An acquaintance of mine who was given an offer by Google, and arrived on the appointed day, brought the agreement, a red line, and a clean copy. They refused to make any change in their wording even though they said their intent was not to enforce the wording as written. They said that they couldn't sign it unless Google's intent was actually in the writing as well. That afternoon, Google asked for all the gear they had been issued back and rescinded their offer of employment.

Google's statement was that Google would not make any changes in the employment agreement and signing the agreement was a condition of employment, thus by refusing to sign the agreement, this person had 'voluntarily' chosen not to work at Google.

Can't really argue with their reasoning.

Hobson's HR department.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobson%27s_choice

Google will flat out refuse. In their view they own the entirety of your intellectual output for the duration, whether or not it's done on your own time and resources, and whether or not it's in any way related to your day job.

I mean I get it (sort of), early on there wasn't really any "moat" to protect the business, so they had to put shit like this in their contracts lest someone goes off and upends their entire business model. But that's no longer the case. Their moat is _insanely_ wide. They don't have to worry about employees' side projects anymore, and they haven't had to worry about that for about a decade and a half now.

Likewise, their trading windows for RSUs are bullshit. There aren't (or at least weren't when I was there) any trading windows for employees below director level at MS, and I knew more about what's going on there than I ever did at Google. There's this illusion of internal transparency (created mostly by weekly TGIF where people get to pat themselves on the back for projects that will soon be canceled, but in the meanwhile can be used to get a promo), but nobody really knows anything material for real. The only exception I can recall is the TPU which was announced internally about 1.5 years before anybody outside Google knew anything about it. And it didn't move the stock one bit as far as I can tell. In fact, TechCrunch had the "internal" announcements before TGIF 90% of the time.

> Google will flat out refuse.

Fair enough, they can decide their terms. Honestly, I wouldn't be interested in working for Google in the first place, but if I were, that would put an immediate end to my interest.

Google can be fun if you make it a point to work on stuff that actually matters and not just rest and vest. But I do wish they'd reconsider their abusive IP clauses. Which they won't until they begin to struggle with hiring good people.

> Google will flat out refuse.

Not necessarily but somewhat practically. I've applied internally at 2 of the big 5 companies for outside activity projects and 1 was denied and the other was approved. It definitely blacklists a ton of ideas which sucks but it is possible (my side project which got approved has a main competitor which sold for over a billion USD).

I doubt that non related work would actually be enforceable

Are you a lawyer?

Some states have laws that prohibit employers from claiming ownership over what the employee does with their own time as long as it is unrelated to the work of the business... but not much is unrelated to Google.