“It’s just standard whatever” is really fun when you want a change and you have all the leverage. It’s hilarious to watch the tune change when you say you just won’t sign in that case. Alas, I’ve only been in this position once.
I've once been in that situation where the company tried to introduce a contract rewrite with the standard lack of clarity over whether it applied to everything, including outside work (e.g. open source contributions). There were enough open source developers in the company that this was a big problem.
So we all just refused to sign the contract change.
The situation stalled for a few months, and they eventually backed down and wrote in a clarification. This was the UK, so we actually had rights and couldn't just be arbitrarily sacked, and everyone was aware that pursuing individuals over this would lead to a mass exodus and the destruction of the company.
Not protected in the formal sense, but the old one still applied with its month's notice in both directions. Really the key factor was the difficulty in replacing developers.
Had to quit the company I worked at for 4-5 years after the owner died his wife took over - and tried to force non competes that were forever and transferable if the business was sold etc..
The contract was so broad there was no way it was valid. The kicker was she was withholding my standard'ish larg'ish bonus. I just walked and finally she came around - took years for us to mend our relationship.
I actually don't mind signing unenforceable contracts.
You don't have to say anything, life can be like a game of poker. If your perception of reality is correct, you gain outsize influence, if it is incorrect (or more specifically "can't gain consensus") then you are poor or are imprisoned or killed. Do you gain a benefit by informing someone else about their perception of reality?
I primarily try to be rich enough to exercise my perception of reality in appeals court, because thats the only place it really matters.
In a lot of situations where a contract like that comes to court, the company will try to convince the judge to simply reduce the scope of the contract to whatever seems reasonable to them - and this can succeed. (Of course if you're in a state where non-competes are blanket illegal, that's different.)
I do the same thing. It's not even necessary to be especially rich in most cases, so long as you took the time to read the relevant statutes and case law in advance. An hour on a search engine is often enough.
Oh yeah on day 3, she said come in and we'll talk... Talked for 2 hours and she was still stuck on the contract.
Finally I told her 'I feel like that check your holding is already mine' - aka your on the verge of theft..
I immediately spent the next month negotiating the bonus into the base pay. Took a few years to regain trust and now I'm at a glass ceiling (which I won't complain about but feel fortunate about)
In employee-employer relationships, the employer typically has all the power, so if you refuse to sign, you will likely be terminated. This comes up all the time with signing NDAs, copyright assignment policies, anti-moonlighting policies... you have to sign it or you’re gone. I’ve tried the cute “strike out the clauses you don’t like” trick and in every case, Legal got back to me in a few days with a stern “Sign it unmodified or GTFO.”
I also remember a company that I worked for where every week, you had to sign a paper showing you worked 8 hours each day for a total of 40 hours, regardless of whether you actually worked more or less. This was for a salaried position with no overtime so it didn’t really affect my compensation. I tried correcting the numbers and HR said you can’t change them. I pointed out that I’d be lying if I signed it unmodified and the response was I’d be terminated if I didn’t sign. So, of course I signed it but it seemed like such a pointless exercise.
I once accepted an offer and the next day I put in my 2 week notice at my new job, and later the same day I found out from a press release that the my new employer was being acquired.
A year or so into the new job, the CEO emailed everyone in the company a restrictive NDA, non-compete, non-solicitation contract and told everyone to sign it. It included language about theft of company forms or documents among other things.
I looked at the metadata of the contract doc and the "company" tag was the CEO's previous employer. Which told me that the CEO "stole" the doc from his previous company, and was asking everyone to sign something saying they wouldn't do the same.
Because of that I decided not to sign it. Several other colleagues refused it too. No one was terminated, but there was a large staff exodus shortly after who were solicited by another former employee. I stayed on another 6 months to finish a project but left after that to join my former coworkers.
I would have been open to signing if I was compensated for it, but that option wasn't on the table, and I wasn't willing to restrict my future ability to find work with no benefit to me.
Lesson learned: Reusing legal forms from old companies can cost a lot more than a proper lawyer review would have cost. Don't take shortcuts when signing OR asking people to sign a legal document.
As a counterpoint to this, a few years back I was freelancing for a fairly well known startup. My first day on site their lawyer gave me a contract with a clause saying something to the effect of if the company found my work unsatisfactory I would redo it free of charge. I brought this up to the lawyer and he immediately agreed he wouldn't sign something similar (also that he was surprised that I actually read the contract since it was otherwise fairly standard). He struck it out and we both initialed.
No issues came up but I've since felt vindicated in doing a close reading of anything more important than an EULA.
