to you. (disclaimer: I worked for Google, and in particular worked somewhat close with the people reviewing those cases for a few years)
It seems a lot of people hear about non-competes being not generally enforceable in California and assume that means it's a nirvana with respect to personal IP/moonlighting/etc. Or even that it means there are never non-competes that will cause a potential employer to walk away, enforceable or not.
Lots of California-based companies have strict policies about ownership of projects that you do on your own time. And there are certainly companies outside of California that don't have non-competes and which have liberal policies about open source contributions.
I don't work for Google, and sadly, while there is a process for getting approval to open-source something, it involves a lot of emails and waiting. I have been waiting since December to submit contributions to the TLA+ model checker.
Sounds very familiar ;) Processes like these make it very, very difficult for employees to work on open source; at most they might have approval for one or two projects that are directly used by the company.
I heard of this stuff before, sounds insane companies try to claim everything you make as their own even if working on it at home using your own funds and equipment. As much I don't like the politics of California, I feel like this is something they got right.
Wonder if maybe this is why some companies are expanding in other places like Austin, Texas or Salt Lake City? Like for example Apple is going to the largest employer in Austin, yet Texas doesn't offer as many employment protections... Maybe as things grow, Texas and other states will look into the issue more... I do think in general tech spreading throughout the country instead of being centralized in California is a pro though.
> The wording specifically says that they own anything I conceive of while working for them.
That's quite normal, at least under Dutch labour law. It prevents IP discussions if an employee does anything outside of the 9-5 working hours, or anything they were not directly instructed to by their manager.
Of course there can be exceptions, e.g., we exempt open source software by default, and are open for any discussions on other side projects the employee may have. But the concept that all your programming work belongs to the company is not that strange.
Also note that this is not a non-compete, but simply an IP clause.
I get some of my best ideas, those related to my job, in the shower.
Much of my value is in designing solutions to technical challeneges, not in cranking out lines of code.
This gets even more complex if I get an idea that builds on something I only learned due to my position, but itself isn't directly related to my role. If I could only have ever conceived my idea due to proprietary info, who gets the IP?
While there are grey area's companies have used these type of provisions in extreme ways like claiming they owned a work of fiction by an engineer that worked for the company.
For example do you believe it would be ethical for a company to claim ownership over a "hot new angry birds" game that goes viral simply because they have a IP clause in their employment contract covering the employment of that programmer who also works on their LOB ERP Application?
It should be in very limited to at minimum the type of work I do, one should not have to surrender their mind over to the company for their wages
>But the concept that all your programming work belongs to the company is not that strange.
That we've acquiesced and allowed the situation to fester means that such clauses are not unusual. They are, however, in the grand scheme of things very, very strange.
I don't see the problem with it. Think of this scenario from the perspective of an employer:
- You hire someone and they create something and use it as part of your software.
- They leave.
- Then they sue you because they say you are using their software that they created in their spare time.
Or any of the other 999 IP disputes that can arise from not being very clear about who owns the IP of things your employees create.
This is specifically in the context of programming work done outside of the work for the company. These onerous clauses attempt to lay claim to that work. For example, if a I work at Widgetron writing Widget APIs this clause might be used by Widgetron to lay claim to, say, a game engine I’m writing at home during the evening.
That is easily avoided by having them sign off on the code they commit to the employer's repository. Giving the employer full rights over every single thing the employee creates just to solve such a simple problem is ridiculous.
Then say "the employee grants employer a non-exclusive (exclusive if the work is directly related to the company business as of time the work is conceived), non-transferable, sub-licenseable licence to use, modify, resell or redistribute all works related to employment (even if tangentially), including modified versions thereof, for commercial and business purposes only", not "intellectual property of anything and everything done by employee relating to employer's business, regardless of whether it relates to employee's work, belongs to the employer".
I see a problem with it, Think of this scenario I work as a programmer writing a boring LOB application, in may spare time I write sci-fi fiction stories
the company falls on hard times, cuts my pay but I happen to submit one of my books to a publisher, it becomes a HUGE success and now the company claims to own the right to that book (the money they need to save the company) because they own everything that comes from my mind under these unethical and immoral provisions
It's the default at Google, but if you want to have an open source project or even a side business you can. You have to disclose it first and get sign-off. This seems reasonable to me and avoids any grey areas.
Alphabet has subsidiaries that work in medicine and autonomous vehicles. You sure your side project isn't competing with the company? You sure you can do so in court when the company comes after you with its top-notch legal team?
> You sure you can do so in court when the company comes after you with its top-notch legal team?
Here is your mistake. The reality is, that they arent going to do that, the vast majority of the time.
The only time when it maybe might happen, is in far out there situations, such as, for example, when that self-driving car guy, built his own multi-hundred million dollar company, on the basis of stolen google documents.
And even then google only went after this guy, after he sold the company to Uber. Before that, google was perfectly fine with the guy running his mult-hundred million dollar company.
Are you going to create a multi-hundred million dollar company, on the basis of literal stolen documents? No? then you almost certainly don't have to worry about it. Nobody is coming after you.
Sadly that's not the case in NY, where I live. I've tried calling my representatives to see if they can propose it for a national law, but I suspect COVID has put this on the backburner.
Is this for anything at all? What if, hypothetically, I want to try out some concepts in angular material to learn? Would I need sign off just to put that in a public gitlab repo (because I get free uncapped CI minutes if it is public). At some point the code should be obvious and silly, right? I mean I’m not doing anything novel here, just learning stuff. It has no commercial value.
You can do whatever you want if it has no commercial value. Google would not bother asserting their rights because your experiments will not grow into a competitor they would care about.
This is for serious side ventures, like you creating a self driving car company on the side. Use common sense, fault on the side of disclosure, and you'll be alright.
you still have to get approval. But the approval is pretty rubber-stampy - my buddy applied for "tasking rtos in rust", which was accepted, despite that being incredibly general.
The other side is that "if it is so trivial, why upload it?".
So if a newspaper writer is working on a novel during their evening hours, the newspaper should own it? Everyone would agree that's ridiculous, why should it be tolerated in software?
How does that work? I have a hard time believing this. If they employee writes a sci-fi novel in their free time, does the company own the copyright for that?
This is why we need a union. If you take my contract word for word my company owns the copyright for photos of my family vacation, the awful songs I wrote with some friends a few years ago and even this comment.
I worked at Amazon in the early aughts. They had the same non-compete then. I worked around it by going to business school after I left. By the time I took my next job, the 18 months had expired. Plan your post employment very carefully -- both financially and career wise when you join one of the big 4. When you receive a salary offer, calculate the actually salary by assuming 18 months of unemployment.
California Business & Professions Code section 16600 makes clear that any non-compete provision between employer and employee will not be enforceable under California law
Yep, I've seen contracts where they say "Clause x/y doesn't apply in the State of California" and then the employer try to tell me "Well, it's not a non-compete" .. bullshit. It clearly is.
I got the impression from friends that it was a worse situation in India with relieving letters[0], the way it was explained to me you needed your current companies written permission to start a new job and that is frequently abused.
One thing about California law. If you are terminated involuntarily (1), then you can do whatever you need to do to make a living. Build a competing product, hire your former co-workers, sell to your former customers, whatever. Your previous employer can't deny you future income, not one dime. (1)Involuntarily, except for cause, and those causes must be given in writing at the time you are hired.
Amazon was the best offer I got out of undergrad. I came very close to doing some very bad things to myself when I got rejected from Facebook and Google after my onsites and was depressed for months.
Please have some empathy for people like me that can't waltz into any job and don't say things like this.
I'm pretty sure Google does depending on which State you work in. If it's in California, it's illegal, but if you get hired by Google of NY, they have no restrictions there, so it's probably in that contract.
I'm not sure what happens if you're hired in California and then transfer somewhere else.
I have been working for Google NY since 2014 and I do not have a non-compete nor does anyone else I know of. Maybe it's different at the director and above level but that's above my pay grade.
Since it's Washington State we're talking about: Googlers who join in WA state do not have a Non-compete in their contract (at least the "rank and file" engineers), even though Google could add it and Amazon/Microsoft have one.
In fact Google took it a step further and tried to lobby to get non-compete banned in WA State:
There was an almost full-ban on non-compete that was proposed a few years ago in Washington State. Google came to the public hearings with full support for the law as it is (which make sense given the status for non compete in California - and how it had gotten sued by Microsoft over one employee, and now again by Amazon). The law would have made it that non-compete are void if laid-off, and void if over 1 year max or if you're not an executive employee.
But Microsoft, Amazon, and the hospitals lobbied hard against it. (Hospitals are using those non-competes on both nurses and doctors apparently)
So the bill got rewritten where it only applies to people with a total comp less than 185k, and where student debt could be subtracted to that 185k. This, again, got fought more by opponents.
Now the ban on non compete only applies to people whose yearly salary (total comp as listed on W-2) is less than 100k, So doctors and tech workers at those companies get nothing out of it, except the clarification that non compete:
- cannot be for longer than 18 months
- if employee is laid off and non compete is enforced, the company must pay base salary for the duration of non-compete.
Geekwire had a good coverage of it over the years:
When I left Amazon, I also left Washington for California, in large part because of this. I'm highly specialized, and I wasn't about to take an 18-month hiatus in my career. You would think Washington state would work harder at keeping their high-tax-revenue tech workers around.
> You would think Washington state would work harder at keeping their high-tax-revenue tech workers around.
