Heh. I advise early career students from my alma mater. One of them took a job with a mom-and-pop web dev + IT firm. Super mom and pop. Like, maintaining word press and similar installs for maybe a few hundred clients and then bundling that with generic IT services (computer repair, maintenance, blah blah blah). Basically, as boring as you could possibly get.
That employer told my advisee that because the company develops software, their non-compete covers all software.
Are they correctly interpreting state law? Absolutely not. Does that matter to a 2x-year-old making 80K worried about losing their job, being sued, being blackballed in their small regional labor market (which they don't want to leave for family reasons)? Also no.
> 2 - every such agreement I have signed has had a “carve out” clause: you can list things you’ve been working on (which is vague, I have listed areas I’m interested in and have looked into and counted that as ”work”) and exclude the stuff listed there from the agreement.
Wait, are you sure that list works how you think it does?
The vast majority of employers won't even talk to you about the scope of their non-compete.
At the outset, you are supposed to white-list things when you start employment. But then anything non on that white-list (which includes every idea you have after the moment you fill it out!!!) has to be assumed to be covered under the NDA, unless you're willing to risk a court battle and an enemy.
FWIW court battles are rare. But better to get rid of the noncompetes regardless.
> > 2 - every such agreement I have signed has had a “carve out” clause: you can list things you’ve been working on (which is vague, I have listed areas I’m interested in and have looked into and counted that as ”work”) and exclude the stuff listed there from the agreement.
> Wait, are you sure that list works how you think it does?
Yes, that's the whole point of that list and the language is very clear.
FWIW I've mostly been the employer, not the employee and I always scrutinize those lists carefully (if someone writes anything there I have to approve it before the agreement can be signed). Not because I care what people do in their free time, but to see if there's anything there that could cause a disagreement, especially if it would be an innocent disagreement. And I have never seen anyone write something that seemed unreasonable there. TBH most people leave that blank.
These docs always go with the employment offer; if the employee doesn't see them until their first day what kind of negotiation is there then? The whole point is to have someone join us and be happy to work with us, not to take advantage of them.
1 - if you work at a company like that (faang, basically) you probably have a choice of working elsewhere and they are paying you handsomely to give up the ability to have almost any software or electronics side projects (my gf wants me to go work at one of them and I have decided it’s not worth the money, though I can understand why others can reasonably think otherwise).
The first section of the article talks about this: US labor law is pretty firmly rooted in freedom of contract doctrine even though for most people there’s such extreme asymmetry of power that any “freedom” in this area is illusory. But if you’re a FAANG developer you aren’t one of those people — you have a choice.
2 - every such agreement I have signed has had a “carve out” clause: you can list things you’ve been working on (which is vague, I have listed areas I’m interested in and have looked into and counted that as ”work”) and exclude the stuff listed there from the agreement. Of course the new employer can disagree with the choices (“ARM CPU designs? That’s what we’re hiring you to do!”) but again, if that were you, you pretty much would have freedom to negotiate. I think such an objection would be pretty fair for an employer to have in that situation.
Also if you decide later you want to write a stock app but hadn’t listed it, well, c’est la vie.