Arguably that's a bit different though. If I hire a contractor to do a job (whether construction or software) for a fixed price and they do a sub-standard job, it's really not unreasonable to expect that they'll correct deficiencies prior to final payment. (If I'm paying them hourly and there are no other conditions in the contract, then it's probably on me though.)
Usually contracts with a do-over clause like that also include very specific, objective measures of what makes a job sub-standard (like not being able to pass certain engineering inspections, in the case of construction jobs). A contract that just says "I can make you re-do this work if I'm subjectively unhappy" is insane.
Things tend to be more formalized in a business context but my experience with contractors, etc. at home is that it's often pretty loose, at least for relatively small things.
There's quite a big difference between voluntarily making a few tweaks to something to keep your client happy, and giving them a legally enforceable right to unlimited and uncompensated re-work until they're satisfied.
Satisfaction clauses like that are the thing I always tell my contractor friends to look for. No sane person would agree to it but the corporate lawyers often manage to sneak it in.
It’s usually enforceable but it’s also almost always negotiable.
Careful, the surprise may be fake, because it was struck out and you both had to initial--if it was so weird, why did they just not give you a new copy that didn't have the clause?
I don’t understand what you mean, can you clarify? What is the difference between striking out vs printing a new contract, and why is one choice or the other correlated with the surprise being fake?
I suppose theoretically one could imagine a malicious company having a contract with language that is favorable to the employee, and then striking that out after the employee has already signed, with the intent to claim that the employee signed with knowledge of the struck clauses. But then again, if contracts were ever intended to be the end-all of legal dispute then one would think they'd use something less easily forgeable than mere initialing.
The lawyer was surprised that someone actually read the contract, not that the contract contained a satisfaction clause. The lawyer was probably already aware that the clause was there, and it's a standard contract that they use for all contractors.
I was in exactly this situation at UTMB Galveston around 2002ish. I ended up in a room with the manager who decided to implement the policy & one of the hospital's lawyers. The lawyer was patiently explaining to the incoherently-sobbing manager that:
1. UTMB Galveston was indemnified from her mistakes by her employment contract;
2. She owed me something like 60000$ in unpaid compensation, and that the State of Texas would probably penalize her another 250-500k$; and,
3. A cursory investigation showed that there was probably another several million in fines & compensation, outstanding in the complaint, that she would have to pay.
We "settled" with an official apology, an official write up in her permanent record, & a change in policy. (She quietly "left" shortly thereafter.)
If you have to track your hours to be paid (or not terminated), then you are by definition not a salaried employee: you are hourly. The way the FLSA works is it asks how the employer treats the employee — if you're treated like you're salaried, then you're salaried. Legally, there's no notion of 'salary' and 'hourly' outside of this. (Ignoring all the real complexities of the law.)
Requiring an hourly worker to falsify statements of hourly work is a serious crime. The repercussions are pretty crazy.
For a low-level manager? That's insane and I'd be shocked to see that hold up in court.
I wouldn't. In the United States, you don't screw with labor law. Pay your employees late a couple of times, and if the right bureaucrat finds out, your company is gone.
I'd speculate that the certification of hours might be an effort to deny unemployment benefits. The company can fire you for cause and claim that you lied about your hours. If everyone breaks some minor rule all of the time, then prosecution and punishment becomes entirely discretionary, used only when furthering the goals of the authority.
I'm not sure if this theory would actually prevail in an unemployment hearing - it varies significantly by state - but the business loses nothing by trying.
The business stands to lose something by trying this: when I learn that they knowingly entrap their own employees in this manner, I will refuse to work with them. I'm sure I'm not alone. Given the cluelessness of many companies' recruitment, they may very well not realize this, but they will in aggregate lose out on some portion of viable talent.
If a terminated employee can prove the sanctions are being applied arbitrarily that's totally grounds for wrongful termination.
But who knows, the court system is so in the pocket of employers in stuff like this and it's so expensive to litigate in the first place it never really happens unless you've got a huge organization with deep pockets.
I know this probably limits my career potential, but I consistently choose smaller companies and enjoy avoiding this kind of thing. There are software "mom and pop" companies all over the place, itching to find a good hire. I sign exactly one piece of paper, my employment contract, and they've always been good about negotiating good terms that allow me to keep my side projects and things of that nature. I think I would sooner change career than move into a corporate sized company, no matter how "startup" the culture is.
I've had mixed results going this approach early in my career. At small companies, you can find some _shockingly_ huge egos. "Tiny kings, in tiny kingdoms" as they say.
