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Legal Arguments Can Hurt Tech Job Mobility
camelcai writes "Microsoft's suit against Kai-Fu Lee and Google is based off of the thought that in some circumstances people can't avoid sharing or relying on trade secrets from their former employer when moving to a competitor. In MS's filing it says: 'Lee's conduct threatens to disclose or Lee inevitably will disclose Microsoft's trade secrets to Google and/or others for his and/or Google's financial gain in the course of working to improve Google search products that compete with Microsoft, and in the course of establishing and building Google's presence in China to compete with Microsoft's efforts in China.' According to CNET, thanks to this increasingly popular legal argument, defectors might face a lawsuit even if they did not sign agreements not to compete or not to disclose confidential information."
" . . . though Microsoft says a document it found in the recycle bin of one of Lee's computers indicates Google anticipated a possible lawsuit in hiring Lee."
Which is worse?
1. Reading over competitor's job offers using company equipment? Or
2. forgetting to empty recycle bin and wiping disk before returning company computer?
It's an easy way for a company to pwn its employees.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
'Lee's conduct threatens to disclose or Lee inevitably will disclose Microsoft's trade secrets to Google and/or others for his and/or Google's financial gain in the course of working to improve Google search products that compete with Microsoft, and in the course of establishing and building Google's presence in China to compete with Microsoft's efforts in China.'
Can someone translate this please?
Facism is upon the world. WW2 only delayed and changed their methods.
Who cares? I'm at the another side of the damn ocean.
And you can't spell 'slaughter' without laughter!
By reading this you acknowledge that you have read it.
Ohhhhh, you say it is sometimes too expensive to fight back to discover the truth?
Wonderful legalsystem you have there, I must say. The best for money you can buy.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
The old employer pays the person as much as the new employer was offering for a year (or however long the non-compete contract is) and puts up money equal to 10x that in case the new company doesn't want the employee after the year is up and he has to find a new job.
Anything less is indentured servitude (a form of slavery).
If the companies want to play that game, then they should be financially responsible.
If this thinking should really take off (doubts based on last two paragraphs), it could mean that companies will have to start training again. And there will be less of the "...along with your tech skills, you need industry experience..." because by hiring experienced people from other industries with the skills needed, there wouldn't be a worry about trade secrets.
Evil people don't think they're evil. - George Lucas, Making of Ep III
I seem to recall at least one lawsuit over this sort of thing that did not involve a no-compete clause. So CNET's analysis seems to be accurate but missing the verification that one would think a lawyer would do. IANAL, BTW.
Secondly, I think that there is a reasonable concern over trade secrets, but that this needs to be carefully scoped. I.e. I suspect that there are no technology secrets that Microsoft is developing that Google would even find interesting, but the larger question is whether the new employee's knowledger of Microsoft's China strategy would qualify. If so, hire him for a year to oversee something other than China strategy and you are in the clear.
Thirdly, I have real trouble seeing any damages caused by Google's alleged bad faith regarding trade secrets here as long as the preliminary injunction is followed. Loss of an employee is should not be a matter of compensation. Trade secrets might, but again, it is premature to know whether there was any damage. So I doubt that Microsoft will be awarded monetary damages. IANAL, so I could be off-base here.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
at worst, Microsoft can be required to pay the guy his salary for taking a year off, then he'll probably join Google anyway.
I doubt companies are going to be willing to do that much for rank and file defections. Of course, there are some real knuckleheads in the executive ranks.
This reminds me of that novel Jennifer Government, where in the dystopian anarcho-capitalist future, companies can sue former employees for losses in productivity which might result from an employee leaving their job.
Here, we have a company suing over potential losses in intellectual property which might result an employee leaving their job.
You tell me which is more surreal.
The future, is.... now?
May the Maths Be with you!
Intresting that MS decide that inevitable disclosure is a problem when their employees leave given that it wasnt an issue when they poached/bribed a lot of the guys from Borland in the .NET ramp up.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Except it's not Google that competes with Microsoft. It's Microsoft that is forced to compete with Google. And how much does a VP know about the actual "trade secrets". Having seen and heard plenty of MS VPs in my life (I've read somewhere there are about 150 of them), I'd say he didn't know anything useful. Just a bunch of buzzword technobabble to make his boss feel good.
Maybe it should be law that if a company wants to bind you to a long non-disclosure, it should also be forced to agree to a golden-parachute clause as long as the non-disclosure?