Washington State has no income, capital gains, or payroll tax. All we[0] have are consumption taxes that people with lower incomes are forced to pay more of as a percentage of their incomes versus people with higher incomes. This is doubly so since people with higher incomes have the financial leverage to minimize consumption taxes[1]. There's little tax-based incentive to attract and retain people with high incomes. If anything, we are somewhat of a drain on the overall society because we price out and displace people who don't have those incomes while we pay, on a percentage-of-income basis, comparatively little back into society relative to what we're earning.
I'm certain some people will come along under me and crow about how this is the whole reason why they moved to Washington instead of another but I am not particularly moved by any reasoning someone might put forward.
0 - My bias: I am a very well paid employee living in Seattle so I include myself in this but am also active in advocacy for levying taxes on myself and people like me for a more equitable tax system in this city, county, and state.
1 - Buying in bulk, buying a single higher-cost good that will last longer than lower-cost goods that must be replaced, evading taxes by traveling or buying online and accepting the risk of not being held accountable for paying the consumption tax
While I also live in Washington and would be fine with raising taxes to be more equitable, higher taxes here would certainly increase the relative attractiveness of California. I'm already right on the edge of deciding to move due to having lived most of my life in sunny regions and really disliking the gloomy weather here. I don't think that would be a typical response though as most people would still prefer the lower cost of living in WA.
> I'm already right on the edge of deciding to move due to having lived most of my life in sunny regions and really disliking the gloomy weather here.
I'd say that's valid enough reason to move on its own. I've lived in Seattle for forever and the weather is one of the things that has kept me here through economic ups and downs.
The cost of living is only "low" here for people like us who are already doing very well for ourselves and I'm not at all enjoying the yawing inequity becoming increasingly wider. I'm not someone who pines for the "better days" of yesteryear or wants to cling tightly to some treasured local watering hole. We need a sane tax policy and a sane housing policy otherwise this all comes to a crashing halt.
Lobbying for it in Washington is to hurt Microsoft and Amazon while doing nothing to them. If they lobbied for a full ban in Montana, I would give them credit.
Likewise, if you get hired by Amazon in Cape Town, it's illegal. In South Africa non-competes are only legally valid for top-tier exec-level positions, and even then maybe not.
Please don't assume things you don't have any knowledge of. Lots of companies don't put things like non-competes in their employment contracts just because they can.
Even in the states where these agreements are enforceable, they usually only are enforceable for a job in the same role, a competitive business, and the same physical location. I worked for a company for about a decade with an agreement like this; the people who left usually got out of it by lying about where they're going, working remotely for a while, or getting their next employer to change their title.
That's interesting. At first glance, I thought you were suggesting "just switch roles completely!" But, you aren't saying that, you are saying the new employer just needs to be clever in creating a role with a different name.
But, then again, for some roles a public presence is needed, like public speaking. You can't temporarily have the role of "janitor" and go out and speak authoritatively about AWS at a conference with that role. Maybe people will get the joke after understanding the true state of these agreements.
> You can't temporarily have the role of "janitor" and go out and speak authoritatively about AWS at a conference with that role.
It is my understanding that you can often get away with being a lot more subtle than that. Things like throwing a proprietary product name in your title, a title that sounds more like a manager, etc.
Maybe. Are you important enough to get administrative attention after you're gone, or does your HR department only care as much as they have to complete their offboarding checklist?
People may talk, but the reality is that nobody is listening.
Companies are not sending private detectives, to follow engineers to their new job, and finding out specifically what they are working on, and if the contract is enforceable or not.
Mostly, people just forget about you, once you leave. People get away with lying all the time.
I forget the details because, frankly, it had no impact on me, but at one company, I remember a new executive simply not being able to fulfill some of the duties of his new role for several months until his non-compete expired. If the company wants you bad enough, they will find a way to make it work.
When I was leaving Amazon, the logic was generally -- don't go to the same org in a different company. E.g. if you work in S3, don't go to Google Cloud Storage. If you land in ads or maps or search or whatever, that should be fine.
Though, it's really up to Amazon whether they want to keep you unemployed for 18 months, which is (in my mind) totally unethical to even have in the contract in the first place.
I and many of my colleagues worried about non competes at Amazon. But mine wasn’t enforced and I’ve never heard of a “rank and file” individual contributor or non-exec manager having it enforced. My impression is it’s only worth it for VPs or other very high level employees. But the scare tactics evidently do work, in terms of scaring employees to stay or to jump through extra hoops (moving states even if they don’t want to) to avoid enforcement.
Has anyone here had a company try to enforce their non compete, and can share their insights?
I've only heard of noncompete agreements being enforced out of spite against someone who has quit on bad terms, not because of a genuine interest for noncompetition.
Why is that you, and other people here, are treating a contract like it's law? Companies can put pretty much anything they want in a contract, it does not mean its enforceable. You have to take into account your jurisdiction.
There are a lot of people who simply don't have the resources to fight a non-compete clause. Do you think a fresh grad working at Amazon 1-2 years in an SWE role is equipped to take on Amazon's undoubtedly massive top talented legal team if they choose to litigate? The law may be on their side but the resources to pursue it may not and any reasonable doubt of being incorrect could be financial or even career suicide.
If a business can get even a small fraction of its labor to follow unenforcable/essentially illegal requirements, they've made significant headway, even if they don't ever choose to attempt to litigate. Over time, those practices can become normalized and set industry standards where they become more and more successful.
I think it should be illegal to even stipulate such requirements in contracts to begin with to prevent businesses from eroding labor rights over time. There should be massive fines in place that penalize even stipulating those sort of clauses to make sure businesses only include reasonable language/requirements.
This is ultimately what it comes down to. Contracts between very rich/powerful entities and relatively poor/powerless entities, in practice, can contain anything the rich/powerful entity wants because the poor/powerless entity cannot afford litigation. Cell phone contracts, car leases, employment agreements, basically anything written by a company and targeting an individual--just read one of them. All the clauses protect and benefit the company, and very little good is in there for the individual. And they are take-it-or-leave-it: There's generally no negotiation or ability to add individual-favoring terms [1]. Try negotiating the legal terms in your cable bill and let me know how that worked out for you. Contracts among equals tend to be more fair because each side is on a level playing field.
1: Yes, I am aware that there are a few software engineers out there with specialized skills who have successfully managed to negotiate some non-salary terms out of their employment agreements. Congratulations, you are not representative of the general employee population.
You negotiate with your feet by walking away and finding another company that has terms that are more to your liking. You may not have the power to rewrite the contracts presented to you, but you have the agency to choose where you want to work.
It's also a chilling effect on many potential employers, especially small ones. When I was with a very small consulting firm, if someone interested in employment had a non-compete that was remotely relevant--or even an NC that wasn't very clearly not relevant--it was a very short discussion. Management just wasn't prepared to take even a small risk.
Interesting, wonder if some startup that didn't want to deal with the risk could just have a checkbox if you have a current in-effect non-compete agreement and just pipe those applications to /dev/null? Maybe if more companies were picky, people would fight back and try to negotiate better agreements... but then again probably depends on location, In Silicon Valley you can be a more picky potential employee compared to say rural Ohio.
Lying to a potential employer is a pretty bad first step. If I caught you doing it, say because someone mentioned it in a casual conversation, I'm going to fire you the same day. Same with lying on a resume even if it's utterly irrelevant multiple years later. It's also going to color any future professional interaction because you're an untrustworthy individual.
I'm pretty sure I don't want to be in a position where I'd be fired if a 10-year old lie came out.
I think the implication is the average engineer at Amazon isn't capable of getting into another FAANG, because Amazon is the easiest/least well paying company in FAANG.
It is interesting to hear the regional takes on this. In Texas, after being involved in the startup world for 20 years, I have never seen a company that didn't require a non-compete - they're just totally ubiquitous.
And the ironic thing is all these politicians talk about wanting to turn some place into "the next Silicon Valley", when much research had been written on the fact that the unenforceability of non-competes in CA is one of the biggest factors in the rise of SV. The tech corridor near Boston had lots of the same "base ingredients" as SV, but non-competes made the startup scene there much less dynamic.
It's just lip service to gain an advantage against political opponents who can't be bothered to even discuss increasing technology in the local economy. The policies themselves won't change until practically all representatives are elected on a technology platform. The policies of Silicon Valley followed the local economy's dependence on technology; non-competes were abolished in Silicon Valley because local politicians couldn't survive without vocally supporting the technology industry.
> The policies of Silicon Valley followed the local economy's dependence on technology; non-competes were abolished in Silicon Valley because local politicians couldn't survive without vocally supporting the technology industry.
Sorry, but that is nonsense. California's primary law against non-competes, section 16600, was passed in 1872. In many ways California was just lucky. An intensely dynamic entrepreneurial hotspot grew up due to the environment in CA at the time, not the other way around.
I mean Silicon Valley has never been about skating where the puck is, but skating where the puck is going to be. Trying to be "the next" Silicon Valley is always going to fail, because it's fundamentally trying to clone something else in a context that can't work. The failure to create a legal framework where labor has extreme liquidity is just one example of politicians failing to understand how a place like SV can come to exist.
Yea we live in a bit of a bubble in the Bay Area, but frankly having lived and worked outside it bit - I find the lack of insight that everyone has into the bubble is why they will never succeed at copying it. The attitudes too sour, ambitions too small, and people too anxious to take any risks.
The general thought process is to make you sign away as much as they can, and later worry about if it was required or something they even want to consider enforcing.
HN readers often wonder how to fix non-competes. Here's a simple idea: if you run a start-up, stand up for your employees and don't put this crap into offers.
Basically I don't put anything in an employment agreement that I wouldn't sign myself.
on the other side of the coin, Take Two just killed an indie studio that was refusing to cede control over ksp 2 development direction by poaching the majority of its employers
not saying non-competes are straight up good, but it's not that they exist in a vacuum because every employee is the evil guy from monopoly.
