Seagate Says Ex-Employee Can't Work For Competitor

deweller writes "According to a story at MacCentral, Hard drive maker Seagate Technology LLC is seeking a court injunction to prevent a former employee, Pete Goglia, from going to work for Western Digital Corp. any time in the next 2 years, saying Goglia knows too much about Seagate's hard-drive reading and writing technology to work for a competitor."

Comments

Re:Non-Competes....

[BJH]

So... someone who's spent the last however many years designing new hard drive technology is supposed to throw that experience away and get a job at McDonalds or something for the next two years?

Why don't you just all sign yourselves into voluntary slavery. Oh sorry, it seems that you already have...

Re:Pete signed a confidentiality agreements

[Todd Knarr]

He signed a non-disclosure agreement, not a non-compete agreement. If he'd signed a non-compete, Seagate is entirely in the right here. With just an NDA, though, the burden's on Seagate. Without a non-compete, they can't prohibit him from working for WD period. All they can do (and it sounds like what they are doing) is claiming that if he works for WD then violation of the NDA is inevitable. The burden's on them to demonstrate that, but that may not help him.

Re:Strange...

[ultranova]

Why not? Why shouldn't private parties be allowed to enter freely into contracts, and be allowed judical recourse to enforce them?

Because one party (the employer) is much more powerfull than the other (the employee), enough so to be able to force any kind of contract. The corporation can survive for a long time understaffed, but the employee cannot survive long without eating.

Consider this:

Suppose you've been to an accident and badly injured. There's a number of people around, and they offer to call an ambulance if you agree to be their slave. What will you do ? Not much choice here - you either become their slave or die.

Then, when Slashdot publishes a story, someone comments that "hey, he agreed to that contract freely, no one forced him, and if he thought it unfair he should have asked someone else for help !". Never mind the fact that no one else offered anything better...

Should this contract be enforced ?

Developed economies' success centers around contracts and their enforcability. Without contracts, there is chaos.

Developed societies are based on the rule of law. If contracts take precedence over law, law has no meaning (because someone will always be strong enough to coerce others to sign). Therefore, a developed society cannot allow the stronger to oppress the weaker without any limits on the excuse that the stronger managed to force the weaker into signing a contract. To allow this to happen would be to switch the rule of law into the rule of strongest, which be a huge disbenefit to most members of the society (everyone but the rich and powerfull).

No matter how difficult this might to for some people to realize, the society does not exist to help them profit. It exists to protect it's members. This means the real people, not corporations. Therefore, it is the function of the society to protect the real human beings from the predations of corporate overlords, not to protect the profits of corporations by allowing them to prey on humans. Enforcing a non-compete deal means helping a corporation prey on human beings (its own employees) to protect its profits from its competitors, and is therefore unacceptable.

A government should always prefer real human beings over corporations or any other organizations. If it does not, then it is corrupt, and should be removed from office, by force if neccessary. Because the courts simply interpret the laws made by the government, having the courts pass decisions favoring corporations over humans is equal to having the government do so.

Economy exists to benefit the people, not the other way around.

The height of dishonesty is people who sign contracts that contain clauses they disagree with with the attidude "its unenforcable, so why do I care." If you don't agree with the contract and agree to abide by its terms, don't sign it.

The bottom of the cesspool are the people who use the weaker position of others to get them to agree on outrageous agreements just for a few dollars more, and then call them dishonest when they try to free themselves from this bondage.

By the way, I am in a technical field, in a senior position, and I did refuse to sign the non-compete. My reason? Nothing about it appeared in my offer letter, they sprung it on me during the orientation process. So, I didn't sign, and said that it was never part of my employment agreement. They never agreed with my point, but didn't fire me (which they knew would land them on the wrong end of a wrongful termination suit, since the non-compete was never mentioned in my offer letter), and the whole matter dropped (over a year ago).

Then you are either lucky that your employer is such and idiot that he didn't do things in the proper order, or unlucky that your employer is smart enough to realize that the courts will propably enforce a noncompete clause even if you didn't sign any. In either case you have no moral high ground to stand on and condemn those less lucky than you.