Say you work in search engine technology for Microsoft, how are you going to earn a nice living elsewhere? Afterall your skill is searches and that's what people are willing to pay for. Well if your employer wants to prevent you from earning a decent living, it should pay for it!
I am sure that there is a flaw in that argument, and I understand Microsoft's position in the matter but in these circumstances doesn't it make the employee a virtual slave of the employer if he can't use his skills elswhere?
The Chinese government is the worst major government on Earth today. It's still a totalitarian government and an aggressive, would-be empire. It's amazing to me at times how much we are willing to do to build up their economy, only to have them eventually become a dominant military and trade empire in Asia, and possibly one day Europe as well.
When I think of how China treats the Tibetans and Uhigurs, I just can't believe that we let companies like Microsoft and Google trade with them. The scary part about this competition to build up their services in China is that regardless of which company wins, the Chinese government wins because its private and state-owned corporations get a much larger economy to profit from. That in turn goes into building up the military, which btw they are now making steady progress toward having a blue water navy in the pacific.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
- Does it work to the benefit of the employer?
- Then it's true.
Got it?After all, Mr. Lee forgot the most important thing to do when employee war is beginning:
TAKE OFF EVERY 'DOC' !! FOR GREAT JUSTICE.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
This is why people should not work for companies like Microsoft. If you think they screw with their customers, imagine how they treat their own employees.
That was certainly the most witty response I have seen in a long while...
I'm of the opinion that what is in your head is yours, and makes you what you are. As no one can own you, in part or in whole, they can't own what's in your head. They can only share in it. Your life experiences are your own, and no one elses.
Trade secrets must be acknowledged as temporary artifices at best. As the pirates say, two men can keep a secret, if one of them is dead.
= 9J =
leaving pr0n on your machine! Oops!
Evil people don't think they're evil. - George Lucas, Making of Ep III
Hey, whats the problem, it's not like we are are talking about bootloaders ;)
Gee, i guess we have to talk with a lawyer first before sign up for any IT job.
I was sued for exactly that reason (knowledge of information, like customer names, what they bought, pricing, etc). When it came time for my lawyers to present my side of the case, the judge said to them: "You don't really want to waste the court's time with this, do you?" and threw the case out. I thought that was pretty cool, since I didn't have the $5 million I was being sued for and needed the job.
Employees at will can quit or be fired at any time, and there are a lot of precedents (esp in CA tech industy cases) that say that what's in your head is yours, unless you signed it away via non-disclosure agreements or employment contracts.
However, you can't take physical stuff with you (like code listings or customer lists) and you can't conspire with cow-orkers to leave en masse. (I did the latter but the employer's lawyer was too incompetent to prove it - they never thought to ask). And patent laws, copyrights and trade secret laws still apply.
> Where are your priorities?
where are yours? quite posting crap and go help some people.
Le parent est très drôle, comme Jerry Lewis. Modérer +5: Liberté, s'il vous plait.
Am I the only one reminded of the bad guy from snow crash who wanted to control the information in his programmers brains?
(I can't remember the names right now)
If the employer doesn't try to pull any non-compete crap, then none of this would apply.Again, none of that would happen unless the company you had worked for decided to pull the indentured servant crap. If they accept your Freedom, it costs them nothing.
If they try to shackle you, then they become financially responsible.
welcome to microsoft YOUR HERE FOR LIFE. please hand in your soul at reception
In today's modern industrial society, corporations have the freedom to restructure their corporate operations unfettered by such obsolete, quaint notions as labor unions or national borders. But can today's lean, muscular engines of economic opportunity lay off workers with the assurance that their trade secrets will be protected? Will HR consultants be able to utilize the synergistic interplay between noncompete clauses and pink slips? Or will meddling nation-states intervene, citing old-fashioned notions of "justice"?
Lee's conduct threatens to disclose or Lee inevitably will disclose Microsoft's trade secrets to Google and/or others for his and/or Google's financial gain in the course of working to improve Google search products that compete with Microsoft, and in the course of establishing and building Google's presence in China to compete with Microsoft's efforts in China.
"Well then maybe you should've made him not want to leave."
I find it amusing that companies are allowed to fuck employees in the race for cheaper labor, but valuable employees [alledgedly] aren't allowed to fuck employers in the race for higher wages.