I like the solution that we have here, non competes without monetary compensation are immediately void. so if they want to handcuff you, they have to pay for it after employment for as long as they want the non compete to be enforceable.
it's a minor simple thing, but haggling on the non compete handout is much easier than trying to get the non compete removed.
There's a vast difference between a noncompete agreement between employee and employer and a noncompete/nonsolicitation clause in a contract between businesses.
The first limits the individual employee's ability to compete in the marketplace. The second prevents a business partner from leveraging their position to kill your business.
Almost everyone (except the shareholders) benefits from employer-employee noncompetes being banned outright. Almost everyone suffers from having business-business nonsolicitations being banned outright. Why the studio's lawyer didn't include it in the contract is beyond me...
I've been in the DBMS business for three decades and have never heard of this happening. In California it's a vanishingly rare case. What has happened is that every new DBMS company I know has benefited from the flow of engineers from legacy companies. This would have been impossible with non-competes.
Off topic but how much of Jeff's wealth would it take to transform Amazon into the best place to work in the world? Solid pay, fair employment, etc, the whole thing across the board.
Even if it took 2/3rds, Jeff would still be one of the most wealthy individuals in the world.
Jeff could make a real change and set and example. Yet he doesn't and I for one can not understand why after you have more than a billion in wealth you would need any more.
All of his wealth is wrapped up in Amazon stock. If he tried to sell 2/3 of his stock, not only would Amazon's share price tank (the founder is selling most of his stock), but he would lose control of Amazon and his net worth would be cut in half or more due to the stock tanking while he was selling. Jeff Bezos' net worth is simply the amount of shares he controls in Amazon multiplied by whatever the current price of the stock is. It is entirely theoretical and there is no real way for him to actually obtain his "net worth" in cash.
Who's saying he has to sell his stock? He should be giving it away to his employees, all the way to the lowest-wage factory and warehouse workers. They're the ones who make the company work, and he doesn't give a shit about them.
Jeff has been building Amazon since 1994. Do you seriously believe the moral thing for him to do is to give away his shares to some low-skilled, easily replaceable employee who is just looking to make a quick buck ?
>Moore said he's gotten countless buy-out offers over the years, but he couldn't envision selling the business to a stranger. "It's the only business decision that I could make," he said. "I don't think there's anybody worthy to run this company but the people who built it. I have employees with me right now that have been with me for 30 years. They just were committed to staying with me now and they're going to own the company."
The people who are strapped to activity monitors in overheated warehouses, packing millions of orders each day, risking contracting COVID, do more to build Amazon and ensure it’s continued existence than Bezos has ever done.
It's very funny how the 'job creators' weren't able to do anything against coronavirus closing and everyone staying at home. If they're so damn good, why did their stocks crater during the COVID-19 quarantine?
He wouldn't need to even touch the shares, the share itself give him control of Amazon and with that, he could institute such change offset against profit margin.
Though many of use foresee many jobs at amazon being candidates for robots and with that, can imagine the last thing Amazon wants are unions that would get in the way of such plans, if such plans were there. Kinda a case of the shoe fits, and drive against empowering those who you eventually down the line, will replace and make redundant.
Also the supply and demand factor, so many companies will only increase employee incentives/remunerations if they find it hard to get and in the current climate, they kinda have lots of people willing to endure what they offer as it's better than nothing. Which is kinda the crux we have seen playout for eon's and sadly, don't see that changing anytime soon.
You make it sound like selling all at once and flooding the market is the only option. He could slowly sell off shares over many years and thereby exchange personal power at amazon for tangible good in the world. He choses to maintain his position because that's where his priorities are. He's within his rights to do that, but let's not pretend one of the most powerful people in the world has his hands tied.
Isn't he doing exactly that with Blue Origin? AFAIK he's selling about $1b of AMZN stock every year to fund it. He's also recently pledged $10b to fight climate change.
To clarify, I'm not arguing one way or the other, I'm just stating that the fact that Bezos' net worth is largely in Amazon shares vs. cash is pretty irrelevant to a discussion of the potential distribution of that wealth.
I like to think that dilemma is why Bezos has pledged a billion a year to invest in Blue Origin. Nice excuse to extract some cash without spooking the market.
Well, many of them sure, but not all of them. For example, Bill Gates has his wealth distributed across a wide range of investments, which means that Gates' ability to turn his wealth into cash is much much greater than Jeff's.
As for the theoretical part, billionaires with all of their wealth tied up in a single company generally only have access to billionaire kind of money through loans with incredibly generous terms that they pay back by selling a bit of their stocks every year.
I don't understand how you think he should go about doing that ?
Do you think he's spending his net worth on a yearly basis so if he refrained from spending 2/3 and redistributed it would make Amazon amazing ? Or are you saying he should kill profitability and let his shares tank by 2/3 ?
I don't really like Amazon but I don't be see what your comment means in practice (I hear it often tho)
The world would not care. Amazon may look like big, but in the ocean of all employers and employees it's a small drop.
Political and cultural shift needs more than just fixing one small place. It needs political and cultural action, simple example won't suffice.
I.e. transforming Amazon could be a small facet of such a campaign as a template and example but mostly worthless without that other work.
You can be an entrepreneurial genious and still not understand how to create political and cultural shifts. So... the program you are suggesting would be quite remarkable and would require remarkable skill and vision. Redistributing profits wont suffice.
I don't think it works like that. Jeff is rich in the same way that Gates was rich in the 90s. Almost all of his wealth is tied up in company stock, and selling a large portion of that would certainly affect the price and his wealth.
It's not like Jeff has a bank account with 100b in it.
That being said, I think the real question here is "could Amazon become the best place to work without losing money?"
My guess is yes. But shareholders wouldn't like it.
It is not about money. Jeff is not going to have more or less money because Amazon has non-competes. US law needs to change to remove non-competes entirely.
Just because he has Amazon stocks of that value doesn't mean he can turn all of that into cash. Economics explained has a great video on the various types of billionaires [1], which uses Jeff directly as an example of the lowest class of billionaire.
Just because the wealth isn't immediately liquid doesn't mean it can't be used. People borrow against illiquid wealth as a rule rather than as an exception. I don't think this argument holds water.
I agree that Jeff could spread his wealth around more and should spread his wealth around more. I think the driving factor is ambition and applies to a lot more people than Jeff. You need a certain amount of ambition to reach Bezos status, how do you turn that off when you get there?
Most people don't until death or near death. Gates is the most recent example to re-shift his ambition to bettering the world... but of course, a non-trivial amount of the world now believes he is trying to put chips in people to track them.
You can make a modest argument for that as it relates to Amazon retail. Mass retail is a hyper low margin business, and one in which the labor skill required is very low, which produces the low incomes: the employees are very easy to replace and the sales & profit per employee ratio is very low.
Bezos doesn't derive more than 1/4 of his wealth from the Amazon retail business however. His wealth primarily comes from AWS.
Your premise collapses badly in tech. The big flaw in your premise is the notion that the profit maximization equation involves slashing compensation to the lowest levels possible. In tech - and most high-skill segments - that is not the optimal equation.
The employees of Microsoft - to name one example of many - are among the best compensated workers in all of history, anywhere, at any time, doing anything. Many other tech giants with extreme profits mirror that outcome, including at such companies as Facebook and Google.
Microsoft is the second most profitable non-state corporation in history, and will soon surpass Apple as #1. They're presently generating $52 billion per year in operating profit and will double in size in the next seven or eight years. They learned a long time ago to share the wealth to attract the best talent, because it was more than worth it for the printing press profits they get in return.
More broadly speaking, tech employees in the US as a major sector are the best paid in world history, and they're the most coddled by a large margin. There is nothing remotely like it in any other segment of the global economy.
For 2019, approximately 1.4 million US software developers earning a median of ~$110,000 per year (and that's not total compensation, which leaves out a lot). Show me anything else comparable to that anywhere else on the planet.
Sure sounds like reciprocity derived from enormous profits to me. By maximizing profitability, they can pay their workers better; by paying their workers better, they can attract the best talent and maximize profitability.
> Your premise collapses badly in tech. The big flaw in your premise is the notion that the profit maximization equation involves slashing compensation to the lowest levels possible. In tech - and most high-skill segments - that is not the optimal equation.
Agreed.
> The employees of Microsoft - to name one example of many - are among the best compensated workers in all of history, anywhere, at any time, doing anything.
Doubtful. There are careers that in average pay much more. For example, an interventional cardiologist in the bay area makes $500,000 a year in average.
And just as there are software engineers that make more, there are cardiologists that make more.
> Sure sounds like reciprocity derived from enormous profits to me. By maximizing profitability, they can pay their workers better; by paying their workers better, they can attract the best talent and maximize profitability.
Reciprocity means the money you are getting is proportional to the value you created. While you can make money working at a highly profitable company, 100% reciprocity would mean that 100% of the profit and dividends are distributed according to merit. That is not the case.
That means that an NT kernel engineer should probably be making like $10,000,000 a year, for example.
> In Europe, and in some states in the US, employment restrictions after job termination are illegal
This is unfortunately not true, at the very least in Spain and the UK (that I know of) they are legal - although more regulated in written and in practice (to certain extents) than the Wild West that seems to be most of the US.
In France, non-compete need to be both reasonable (not to broad) and paid extra on top of the salary when you quit the job. If there's no monetary compensation for the non-compete, they are just invalid.
I find this position reasonable, non-competes are an extra burden on the employee so they should be paid for.
In Spain it also needs a reasonable compensation, AFAIK estimates are around 80% of the salary the employee would have received during the period the post-employment limitation lasts.