The worst one was where during the interview, the interviewer specifically warned about the dynamics of the place: "we serve at the pleasure."
And indeed we did. The owner expected bizarre rigid behaviors. For one, everybody clocked in/out (a question that didn't occur to me to even ask about), and if you clocked in >5 minutes after when you were supposed to start, you had to go to HR and sign a document explaining why. This was a development gig.
We also had to watch cartoons made by the owners wife. Absolutely bizarre place. I made it about 6mo before getting the hell outta there.
The other notable "small shop" experience was when I stopped getting paid on time and the company credit card started getting declined.
MegaCorp1 is nice in the way that the others were not.
Where I work this is a thing. We are required to report to the government how many hours we work and I think by law are entitled to overtime. Instead it gets reported as 40 his each week when that is obviously not true.
I'm ok with my compensation, and have no real complaints, except the lying to authorities pay.
This is in a FAANG company, but a European subsidiary.
An old defense contractor I worked at did the similar things.
It was required by federal contracting rules/law/whatever that our timesheet reporting be accurate. The spirit of the law was probably "don't charge us for time you didn't work for us", which is a reasonable requirement.
The problem was when I worked 70 or 80 hour weeks. I didn't get paid any more, the company didn't get paid any more (I have no idea how or why, I didn't do project or program management, so I have only the most cursory knowledge of the different flavors of the main contract types in defense contracting). I was just trying to follow the law and whatever agreements I had signed. Seems pretty easy, pretty cut and dry, right?
Nope. I was working on two projects - we often did this. 90% on one, 10% on the other, usually in some sort of super specialist role where you help with one specific aspect you might be good at and free up other devs' time to focus on the actual dev, not things like Decision Analysis and Reporting plans for your CMMI compliance. The problem was the percentages were fixed. That means if my 90% project was in crunch time, and I worked a 70 hour week, even if I still did the normal 5 hours for the 10% project, it didn't work out that way. They normalized all the hours back down to 40, so the normal 5 ended up looking more like 3. Shouldn't be a big deal, but different contract types, different budgets not burning at the right rates, blah blah blah blah blah.
The result was they asked me to work a proportionately increased amount on the 10% project, as well. So not only was I putting in an extra 30 hours a week for no extra pay, no benefits, no tangible rewards in any way, but they wanted me to do even more of that on the other 10% too.
Keep a record of your hours worked, and send them an invoice for the difference at the end of your employment there. Good chance they'll pay it to avoid the headache of arguing.
> In employee-employer relationships, the employer typically has all the power, so if you refuse to sign, you will likely be terminated.
Almost always, it won't hurt to ask. I've gotten approval to cross out some of the clauses when it didn't matter to the employer. Ex: ownership of work clause when I wasn't in a position providing work; but they wouldn't let me cross out asymmetric notice clauses.
I also neglected to sign an NDA for about two years once; I was asked to sign and scan prior to employment, but had some equipment issues and was told we'd do it on the first day, but it was forgotten, until investors wanted to see that everyone had an NDA prior to the next round of investment.
This can vary quite a bit employer to employer. As a contractor I've always successfully crossed out indemnification clauses, noncompete clauses (except while the contract is in progress), and anything that lays claim to my time or effort outside of work. But I've also been willing to walk.
You have more leverage as a contractor I think, the position is different to an employee. Clauses like noncompetes and IP claims outside of the contract are a pretty hard sell for a contractor, as it limits your ability to work after the job is done and as such it's going to be hard to hire a contractor with those kinds terms. I imagine clauses like that are designed to keep employees around for as long as possible, not really an aim if you're hiring a contractor.
Depends on the goals of the contractor. They might concede to some crazy agreements to be able to list a big name company or a high profile project on their work history to get higher paying work in the future.
Not saying this is right or proper... but if you are in the U.S. then this was almost certainly about corporate tax reporting. Your salary may or may not be deductible from the company's business tax, depending on whether your work is classified as an "operational" or "capital" expense.
Different companies are more or less zealous in how they collect documentation for these tax deductions. I've worked for companies where management just "handles it", and it's invisible to employees. I've worked for companies that not only make salaried employees log hours, but also do separate them by project code (with some codes being "operational" and other "capital").
I've rarely had any pushback over clarification or refusing to sign as-is. A lot of the time a strike-through on a portion of a contract is sufficient. My bigger issue is electronic signing against versions that don't have the option of striking a line or two.
My biggest concerns are outside contributions and IP. Personally, I don't believe in Software Patents for the most part, and will not give up rights for stuff I build on my own time.
