You don’t need to feel bad for the author.

You need to feel afraid for the ability for a corporation to so easily get you to surrender your own fundamental rights.

It’s not a coincidence you rarely hear stories like this in Scandinavian or even broader European countries because they have basic safety nets that mean you don’t need to sign away your rights in order to just live peacefully.

They are using the same kind of exit NDA used to coerce OpenAI employees who left that organization. We should all be afraid for ourselves as these organizations turn into black boxes where the only people who could speak out feel they cannot. This thing where you stop working for a company but they can still penalize you financially if they don’t like your annual “post-employee performance” evaluations is Kafka-esque.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-whistleblowers-ask...

Just to clarify, OpenAI did change their agreement (to some degree) after the SEC put pressure on them. In Facebook’s case the SEC has been notably silent despite the calls from US senators (AFAICT).

Facebook execs need safety nets now?

I am all for safety nets, and I actually live in a country with stronger safety nets than the USA, but I still don’t feel sorry for the author who basically has had every card to be extremely wealthy and squandered it.

Also realize that it isn’t private companies job to fix the broken social system in the USA, usually separation agreements for high paid employees offer severance well above and beyond the legal requirements (I have seen 3 months to a year including accelerated vesting in some cases), and a condition of accepting those benefits above and beyond the laws is you don’t disparage your employer. If you don’t accept the agreement you get the bare minimum according to the laws but you are then not bound to the disparage clauses.

There is no legally required severance in the US, the "bare minimum" is nothing.

Ok, so the fact that the USA has no laws for severance is the problem, not the fact that companies who pay severance above and beyond what is required of them comes with strings attached. If severance was legally mandated people could tell the company to pound sand when they push an exit contract on you.

It blew my USA colleagues when I told them I can take over a year of legally mandated parental leave and there is nothing the company can do about it.