It can be paid "while you are employed", which becomes a notable point of friction in contracts where part of your negotiated gross salary suddenly appears assigned for that purpose instead.
Things may get funny because at termination the company may have in fact paid only a part of the compensation that the agreed period would require. What happens then? Is the period reduced proportionally? Is the non-compete voided entirely? Moreover, the contract is binding both ways, which means at termination the employee might require the employer to honor their side and pay for the entire period regardless if the employer never intended to enforce it. Most of those quirks have not been tested to my knowledge, but it would be fun to watch.
In nearly all countries any contract must be at "arms length". Otherwise you could do fancy things, for example regarding taxes. :-)
This is actually a reason why you can not, for example, enforce something that is given freely. E.g. I give you a contract where I promise you to give you my house for free. If I change later my mind, in many jurisdictions you could not force me to write over my house since there is not "arms length". It is something for nothing.
Similarly, as I understand it In the US most noncompete contracts are actually unenforceable due to the concept of consideration[0]. Every noncompete I've signed offered me nothing of value in exchange for my agreement, they weren't part of the negotiation process and were simply presented with the health insurance and other forms on my first day with a implied "sign this or you don't have a job". However that wouldn't stop someone from calling your new employer and threatening to sue.
We may be talking about different things. Executives often negotiate a contract that contains a noncompete. That noncompete has clear consideration as it was negotiated as part of a total deal of employment, theoretically the employee is more highly compensated for this term of the contract. However rank and file employees are often not presented with the noncompete contract until their first day of work after salary negotiations have already taken place and the position accepted. Such an agreement probably isn't enforceable[0] as far as I can read[1] as it's hard to argue its part of the employment contract as the contract is signed after you are already employed and have reported for your first day of work[2]. If it was a employment contract it would've came attached to the offer letter.
[1]"The very basic requirements are that the non-compete must (1) be in writing; (2) be part of an employment contract; (3) be based on valuable consideration; (4) be reasonable in scope of time and of territory; (5) not be against public policy." - https://lincolnderr.com/is-my-non-compete-enforceable/
[2]”One of the most common reasons that courts refuse to enforce Non-Competes is that employers make the mistake of obtaining the agreement from an already-hired employee without providing the employee with anything of value in return. Generally, such agreements are unenforceable because the employee did not receive any additional “consideration.”" - https://macelree.com/the-top-10-mistakes-with-non-competitio...
IANAL. But, for example, in some jurisdictions you can write in the contract that all over time is already compensated with your salary. As long as the salary is significantly above market pay there won't be any issues. If you pay market rate and the employee is regularly pulling 60h work weeks, you are setting yourself up for big liability issues.
No, they have to pay your full salary for the whole time. So to enforce a 18 month non-compete agreement they have to compensate you with 18 months of salary.
It's worth noting that this is usually a significant pay cut from the usual total comp, since annual bonuses in some areas of finance tend to be >50% of total comp.
Gardening leave payments are better than nothing if only because they force a company to put some skin in the game if they actually care about enforcing the contract. But, in many cases (I believe the newish Massachusetts law for example) it's not 100% and, as you say, even if it is 100%, it's often exclusive of bonuses, even when bonuses are pretty much a normal expected part of comp and RSUs. Plus it's maybe an 18 month pause on someone's career.
Sure, for some people, 18 months off at half pay or so might seem like a pretty sweet deal. It certainly isn't for everyone.
You can write anything you want into a contract. Even that you are obligated to give BJs until the end of your life to your previous employer. Good luck trying to enforce this in court. A shitty non compete? I would tell my previous employer "go sue me". A friend actually had this problem and he met with his previous employer and told them: "Look, I don't care what you want, I will keep working for my new employer. If you don't like that you can pay me the same amount of money and I sit a home and do nothing." They passed.
The enforcement is them dragging it out in court for as long as it takes to bankrupt you.
Amazon has a large vested interest in retaining these clauses and wielding them as a weapon. To the extent that only a few upper employees may have the resources to fight back long enough to avoid being destroyed.
You have a point there but don't forget, suing works both ways. And while the company may assume they can sue you into bankruptcy, lawyer could assume the opposite. If they counter-sue, a big company is able to pay damages. As with most things in live, they work both ways.
No not really. It's a mater of orders of magnitude.
If your attorney bill is one million dollars, you are probably bankrupt and destitute.
If the company loses, and they have to pay their attorney one million, and your attorney one million, and maybe a few hundred grand of lost wages for you, that's still absolutely nothing for them. Pocket change. It will not materially affect their budget.
Lawyers love to sue big companies. Do you know why? Payment is guaranteed if they win. And if company XYZ insists on an unreasonable non-compete without compensations, then this screams class action.
I've heard that law firms in England put terms in employment contracts that prevent an employee from working for another law firm for 12(?) months within 10(?) miles. They're called "restrictive covenants", I believe.
Since law firms often have multiple offices, a common trick is to be officially employed at a far-away office while mostly working at home and sometimes "visiting" the nearby office. For the first 12 months.
Mentioning that the reason you left might have been because you were being sexually harassed probably deflects some threats, but these things rarely get as far as a public court so it's anyone's guess what gets mentioned in private in such cases. I have absolutely no idea how the damages would be calculated if enforcement of a restrictive covenant did get as far as a court. It's certainly an interesting question. Perhaps for an ensurer if people need to ensure against it.
Please correct me but my understanding is that in essence it’s sort of like the US. There are legally defined reasons you can’t be fired but there are plenty of reasons you can and if they want to fire you, a legal reason can be found without too much trouble.
You can still sue for wrongful termination but the total amount you are able to recover is limited to 1 month salary for each year worked at the firm?
It's legal to put clauses in contracts, but employment tribunals almost invariably strike them down. Unless something clearly nefarious is going on, they are utterly unenforceable.
IANAL but this looks to me (sorry, in Spanish) like an example of one that was enforced without anything particularly nefarious, and included the employee having to return the compensation and pay an additional amount for damages on top of that. https://cdn.cuestioneslaborales.es/wp-content/uploads/2014/1...
I had an employer that forced many of us to sign a very restrictive NCA. At the time they did it for me, I had been there about 20 years (I was middle management).
I did sign it, as not doing so meant termination (I know one or two others that chose termination). I have no idea what the terms of their termination were (like if they got a pat or a kick in the butt).
I also had determined, by then, that I would be doing different stuff, afterwards (which I am).
It was a bad NCA. It explicitly stated that, if they laid me off, or fired me, I still couldn't go to another company that fell under their definition, and it was a very broad definition. If I had gotten a job as a clerk at a drug store, it could have been construed as a "competitor or customer," because of the photo-processing lab.
Probably unenforceable, but that's beside the point. It still would have required me to hire a lawyer, and would probably have poisoned me to potential employers.
yeah. i’m pretty sure stuff like this is completely unenforceable. this sounds like being forced to sign it so you can easily make the argument that you signed it because you had no other choice and you were threatened with termination.
Making the argument is the wrong phasing. Instead, what he should have said is "I can almost certainly get away with breaking the non-compete, and it is unlikely that anyone will notice".
Tech companies are not sending private detectives to follow every engineer that left the company.
This fantasy world, where major tech companies are preventing random engineers from leaving to work for other big tech companies, is just not true. It happens all of the time, and almost nobody gets sued.
Like, I don't know what to tell you. Like half of the engineers that I know, have job hopped, sometimes multiple times, between these top tech companies. They aren't being sued.
They go work at microsoft, and then leave for Facebook, or uber, or "insert rando prestigious tech company here", and I don't know of a single one, of all of my friend that I know, who has ever been sued for job hopping between top tech companies as an engineer.
It just does not happen, for the average tech employee, outside of weird, extreme, egregious cases.
Do companies enforce every single time? No. Can they try to enforce, and win, if your manager is upset, dislikes you, or is just a bad manager? Yes. Do they ever enforce? Sure do[0]. Do you have any data about this or could you find any article indicating it's safe to not worry about non-competes (if they are enforceable in your state)? I looked, and I couldn't find any such thing.
Most times the employee is just going to give up, and pursue other opportunities that the employer can't or won't enforce a non-compete against. There isn't always going to be a lawsuit.
Have you gone over the detailed career trajectory of all these engineers you know? Do you think they would volunteer, without prompting, that they couldn't take XZY job due to a non-compete?
Even if you have had detailed conversations with, say, two dozen people, if big companies enforce on 5% of people, it's not unheard of that you personally might not know someone it happened to. That's especially true if you happen to live in CA, where non-competes are unenforceable.
With how infrequent this stuff happens, and how often people jump between companies, I find it much more likely that the number is closer to 0.1% for a random software engineering job.
Or, in other words, it is nothing that anyone needs to worry about.
Your link is irrelevant because those examples were for VPs.
I am not talking about VPs. I am talking about a random software engineer at a top tech company. Those people don't have to worry.
all those people are VP level and above. If you’re a VP you can afford the lawyer. Hell even if you’re an unknown drone (maybe with the exception of fresh out of college people) you can probably afford the lawyer.
The point is it has a chilling effect[0], fast food restaurants aren't having employees sign noncompetes[1] because they think they have specialized knowledge, the purpose is to reduce churn and therefore training costs.
Ok, so, that just means that people need to be more informed.
The reality is that people move between top tech companies all the time. It is extremely common. And basically nobody is having those non competes enforced, for a random engineering job.
the comment i was answering to was about a job were they added the NCA after the person was employed there for 20 years!!!
as far as your comment goes:
nope. Amazon cannot afford a legal battle for each and every one of their employees. Also Amazon knows they’re going to look really stupid if they do go the route of suing you. Only case where I have seen NCAs trying to be enforced is in case of high profile executives where they are actually trying to send a message more than enforce the NCA. It’s a stupid posturing game that rarely works.