Your next shadowrun will target Ares Macrotechnology, an extraction of an IT veep. Expect heavy security on the outbound vector - if you can dodge the patrols then one of our LAVs will be available to return you to the Aztechnology compound...
The dystopian future is now!
One of the reasons that California's tech sector is dominant, and that California has such a history of innovation, is that California law does not enforce non-compete contracts except in very narrow circumstances. IAAL, and as someone who has litigated these cases before, I suggest to any employee that they attempt to negotiate a California choice of law clause in their employment contracts, especially if they work in California or for a company based in California.
When will this work? The next time the job market becomes tight in tech.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
No company can OWN any part of a person, and that includes their knowledge.
You hire people to make use of their knowledge and skills. If they improve these during their time with you, then you benefit. You pay them for this. Once they have stopped working for you, you own no part of them.
It comes down to trust here. He knew Microsoft trade secrets and upcoming plans ('Copy good ideas we see') as part of his job. He was paid to not disclose those plans outside Microsoft, and so far he has not, as far as I know. Until Microsoft can prove that he breached those plans, he is innocent and all this action is at best scare tactics, and at worst a massive notice to everyone out there to never ever accept a job with Microsoft because they will treat you as owned property, including your knowledge, making you no better than a slave that gets fed and houses (via wages). Feudal capitalism, what a nightmare.
IT is not the only area this effects.
This begs the question; if it becomes a precedent that a company can file suit against former employees who aren't bound by non-competition clauses, will certain religious institutions with corporate entities attached to them use this to keep people from converting to "competing" sects?
Having the Google Toolbar installed on his Microsoft Internet Explorer.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Google, too, but only in certain idioms.
Another solution, for some of us, is to not take a job in a company known to play legal games with their employes, or in country that accepts such legal concepts.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
That said, I can't think how this specific situation is defensible by anyone anywhere on the political spectrum. It reminds me of the case in which a record label sued a singer because he sounded too much like himself, thus infringing on the copyright of his old songs that the record company owned.
This path leads to indentured servitude. We have got to put a stop to corporate-lawyer chicanery of this type. Let us not forget that the original purpose of the limited-liability corporation was to protect individuals, i.e. investors, from being ruined by the acts of others. When the corporation is not just made equal to a natural person, but elevated above him, it's time for a change.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
wtf.
Okay, so this guy decides he will follow his non-compete clause, and thus does not go to work for Google for a year.
What does he do in the mean time? Does he sit at home fiddling his thumbs? Where does he get any money? It just does not make sense to me. He can't get a job in the field where he is specialized, so even if he were to find a job, it would be low paying, and could cost him part of his lifestyle, his house or whatever.
Just seems weird to me.
cat
'If you go to work for/set up a competing company and use your inside knowledge of your former employer to harm us, then we sue you' clauses: legal.
That way, the burden falls on the first company to prove harmful intent, and doesn't mean that some highly trained guy can't actually work in the field he's suited for because of paranoid small print. Sound fair?
You must think in Russian.
Of course if you deal with M$ and look at their confidentiality/nondisclosure agreements, they specifically reserve residual rights -- so they're complaining about an ex-employee possibly doing what they explicitly say they're going to do to others.
Big surprise.
will certain religious institutions with corporate entities attached to them use this to keep people from converting to "competing" sects?
Are you referring to the Church of Scientology, or are you referring to Protestant evangelicalism and Fox News Channel?
We should [sic] have to use Unions. But now we have to because "Big Government" can't keep it's god damn hands out of a free ecconomy.
In an economy increasingly based on "intellectual property" (the very concept requires the government's involvement), you're complaining that the government is involved? Now, I think noncompete clauses are horsecrap, but the government is involved because it's an IP issue. You can't have your cake and eat it too. You can't have a government-enforced economy without the government getting into the action.
If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
1000's of Americans that is. Get some perspective - it's not as if there's a shortage after all!
We've outsourced most of our manufacturing other countries, so now companies are going collectively insane trying to protect their brain share products whether it's music, movies, software or patentable ideas. This is just extending that protectionist mind set to the employees who think up the ideas.
It's insane. And I'm afraid we're going to wake up in the middle of an economic Pearl Harbor depending on sales of products with no substance.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
The problem is that the government only recognizes the corporate claim to IP.
If the government were to recognize humans as the fundamental source of economic activity, then they would rule to protect the rights of the individual to the skills they've developed.
