Re:Founder of Facebook's Oculus hit with lawsuit
by moron4hire on Sunday May 24, 2015 @10:32PM
(#9598386)
I had a very similar issue when I was 20 years old. I was an instructor for a martial arts school in my home town. They decided, all of a sudden, that having the most students they ever had meant they were in "hard times" and without notice just stopped paying the instructors. There were a lot of stories about "loyalty" leading up to this. And then, when I quit because I literally could not afford the gas money to show up anymore if I was spending my time there instead of at another job, they sent me a cease-and-desist letter to preemptively warn me against trying to open my own school with their "proprietary information", aka the routine of basic calisthenics, striking and kicking techniques, and other common martial arts training regimes that every other school was doing. Never mind that all I wanted to do was finish my CS degree and had no desire to open a school. Never mind that you can't send a cease-and-desist unless a person has actually done something. They read somewhere they should do this and they did it.
To defend against this sort of stuff, you have to be extremely well-versed in your field. You have to know exactly which parts are public knowledge and which parts aren't (and therefore, are proprietary knowledge). You have to know all the dark, secret corners of your field. You have to not only be an expert, you have to be THE expert, the one and only, the master of all knowledge.
Because the court won't be. And they don't care. It's your word against your former employer's about what you learned there versus what you knew before versus what is common industry knowledge. I've also worked at a ton of CRUD-y consulting firms that had similar language in their NDAs. I'm sorry, nobody building an OLTP system for keeping track of sales figures on ASP.NET and SQL Server is blazing new trails. Not that there isn't anything new to do in that field, just that cross section of the programmers who are capable of doing it and the managers who are willing to go out on a limb, don't exist in that market segment.
Just another reason to stay freelance. Just another reason to refuse to sign NDAs, at least unedited by my own lawyer.
To defend against this sort of stuff, you have to be extremely well-versed in your field. You have to know exactly which parts are public knowledge and which parts aren't (and therefore, are proprietary knowledge). You have to know all the dark, secret corners of your field. You have to not only be an expert, you have to be THE expert, the one and only, the master of all knowledge.
Because the court won't be. And they don't care. It's your word against your former employer's about what you learned there versus what you knew before versus what is common industry knowledge. I've also worked at a ton of CRUD-y consulting firms that had similar language in their NDAs. I'm sorry, nobody building an OLTP system for keeping track of sales figures on ASP.NET and SQL Server is blazing new trails. Not that there isn't anything new to do in that field, just that cross section of the programmers who are capable of doing it and the managers who are willing to go out on a limb, don't exist in that market segment.
Just another reason to stay freelance. Just another reason to refuse to sign NDAs, at least unedited by my own lawyer.