>as far as your comment goes: nope. Amazon cannot afford a legal battle for each and every one of their employees. Also Amazon knows they’re going to look really stupid if they do go the route of suing you. Only case where I have seen NCAs trying to be enforced is in case of high profile executives where they are actually trying to send a message more than enforce the NCA.
Do you have any source whatsoever for this? Companies enforce non-competes all the time. Wall Street Journal thinks it is rising 60% over the last decade (2013)[0]. I think your experience of what you "have seen" is wildly out of touch with reality.
I tried to find a source supporting your position, that companies don't enforce non-competes, but couldn't. The best I found was this[1] article about one lawyer willing to take on NCA cases for employees on extreme-contingency arrangements, since he apparently practices in a state where fee agreements must be reciprocal (i.e., if there is a fee agreement in your NCA, you get your fees paid if you win). If you live in such a state and can get that man to represent you, great. Otherwise, as he describes:
>There have been several cases where we have invested $100,000 worth of attorney time and $10,000+ of hard, out-of-pocket costs to defend a poor or working class person against a bogus non-compete agreement. And there have been a couple cases where it’s gone far past that: $200,000+ in attorney time, $20,000+ worth of case expenses. I’m sorry, but no other lawyer in America does that. I’m the only one.
>In many of these cases, you will need to execute perfectly or you will lose. You have to make 100 perfect moves and the other side only has to get 1 thing right. It’s absurd. It’s messed up. But that’s how it is.
Now, in reply to you saying: "It’s a stupid posturing game that rarely works."
This individual does agree that in many cases the companies are posturing and will lose. But unless you can afford the $XX,XXX-$XXX,XXX to pay a lawyer to get there (or find a unicorn, like him, who will work on contingency), you lose by default. Whether you think it's a "stupid" move to posture or not, the companies do it, routinely, and at an increasing pace.
> Wall Street Journal thinks it is rising 60% over the last decade (2013)
Rising from what number to what number? How does that compare to how many employees Amazon has?
If it’s up to 5 from 3, that’s a completely different proposition than up to 5000 from 3000.
One easy thought experiment is to look at how many people have left Amazon in the last couple of years vs how many were sued. My anecdotal evidence says it’s an extremely low number and it’s usually top level executives.
BTW I am not approving of or justifying the behavior big corporations have. Far from it.
L1B visas are as abusive as anything... can't transfer, and now they want to impose non-compete?
These companies like Amazon, Apple, etc. really screw the L1B people. Not only are they terrified of loosing their jobs, but now even if they get sponsored for permanent residency they cannot work for someone else? Freaking everyone "competes" with Amazon.
I don't believe this is legal in California, but I could be wrong.
Very shady. Move to a place where those terms are unenforceable. I think its less about Amazon being scared and more of a tool to suppress wage growth.
I don't see the contradiction. Amazon are afraid of their employees having more power. Their success was built upon an open market, but they are trying to prevent others from benefiting from this.
I saw a comment on here a couple years ago or so that referred to this practice as "Ladder Licking". Lick the steps behind you so that nobody else can climb up the same ladder that you did.
Non-competes are usually about proprietary information / intellectual property. Amazon does not want someone learning their secret sauce recipe and then take it next door and start using it. That same non-compete also means you might not be able to get a higher paying job next door, which is a side-effect that only benefits employers.
A "Proprietary Information and Assignment Agreement" is about protecting proprietary information. It is illegal in all 50 states to use trade-secret information at a new employer. See Anthony Levandowski.
A Non-compete is about labor market, wage, and competition suppression.
IMPORTANT: Moving to California no longer means your out of state non-compete is unenforceable!!!
"In the past, it was commonly believed that out of state non-compete agreements may be unenforceable if the employee is first to file an action in a California court asking that the court declare the non-compete agreement unenforceable."
"Thus the employees [...] argued that the enforcement of the [Washington non-compete agreement] would violate California’s policy of not enforcing non-compete clauses. The California court disagreed [and upheld the non-compete"
As someone whose had friends suffer similar immigration-related shakedowns by big corps, all I can say is that this is despicable and more common then you’d imagine. In my experience, it comes when you try to move companies, with them demanding illegal, exhorbitant reimbursement for legal fees or maybe there’s going to be a “mix-up“ with your paperwork.
I know HN leans anti-union, but think if you actually had the power to stop companies from doing this to yourself, your friends, and coworkers. Think if it was part of the very basis of employment that such intimidation was not allowed and that people were at the ready to come together and stop anyone who tried. The point of organizing is to give workers this parallel, durable form of power, that persists beyond any one negotiation.
This seems really shady. It seems to imply it's legal for companies to restrict what you do after you don't work for them anymore? Any historians around? How did the US get to a place where employers have near total control of their employees, even after they're no longer paying them?
That just sounds bad. I've also heard of contracts that essentially prohibit side projects or moonlighting. Are software developers not aware they don't need to accept these restrictions to make a living? I guess maybe companies impose the restrictions under duress like in this story. Still, I'm surprised companies with such unethical employment practices can manage to hire anyone.
Employers having near-total control of their employees was the norm through much of history - capitalism is a development of feudalism. Then unions fought for workers' rights and much was won in much of the world, and workers' rights overall improved ever since in countries where they could organise politically across sectors. An assumption that freedom of companies to do whatever they want leads to better outcomes for society has eroded some of this in more recent years, but all in all we're doing better than a hundred years ago.
The US, on the other hand, cracked down on unions and prevented them from gaining political power in the same way that they did across Europe, and the rest is history.
I keep getting invitations from Amazon recruiters who say are impressed with my LinkedIn profile. I keep ignoring, and even said I'm not interested, but they keep sending it again after a while. Must be desperately looking for devs
I think it’s more that recruiting is a sales job, often with a commission attached to it. I wouldn’t say that Amazon is “desperate for business,” but they still emailed me every few weeks about moving our business into AWS.
A question I have as a fresh graduate in the industry. For a company like Amazon, wouldn't a huge chunk of tech companies be competitors? Does the non compete span the entire product range of Amazon's services, or just the team/project you were working on?
For example, Amazon and Google both have cloud services. If I'm working for AWS, would my non compete prevent me from working for Google, or just Google cloud?
L1B is a very bad visa. If you come on that to US and you get sucked into the green card trap, you are basically screwed.
You will see a lot of people on L1 visas taking on more crap at work because they can't quit or change jobs easily because of how that visa rules work.
I have signed a similar non-compete without knowing the 18month clause is there when I moved to Austin to work for Amazon with an L1B visa.
My plan once I leave Amazon is to move to California and work out of there for 18months before moving back to Austin to get around this issue.
> Some people are saying that these clauses are known upfront before joining
If you live in a country/state where this is legal, that doesn't really matter, because practically every company has non-compete clauses, and your options are to agree or be self-employed the or unemployed.
It's a civil matter, not criminal. Extradition is irrelevant.
The states agreed to honor court decisions in other states in Article 4 of the Constitution: "Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State." If a court in Washington says you owe money, it's enforced the same as if it were a court in California.
"Extradite" is not the right word - these are civil matters, the loser doesn't go to jail, he just has to pay something.
The question is more like: "could a sentence in Washington, resulting in a fine or other monetary obligation, be enacted or enforced in California?"
I don't know American law, but I'd be surprised if there were no mechanisms for Washington to tell California (and viceversa) "this dude owes us money, use your powers to make him pay please".
It's a civil tort, not a crime. Amazon would presumably have to serve process to the California resident ex-employee, who would need to show up to court in Washington or send representation to present their case.
This seems like the sort of thing that software engineers should be organizing around and calling their state representatives about to make these unenforceable.
I think NY would have a harder time doing this without losing employers in finance. A lot of IP in algorithmic trading can't be protected by patents since they only work if they are kept secret. Non-competes are essentially the only mechanism for IP protection of trading strategies.
I wonder what does someone like Jeff Bezos think regarding this situation in his own company?
Especially since Bezos is a strong advocate for long term thinking and that annoying mantra "still day one".
Can they not see the fallacy of these policies? Burning bridges and thinking short term?
They might have a prospective pool of talents regarding fresh graduates, but more and more people are actively trying to avoid AWS and companies with similar "reputations".
I'm not really sure what he expected when moving to the US? Employee protection? Powerful corporations checked from screwing you over?
What was he thinking? "Yeah that stuff happens all the time in the US, but surely when I move there it won't apply to me" -- and if they did believe they were owed this protection, on what basis?
Who was going to protect his employee rights for him? That US corporation he works for which has to be forced to provide such rights when they are operating outside the US? Hahaha
This sounds like someone who could move to work in Qatar and be upset they end up working to support a system of slavery.
I'd never heard of an L1B visa so here is one of the top DDG search results.
"An L-1 visa is a visa document used to enter the United States for the purpose of work in L-1 status. It is a non-immigrant visa, and is valid for a relatively short amount of time, from three months to five years, based on a reciprocity schedule. With extensions, the maximum stay is seven years. L-1 visas are available to employees of an international company with offices in both the United States and abroad. The visa allows such foreign workers to relocate to the corporation's US office after having worked abroad for the company for at least one continuous year within the previous three prior to admission in the US...."
Really it sounds like this is a Visa for a US company to temporarily bring in someone from outside the country, a person who is already an employee of the company.
The spirit of the legislation may have been that L1B is for a temporary stay, but in practice today it's one of the major paths for high skilled foreign workers to permanently immigrate into the US, since H1B got extremely crowded lately. AFAIK most big tech companies wouldn't even try to bring anyone from overseas on H1B anymore - too much hassle, too little chance.
