> But in reality if you stick to these rules hard and fast, you'll basically never accept a job offer. That's clearly an exaggeration, but many-to-most of these clauses are in every boilerplate contract.
In the tech industry, yeah, but there are industries that aren't so employee hostile where you can find better contract terms. I'd have to say in my experience, the tech industry is one of the worst when it comes to the malicious application of employment contracts. Apple is especially egregious with forcing interviewees to sign expansive NDAs; the Dilbert cartoon is spot on by making them dress like Apple store employees.
The funny NDA's are the ones where they think they have a 'secret sauce'. Then you get in there and find out they are using some off the shelf API's exactly as intended. You start asking exact questions and they do not understand how you know so much about their product already.
How is it that someone smart enough to be able to read the docs and connect up to the API can still be unable to realise that they are using something that others can also use?
I just think it is sort of funny. But connecting API's up is what many do. Reading the docs is something a lot of people skip, not hard just tedious. The NDA part is a funny twist where I can see an NDA around their business case and who they are working with. But the tech is rarely anything groundbreaking. Had one guy who only wanted to work with 'mozarts' no 'salieris'. That was some weapons grade hubris there. It was basically a in memory hash table he was building. Thought he had some sort of serious secret sauce with that 'idea'. When his real secret sauce was his client list and connections.
Totally correct - I tried to caveat that in my post by saying I'm skewed hard tech industry. That was the main attention of the article, and my main experience, so I was writing from that viewpoint.
I somehow doubt that Vail Resorts has a non-compete for their lift operators to go work on another mountain (although now that I think about it VR is pretty terrible so this might have been a bad example)
In the tech industry, yeah, but there are industries that aren't so employee hostile where you can find better contract terms. I'd have to say in my experience, the tech industry is one of the worst when it comes to the malicious application of employment contracts. Apple is especially egregious with forcing interviewees to sign expansive NDAs; the Dilbert cartoon is spot on by making them dress like Apple store employees.