There really is no better engine for economic growth than individuals taking the skills they've learned in a big business and starting a small firm that puts those skills to the fullest use.
As for the company, IMHO, their rights really should be restricted to definable items such as patents and copyright. In general, the courts should rights of the individual, then work to have clearly defined items that exemployees must not divulge.
My memory of the event is hazzy, but I recall a succesful lawsuit was filed against a key employee of a company that claimed they suffered financial loss when he left for another job. If memory serves he did not give them two weeks notice so the company had to scramble to find a replacement.
You might find it particularly onerous, but we don't seem to have "at will" employment in any province in Canada. You can't simply be fired for no reason and it appears that, at least in key positions, such consideration works both ways. I don't see McDonalds filing suit against an employee for leaving without notice. I wonder if such lawsuits would hold up in a state with "at will" employment?
Discouraging employees from leaving is just one side effect that Microsoft is trying to achieve using this case as a precedent-setter.
By making it less worth while for companies such as Google to hire away its best talent, Microsoft is also decreasing the outward osmotic gradient.
As the founder of MSR Asia, Kai-Fu Lee brings unique relationship with Chinese researchers with him, but your typical R&D tech staffer will have a harder time "being worth it" if they have to cross the iron curtain, so to speak.
ICQ: 28651394 = AIM/MSN/YIM: hsuwh = www.livejournal.com/~banazir
So what happens when you take inevitable disclosure out of the new, exciting, and lucrative intellectual property debate and apply it to the rest of the world not yet overrun by lawyers?
Joe Blow is a sophomore in high school and decides he needs some extra cash so he can take his sweetie to the movies on Fridays. He hires on as assistant burger-flipper at the local fast food joint.
After a couple of months, a buddy that works as a manager at a nearby greasy spoon tells Joe that there's an opening for a cook. It'll pay two bucks an hour more. Joe gives his two weeks' notice and starts working at the greasy spoon. On his second day on the job, the fast food chain sues Joe and the greasy spoon.
All of Joe's expensive burger-flipping training, and any french-fry-frying and diet-cola-dispensing knowledge he picked up, will be more or less handed to his next employer. The theory of inevitable disclosure says that, therefore, Joe should not be able to flip burgers for the rest of his life.
Employees need to have their employers sign a no-sue agreement in the event they change jobs ensuring that said employer has no control over an employees employment prospects once they leave the company.
That's likely when "employees" have as much lobbying and campaign contribution influence over lawmakers as their megalithic employers. I.e. approximately the same week Hell freezes over, or if you move to Venezuela.
Freedom: "I won't!"
Wasn't it a short while ago that Microsoft, facing a lot of anti-trust litigation, was trying to argue its way out of a lot of legal problems with the DOJ, involving competition with smaller companies that it was steamrollering or strong-arming? Now that the shoe is on the other foot, it hardly seems balanced.
Recent preliminary glimpses into Microsoft's Start project and Google's entrace into the IM and desktop app scene show that they are starting to crowd into the same desktop search portal market.
I think the broad language of above claim demonstrates that Microsoft would seek to prevent Kai-Fu Lee from joining Google even if his R&D projects have nothing to do with those he managed in Redmond. Such an outcome would set a pretty poor example for the IT industry. There should not be a waiting period for starting a new facility if no direct tech transfer can be proven. I agree with the poster who noted that what's in researchers heads (and this includes rapport with a foreign market) really belongs to them.
The medical profession still maintains high wages in the US because of a perverse form of collective action: the medical guilds that prevent a bigger number of doctors to study at the universities (and the high cost of education too).
In the end, we are workers who sell their force of labor for a sallary. Dont come with the "innovation" argument because it's phony. We may dress like managers, not like the janitors; we may be called "middle class", we may work in offices instead of production lines; but the reality is that our place in the greater scheme of things is closer to the janitor and the workers than it is to the managers and big capitalists.
Historically, even with aaaall their flaws, unions and struggles (NOT elections!) have been the only way that workers have been able to defend their interests against the interests of the bosses.
But we techies believe that we are above that, we believe that we can solve everything individually. I have never in my life seen a group of developers demanding anything in the streets. This is just the beggining, they are already attacking us and we have our pants down.
Posting comments to a site is not an assembly. If you dont go out to the streets, anything that you do does not exist politically. That is if you are not one of the bosses or owners of the circus.