Instead they'd offer people to work for a year in Canada or Europe and then import them on L1. Advantages: it's not subject to quotas and lottery like H1B, and (a plus from employer perspective:) ties the person to the employer, so they ain't job hopping anywhere for a while.
The typical approach to handle the temporary aspect is to arrive via L1B and apply for H1B which doesn't have the maximum stay restrictions. Employee friendly companies tend to help with application.
The other visa in a similar category is L1A but the employee needs to be of managerial grade. However, the green card approval process is quicker (subject to various factors including country of origin etc).
All this from some various discussions I've been in so I may be not be entirely accurate.
I stand corrected. To add, usually the H1B holders begin the green card process as soon as possible (with the help of their company). Technically, at least 365 days prior to the day in which the six-year limit was reached and then H1B visa may be extended in one-year increments.
5-7 years is an eternity for tech jobs though, and nothing stops them from converting to another visa at some point if th emove is truly permanent. I know people who have worked on free trade visas for decades that are far less stable than the L1B too.
I consistently see discussions about tech unions being bad things, but I'm equally seeing articles like this where a company holds all the power to keep you unemployed.
This seems like exactly the sort of thing I'd want a tech union (or guild or association or collective bargaining unit) to be out fighting against.
Reminds me of a post employment copyright assignment clause added to the other employment paperwork when I started my latest job. I was near the end of my savings after being laid off, so I had no real room for saying “no”.
US employers are getting pretty shady with all these post-job “agreements”.
Yeah, when I worked for Tudor Investment they gave me a 3 inch thick binder of an “employee handbook” on the first day and made me sign that I’d agreed to the terms of this literally unreadable document.
In retrospect I should have known worse things were to come from those assholes.
It should be illegal to add terms after the initial contract is signed. The only reason they do it is because they know once you’re in the door, you already turned down other offers and therefore have less leverage.
Probably not - at least not in most of the US. Continued employment is considered to be sufficient 'consideration' for at-will employees when presented with a modification to your contract.
Post-employment copyright assignment? As in, code you wrote after you left their employment would still be owned by them, without them paying you for it??
I just wanted to quickly thank you people for making topics like this one widely discussed, so I can easily make a decision to blacklist that company as my future, potential employer, saving time for more reasonable options!
L-1 visas, A or B doesn't need non-compete. Employee is already tied to the employer. That visa is not a portable visa like H-1B. This is all a tempest in a teapot, nothing more.
Does it need your employer to be on board with the idea that you want to become a permanent resident? Or can you apply as an individual for a green card?
- Other FAANG companies vest 25% of your initial grant every year. Amazon works on a 5/15/40/40% vesting schedule. Actually it's unclear if this is now 10/20/30/40. Either way, it's weighted towards the end;
- Amazon will argue you get a starting bonus to cover you. Other companies give you a starting bonus and typically pay you in a lump sum, not over 2 years;
- Other FAANG companies use a fairly simple formula of Initial Grant Value / Initial Share Price [1]. Amazon's grants are valued assuming the share price goes up at a certain rate.
- FB and Google at least--possibly others--have no cliff. Up until a few years ago, you'd typically get no stock vest in the first year. Not so now. I can't find a definitive answer on this but I fully expect you'll be waiting the full year for your 5% (or is it 10%?)
- Amazon has a 50% match on 401k contributions... capped to 4% of eligible earnings, which I assume is salary + bonus [2]. So at $150,000 eligible compensation, you'll only get the first $6,000 matched at 50% (so up to $3,000). Google has no cap. Facebook has a cap of 7%.
- Amazon 401k matches are unvested for 2-3 years. Each year you work 1,000 hours or more counts as 1 year so join mid-year and it might only be 2 years. This means if you leave Amazon before those 2-3 years are up, Amazon will take back your match. Neither FB nor Google does this.
- Amazon PTO for US salaried employees starts at 6 paid holidays and 10 days of PTO [3] with 2 weeks (IIRC) of paid sick leave. In year 2 this goes to 15 days. In year 6, it's 20. Google and FB have 10-12 company holidays a year with pretty much unlimited sick paid leave. Google starts at 15 days vacation going to 20 in the third year and 25 in the fifth. FB has 21 days.
To this list we can no add 18 month noncompetes. If you're capable of getting a software engineering job at Amazon, you're capable of getting much, much better benefits elsewhere.
Side note: attempting to put long form content in a series of Tweets is a trend that needs to die. It's so awful to consume. Just post it somewhere and link to it.
[1]: Different companies use a different formula for this but it's typically approximately the closing price at or before the time of joining.
I’m currently an Amazon engineer - it was my first job out of college. I worked really damn hard to get this job, and now everyone (including you, a Facebook/Google employee) seem to think I’m stupid and inferior because I didn’t pass my Google/Facebook onsites.
I’ve studied for hundreds of hours but the best company I’ve cracked is a hedge fund. It’s comments like these that make me wonder if I should just end it all.
Sorry if what I say sounds harsh, but you remind me of a former colleague who really beat himself up for not getting admission into the top 2 ranked schools, and having to settle for the one ranked 3rd in the country. He thought he was worthless.
The problems with your thought process:
1. Believing Google/Facebook/Amazon/any company's hiring process to be a representative of your ability. It is well known that companies like Google have set up their process to minimize bad hires, and that rejecting qualified applicants is the side effect of this. If you got rejected, it means nothing. Look up Type I vs Type II errors in statistics (or Alpha vs Beta testing).
2. Since when is getting hired into any company a badge of honor? It's not an accomplishment. Doing/building something that has impact is an accomplishment. And if you look around, you'll find most SW folks who had an impact are not in these companies. You'll also find that the average Google/Facebook employee has not, and never will, achieved much (which, BTW is totally OK!)
3. Similar to 2 above, you'll always be miserable if you allow others to set standards for you. Set your own standards!
4. In my opinion, if you're using your career as a major factor in self worth, you are setting yourself up for all kinds of psychological problems. The purpose of your job is to get paid. The purpose of acquiring money is to help you achieve your goals - it's not a goal in itself. If you happen to find a job that gives you meaning beyond just the paycheck, that's great. But it's not the norm, and even when you do find one, in most cases it doesn't stay that way. Things change at work, and that meaningful job could easily become a meaningless one overnight due to senior management.
Find purpose in life that is not tied to your job.
Even if they aren't representative of ability it's a strong signal if I keep getting rejected from Facebook (3 times for internship with final interviews, 2 times for onsite) and Google (2 times for internship, 1 time for full time onsite). You yourself say in a different comment that Amazon is easier to get into - that just means I'm less intelligent right? I did get into Citadel, but that was via their JavaScript domain specific interview process that had (as my friend described it) "mind-numbingly easy questions".
It's easy to say that I shouldn't make getting hired into a company as a badge of honor...but I truly have no other accomplishments to speak of, even within Amazon. All of my friends seem to think I'm some sort of disappointment, or at least not successful.
I wish I could avoid using my career as a factor for my self worth, but I don't make enough money to achieve my goals and won't for 2 promotions from now. It really feels like i'm both stuck and limited by my inherited intelligence.
Since a lot of this has been about Google vs Amazon, I should add: I respect Amazon a lot more than Google. Amazon truly is a giant, and in recent years its successes are a lot more impressive than Google's.
To begin with, Google's main accomplishment is ads. It's their cash cow. For the most part, Google is a one trick pony. Amazon is much more diversified.
Amazon is way better than Google when it comes to execution. When Amazon steps into a market, everyone is terrified. They tend to dominate whatever they step into: warehouses, cloud, ebooks, smart speakers. And now they're trying to get into retail and shipping. Let's see how that goes.
Presently, there's no reason for me to prefer Netflix over Amazon Prime Video.
They also have owned IMDB since forever, and it's quite cool that they've allowed it to remain a great resource for movie enthusiasts!
They own Goodreads as well, although I think LibraryThing is better.
I expected Whole Foods to get worse once they bought it, but it doesn't seem to have, and the culture there just prior to Amazon scooping it up was quite poor (previous owner became so metric driven that employees were often in tears and were looking forward to working for Amazon - can't find recent resources to see how that played out).
Google, on the other hand, has a huge list of endeavors that they completely dropped the ball on. Lots of canceled products, and the existing ones are lethargic. Google Nest is not really the best, and most reviews of thermostats agree, although it perhaps does sell more because of the hype. They're branching off into smart security cameras, but again are not considered the best. I think they've given up on smart speakers - I've had their speakers for 2 years, and in those 2 years I haven't noticed any improvements, new features, etc. In fact, their voice recognition has regressed. I expect Google will cancel this at some point - I regret filling my house with them.
Google is known to have horrible support for their products. Amazon has its issues as well, but most will trust Amazon more for support for things like Cloud than they would Google.
Google's Internet/cell phone plans are horrible. Lots of terrible reviews.
The Chromecast is occasionally useful, but my Roku is much better.
Google got into cable TV via the Internet, but I don't think their offering is any better than Sling's.
From 2000-2010, Google was very innovative, and produced a lot of stuff of value. In the last decade, everything has been more or less incremental. I struggle to think of any way my interaction with Google products (Youtube, etc) has improved in the last decade. They're fundamentally the same.
> To begin with, Google's main accomplishment is ads.
Google's ad business doesn't exist in a vacuum. AdWords is a license to print money because Google search is so good. Without Google Search, Google's ad business would be <10% of what it currently is. So how can you argue that's not an accomplishment?
AdWords is about the only form of online advertising that I personally have no issue with. You have the intent of the user to find something and they've told you what they're looking for. As long as an ad is clearly marked as such, I have no issue with including ads in search results. It may be what the user is looking for.
> When Amazon steps into a market, everyone is terrified.
Like the other giants, there are things Amazon is good at and things they are not good at. Prime Video (which you mention) is no Netflix and honestly only exists because it was bundled with a service actually want (ie Prime free 2-day shipping).
> They also have owned IMDB since forever, and it's quite cool that they've allowed it to remain a great resource for movie enthusiasts!
IMDB, for me, has reached the point where I'll prefer Wikipedia if at all possible. Particularly on mobile, I tend to find it's a horrible experience. On mobile you have the extra step of "see full cast". Finding TV episode synopses and cast is always an exercise in "where have they hidden it this week". I'd say it's stagnated, if anything.
I do respect the Amazon strategy of acquiring leading lead-generating sites (eg dpreview). That's not typically what Google does. More often than not, Google is acquiring the talent rather than the tech. It's a different strategy and not necessarily worse.
> Amazon has its issues as well,
That's an understatement. Amazon has a counterfeit product problem that I'm honestly shocked hasn't made them the target of some AG investigation yet. Dodgy sellers buy up product pages for a good product and replace it with something crappy, keeping all the reviews. Amazon also prefers their own products in a way that's arguably anticompetitive. Amazon provides logistical services that i've certainly read some horror stories about (eg look into the Louqe Ghost S1 US distribution through Amazon).
Amazon's stranglehold on online selling is (IMHO) the best case out of any the tech giants for anticompetitive behaviour.
> Google's ad business doesn't exist in a vacuum. AdWords is a license to print money because Google search is so good. Without Google Search, Google's ad business would be <10% of what it currently is. So how can you argue that's not an accomplishment?
I don't disagree with you, but in a sense you are saying what I'm saying, with just words substituted. Yes, you could view their expertise in ads, or you could view their expertise in search. Either way: One trick pony.
> AdWords is about the only form of online advertising that I personally have no issue with. You have the intent of the user to find something and they've told you what they're looking for. As long as an ad is clearly marked as such, I have no issue with including ads in search results. It may be what the user is looking for.
Yes, but Google is involved in several other dark patterns (tracking users across sites, etc).
> Prime Video (which you mention) is no Netflix and honestly only exists because it was bundled with a service actually want (ie Prime free 2-day shipping).
I'm a big Netflix fan, but I noticed yesterday that it has been months since I watched something on it. I originally signed up for Netflix's streaming to get access to a lot of existing content (i.e. not produced by Netflix). I suspect today you'll get a lot more of that with Prime than with Netflix. At the moment, I'd hesitate to say that Amazon Prime is clearly better than Netflix, but I'm equally hesitant to say that of Netflix. Were I a new user with no prior knowledge, it's not at all clear to me that Netflix is better. It's certainly not apparent to me that Netflix will maintain their lead for long. And just as you complain about IMDB's redesigns, Netflix's constant experiments with their UI really annoys me.
(Oh, and just a few days ago "My List" was empty in Netflix - not sure if they did that intentionally or it was a bug and they fixed it).
(It's amusing you say that people don't really want Prime Video but want 2 day shipping - it's the opposite with me - but I can see I'm far from the norm).
Yes, IMDB's constant redesigns are annoying, but if you have an account, you can adjust your settings to make the layout relatively stable. When I look up a movie, the site looks the same as it did 10-15 years ago. For me, that's a sign someone in Amazon actually cares.
> That's an understatement. Amazon has a counterfeit product problem that I'm honestly shocked hasn't made them the target of some AG investigation yet. Dodgy sellers buy up product pages for a good product and replace it with something crappy, keeping all the reviews. Amazon also prefers their own products in a way that's arguably anticompetitive.
Oh, I hate buying anything from Amazon.com. The web site sucks. The fake product and fake reviews issues sucks. I now almost always comparison shop and if the price is not too different I buy from elsewhere. When Amazon touts its "Customer obsession", it really annoys the heck out of me as the experience with Amazon.com is so poor for me.
The point is they do dominate that sector, and they really earned that title. It didn't just happen because they were early or lucky. They work (and continue to work) aggressively to dominate it.
How many ventures can you list that Amazon went into and completely floundered? Now do the same exercise with Google. Google often goes into a market with an "I have a neat idea I want to try out" mentality. Amazon goes into something with the intention of succeeding big. Their pivot to cloud was brilliant.
The main reason I don't want to work for them is their poor vesting schedule and poor paid time off policies.
(Oh, and on the side: Washington Post - it's a crappy newspaper. Not sure why Jeff was enamored with it).
> Even if they aren't representative of ability it's a strong signal if I keep getting rejected from Facebook (3 times for internship with final interviews, 2 times for onsite) and Google (2 times for internship, 1 time for full time onsite).
Strong signal of what, exactly, and how are you connecting the dots? It's natural for the brain to fill a void with faulty speculation, and that seems to be what you're doing: "If I didn't get in, there must be a rational explanation." (faulty speculation 1). "That explanation is I'm not that smart." (faulty speculation 2).
This type of thought pattern is what I often refer to as "Out of ignorance comes certainty." Realize these are speculations, and go and seek concrete information to validate them.
FWIW, I've been rejected by all 3 - twice by Amazon. Yet it didn't do anything to my feeling of self worth. I work a job in a company which, although they're a giant in the field they're in, I (and most engineers there) earn less than you.
It also doesn't hurt that I know people who've left my company to work for Amazon. I know their abilities and achievements, and while decently intelligent, they are not at all remarkable. I can do things they can't. The same goes for two former coworkers who are in Facebook (both decently smart, and one of them often credits me for teaching him various stuff that made him a better developer). I know people in all 3 companies who struggle with functional programming and calculus (something every one in every engineering major outside of computers has to become quite competent at).
You want me to throw away all that data and focus on the fact that I didn't get a job offer? Why would I take concrete information I have and replace it with nebulous information (namely: I have no idea why I got rejected).
It also doesn't hurt that I've sat in interview committees in my company and I've seen how it is the norm that a candidate is rejected (or hired) capriciously. People have all kinds of weird ideas on what a good candidate is. Now I imagine that FAANG companies are a bit more structured in their interviewing and this is less of a factor, but I'm sure it's still a factor. You can go and read on Medium how Google interviewers evaluate candidates and it won't be hard to spot problematic themes. I recently read something from a LinkedIn interviewer who described what he felt was a "red flag" in a candidate's coding style (essentially fell into the pragmatic vs elegant bucket). Amusingly, I had an interview 2 days ago elsewhere where the interviewer and I discussed this exact issue, and we both felt that what the LinkedIn guy felt was a red flag was actually good coding practice.
Along those lines, I wish I could find the article (perhaps it was on HBR?) that pointed out that studies showed that the variance in an employee's annual rating was mostly due to the variance in the managers' beliefs in what constitutes a good performance, and had little to do with the variance in the employees' performance. In a company like mine, this is very obvious. Yet so many employees tie their ego to that rating.
> It's easy to say that I shouldn't make getting hired into a company as a badge of honor...but I truly have no other accomplishments to speak of, even within Amazon. All of my friends seem to think I'm some sort of disappointment, or at least not successful.
Your attitude reminds me of my experiences with universities. I went to a mediocre undergrad and a top ranked grad program. The differences between the students in both existed, but were not as significant as one would expect. One of my friends had only been in top schools, and he had a vastly inflated idea of how much better an education he was receiving compared to an average school. And then he went on to interact with people from those schools (via conferences), and the experience really shook him. He found way too many people at no-name schools doing more impressive research than he was.
One of my undergrad friends ended up working for a small business and got paid extremely low. I went on to work for one of the top companies. Yet I've never achieved anything at the top company that matches what he's done. I recall advice I saw when I was in school: The opportunities to do innovative work in a small shop are much higher than in a big company because resources are much more limited.
Yeah - I got into a big company and get paid a lot more than he does, but he is more accomplished.
All those friends who think you're a disappointment - what have they accomplished beyond getting into those companies?
And the most, most important thing of all: Is your definition of accomplishment tied to work? And if so, why? I once helped someone out who was in dire need. I put in a fair amount of effort to help him, and it was risky as there was no guarantee it would. Fortunately, it all worked out and the person is in a much better position now, and doing well.
It is very unlikely that any accomplishment at work will match that. There's a whole world out there outside of SW and outside of work.
> You yourself say in a different comment that Amazon is easier to get into - that just means I'm less intelligent right?
People have studied intelligence, and published papers on it, for decades. I don't recall seeing any that used "Getting into Google/Facebook" as a measure of intelligence.
If the experts on intelligence don't do it, why are you doing it?
Once again, I would strongly suggest pondering over what standards you should have that aren't dictated by peer pressure. And I don't think the harsh part of my earlier comment has sinked in: Should you get into Google tomorrow, it is not an achievement. Realize you'll be the same person tomorrow as you are today. Getting in didn't suddenly make you more intelligent.
(I want to get into Google too, but my goals are higher compensation and access to interesting work - the former is guaranteed, the latter isn't. And frankly, Amazon is doing better on the latter metric).
Most people who do not get into any FAANG company are a lot happier than you are. I suggest you find out why.
> If you're capable of getting a software engineering job at Amazon, you're capable of getting much, much better benefits elsewhere.
which I think says the opposite of what you're implying. I'm saying you're capable of getting a much better benefit package as evidenced by the fact that you got a job at Amazon.
Amazon is (IMHO) short-changing you. Don't sell yourself short. If that was the best offer you had out of college, believe me I get it. And if you're happy there now then I'm happy for you.
But pointing out how Amazon falls short of competitors with a roughly equivalent hiring bar is not intended an attack on you or your choices.
I get what you're saying, but the evidence in my experience seems to prove otherwise if I can't get into Google or Facebook after trying nearly a dozen times between them.
I make around ~$150k a year right now. If I get promoted this year, I'll make $180k. Google engineers start at around $200k. By nature of the free market of labor it seems like I'm only worth about 75% of a Google engineer at maximum to work on identical things.
Folks have told me to "just go to Google" don't understand the anguish of being worth 75% of a human at best, and not having the intelligence to pass an interview loop anywhere consistently.
> Folks have told me to "just go to Google" don't understand the anguish of being worth 75% of a human at best, and not having the intelligence to pass an interview loop anywhere consistently.
The majority of SW developers in the US make less than $100K right out of college. Are you suggesting they are less than 50% of a human?
And most Google employees make less than what the top earners in hedge funds make. Does that make Google employees less human?
I'm not a counselor, and I suggest you seek one. However, the warning signal in your comment is "Folks have told me..." Why are you letting other people tell you what constitutes value?
Sorry that I keep riddling my comments with anecdotes and stories, but here's another one: A friend of mine spent over a decade trying to get a PhD. He's smart, but there's a lot more to smartness that is needed to get one. He kept having problems (some from his side, some external). I told him for years to quit - the PhD isn't all that great a goal. But he insisted on sticking to it so as not to be a failure. Last year I had to tell him "Be prepared for the inevitable depression after you get the PhD and then realize all that effort wasn't worth it."
He graduated recently. Let's see how he holds up.
If Google is good for you, I hope you get in. But be prepared to discover the opposite if you do get in.
Your username and the tone of your message feel a lot like imposter syndrome to me. You passed the interview, you kept the job, and are doing the exact same work.
You are not "worth less" than anyone else based on Amazon's miserly compensation, it's that other FAANG weren't smart enough to grab you when they had the chance.
I believe both FB and Google are actively hiring experienced engineers right now, apply every time you can until you get the job. I know getting rejected sucks and it feels like a statement about personal value but in the end it's a screening process that tries to guesstimate your potential for success, it's not an indictment of your abilities.
The first thing to ask yourself -- are you happy? Are you working on problems that you think are interesting? Use that as a guide to determine if you need to change positions or companies. Benefits and comp are always great, but at a certain point you also start to examine your role in the world and the impact that you can have. Never sell yourself short, always look forward, and try to use the resources you have available to develop your skills.
I've been with Amazon for about 15 years. There are a lot of employees who choose to be at Amazon and not Google/FB. There are pros/cons with each of the FAANGs and really any job. I find the problem space of Amazon's physical business to be fascinating to work on whereas I couldn't give a hoot about online advertising. With regards to benefits -- I've made enough in RSU appreciation for those differences to not matter. But I encourage people to carefully consider their own circumstances and look closely at long-term growth potential of whatever companies they're considering.
Amazon has its shortcomings but it still has a lot of smart and qualified people (like you, I assume!)
Do you best, be aware of your worth, and if/when you find a better opportunity, grab it!
It’s not good to beat yourself up for “failing” to get into Google or some more desirable company. Anyone who is familiar with the process knows that these companies (including Amazon!) frequently reject qualified candidates. They’re tuned to avoid bad hires at all costs. Basically if any interviewer has a bad feeling about a candidate, they’ll get rejected.
I mean these sorts of things would imply that Amazon doesn't though, right? Why would anybody accept the "worst" for no benefit unless that was the best they got? In a free labor market that just means my inherent value is lower.
Its indeed true that Google rejects qualified candidates. But if I miss a question during an onsite, that just means I'm unqualified.
One thing to note is that Amazon is the easiest of the FAANGs, so I don't think the idea that "if you can get into Amazon you can get in anywhere" is true.
> Amazon will argue you get a starting bonus to cover you. Other companies give you a starting bonus and typically pay you in a lump sum, not over 2 years;
I'm not sure this is true. My friend had no trouble getting one (good amount in cash), and the rationale was precisely due to their vesting schedule "Since not much of your stocks will vest in the next 2-3 years, here's a cash amount to compensate for that."
You did forget to point out one other key difference between Amazon and the others: Although the interview process is still demanding, it is somewhat easier than Google/Facebook.
The "signing bonus" from Amazon isn't really a signing bonus, it's just to make up for the fact that they are not giving you much stock for the first couple of years.
I can't seem to access the original source. Is it a non-compete for entry level workers the way Jimmy Jones tried to put in place? If so, it is silly and not reasonable. Those used to be for senior level people who could actually do some damage. A kid stocking stuff? I do not think so.
This is one of the greatest things about CA, these kinds of clauses are unenforceable, so I don’t have to even worry about them.
Of course California exposes the deep hypocrisy of the way these clauses are sold. If non competes were truly critical to company success, they wouldn’t hire anyone in CA.
Out of interest, in the US can you turn to anyone who represents your interests in this case? There are no unions and no worker-representatives at all, aren't there?
Is everybody scared to stand up to your employer in those cases?
Sure, you have to pay for it, but you have to pay for it indirectly if it's a union anyways. It's unfortunate that the costs aren't spread over the entire organization, but getting the opinion of a lawyer is not that expensive for a software engineer.
Personally I suspect that if he refused to sign this and they fired him for that he could have recovered significant damages under promissory estoppel, but that's something you'd need to check with a lawyer before actually doing it.
I've always signed them as a sign of good faith (sometimes amending with my own IP so there's no misunderstand about something I've already done if the company is in the same space) figuring that they have no teeth. In 30 years in the industry moving between small and large companies here in the Seattle area, having signed a NC everywhere, I've never even been asked about a previous NC, nor do I know anyone else that's had an issue. From what I understand, they are very difficult to take action on. Perhaps in the upper echelon's of management this is more of an issue, or for very narrowly-defined technologies or market-segments.
Is that valid when moving back to the EU? And are there any actual benefits of working at large multi-nationals besides a fat check and name recognition?
Honestly I don't understand why people still go to work for FAANG in 2020 after so many recurrent (or past now exposed) scandals regarding hiring, non-competes, poaching, crazy NDAs etc. A huge salary and a golden mark in your CV can't be the only thing that matters in a career given all the internal dirty politics hitting the HN front page every once in a while, come on.
Amazon is remarkable because they have such a comprehensively awful reputation when it comes to recruiting and retention.
I know many Amazon employees and the following is the norm:
- Multiple manager changes after joining within months
- Moving teams and offices within six months
- Lifetime survival of 18 months On average
- Intense pressure to hit high goals
For whatever reason, they got away with running a white collar sweatshop for a decade.
These Non compete changes and lawsuits Like the recent one against a former exec who defected to google signal a shift. Their model of thrashing their employees is now under pressure as Google Cloud have opened offices literally across the street and talent is streaming over there.
Likewise, Microsoft has done a MUCH better job at managing and balancing forces of diversity, government, political pressure as well as local citizenship and international relations.
Hate to say it but people get old and have kids. They can’t deal with the pressure. Microsoft and google offer better work life balance.
Compared to Microsoft, Amazon has been making mistake after mistake with the government. Buying the Washington Post, for example, was an extremely political maneuver, it certainly was not to “support the news” as Bezos claimed and annoying trump resulted in the loss of the JEDI contract. Another four years of Trump and Amazon will be lucky to ever see another government contract ever again. Same with the bungled campus II in New York.
I think they must be under pressure for talent now to be resorting to and enforcing Non competes, my experience with them is they have hired everyone that is not nailed down. Don’t get me wrong, the talent level there is extremely high.
Competition for talent is a good thing. Their response to try to use force is going to get them in trouble.
I think the fact they added the non-compete after is not the issue. Also the fact he was told otherwise prior to relocating. My guess it's a standard thing for all US based workers as he was told and there was a "bug" in the process. I doubt it was done intentionally.
The issue is the states that allow this to happen. Capitalist America.
Right, I understand that. All I'm saying it's not the important issue. The important issue is that it's legal in the first place to restrict employees in such ways.
Screwing people over in every way that's legally permissible is... not always considered praiseworthy. And you can blame Amazon for straight-up lying to the guy about how the terms of his employment would change after the transfer.
Amazon apparently fraudulently issued an employment offer and contract that they never intended to honor. It will certainly make me think twice about ever signing a contract with Amazon.
I beg to differ. They did not "add" a non-compete. They scared him into signing one.
Someone at Amazon put a paper on his desk and said that unless he signs it, they would not "authorize my employment". Whatever that means.
So I signed. Because what
other options did I have?
The option not to sign. He had an offer from them and he agreed. That is a legal binding contract that they have to abide. So don't sign and say "Sorry, but we have a legally binding agreement. And this is not in line with it.".
If you let people scare you by saying something, they will continue to play tricks on you. Stick to what is written.
But I suggest standing your ground in such a situation. They wanted to work with him. They had a contract with him. So there was a lot of pressure on them too. If they breached the contract they would lose an employee and face legal repercussions.
I think you're vastly overestimating both the leverage a low-level employee would have in one of those megacorps and the amount of autonomy that an HR rep would have in a case like this. They have a process to follow, and that process does not include negotiation. Maybe they have the power to escalate the request to someone with decision making power, but that's going to take time, and their flowchart probably does not allow for allowing somebody to start work provisionally until that escalation is solved.
What "legal repercussions" are you thinking of? The author stated that their new contract was "at will", so their employment could be terminated for any reason at all.
(Not defending Amazon here. But the employee had been put into a position where they had no realistic choice but to sign.)