Our bosses are going to fuck us big (they have already started) and we have no way to defend ourselves.
Here, in front of the keyboard, we dont stand a chance; and that's exactly where we will stay as a group.
All the current unions operate like that, but does it have to be so?
Why couldn't we form unions and put it in the union by-laws that we will allow, or even demand(!) that poorly performing employees be fired/paid lower?
If we controlled our unions, we could set whatever standard we wished right?
I don't get this, Kai Fu Lee could have set a small shop in China, immunized by international trade and an opacitiy of his new company, and transferred any secrets at will without us ever knowing. I think Google is trying to honestly employ a bright guy and MS is just fuding around like they always do.
I would not be surprised to see a list of such entities from which MS gained other corp's competitive knowledge, a good look at their aquisitions and partnerships is a good starting point.
I don't care how much you may legally justify it, the guy is his own person and should have the right to do and think as he does, Unless he commits some sort of (illegal) violence, I don't think it's any of their business.
If it was such an important issue, they maybe sould not trust such informatin to mere mortals and just load it in to some VB script to keep the info safe.
Look, we are talking people here, the companies are not looking at that fact, only the potential effect it might have on thier stocks.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
If M$ wins this case, wouldn't corporations be able to bar employees from using skills and knowledge gained from training paid for on the corporate dime?
Those skills belong not to you the employee but the company that paid for them, no?
...that's the breaks, too bad.
Seriously. Life isn't all about protecting corporations from the humans that make up the corporations.
If you have an employee that knows so much about your business, then I think we need to to do one of two things:
1) As a society say "oh well, too bad for the company"
2) Or have the company pay the person to essentially sit out from working.
I personally favor #1, because any other way essentially gives a corporation veto power over peoples lives just because of the knowledge that's in their heads. Plus as a society, I think we're better off with knowledge cross-pollination. It forces companies to invest in new ideas to compete instead of just waiting on legislative and judicial fiat to protect their margins.
Corporations exist to benefit people, not vice-versa.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
"another chink in the armor"
Oh great. Now its all sweaty and smells like General Tso's chicken in there.
That this turn of events is an inevitable consequence of the expansion of the concept of "intellectual property." It used to be that business methods were not patentable -- they were valuable information but not strictly proprietary. What you learned at one company was freely yours to take somewhere else. Now, post State Street , we live in a world where increasingly, every piece of information is owned, and anything novel that you could possibly create or learn while in the service of your employer necessarily belongs to your employer. Under such a regime, Microsoft is correct to assert that Lee would inevitably contain within his head some of their intellectual property.
It's easy to look at Microsoft as the bad guys, but the real problem here are intellectual property laws that are assisting corporations in gobbling up all remaining vestiges of the public domain.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
Looks like corporate management has found a new Fugitve Slave Law to ensure that the full power of the State and its courts enforce their ownership of their human property.
Sigh. Is it this bad in other countries, or is it just the nation formerly known as the United States of America?
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
We are all familiar with the no-compete contract. Most of us have signed one.
For most companies, this is not a problem. You know the business space the company operates in and can therefore make sure your next job operates in a different space.
But Microsoft is different... They (at least in their minds) compete with EVERYONE. Therefore, once you work for MS, you can't leave because no matter what area of business you decide to go into, they have their sights on it.
Of course, if all other companies buy into this logic then the problem will go away. I.E. you should be no more able to join Microsoft than you are able to leave it.
If you were an aspiring doctor with the intelligence and grades to make good on your ambitions, you would be better off investing your tuition and starting a business.
It's not a great way to make money. The HMOs and managed care have shifted a lot of profits into the hands of businessmen.
Doctors have to be close to 30 before they even break even and their hours are insane, most of the time.
Noone in their right mind would go into the profession just for the money.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
This happens all the time - you interview someplace and they, usually way out of site of the interviewee, find out about possible non-compete complications. If there are any, and I do mean any at all, there is no offer. Period.
Why would it work any other way? Is someone at Google just trying to spend thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees to prove a point? Companies don't do this sort of thing unless there is a real reason behind it.
And no matter how good Lee is, he isn't worth this. There is another agenda here - and that is what the real story should be.
Lawyer says "Boy, you ain't leavin' yet"
So Google don't you call me, cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the MicroSoft gold.
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
Not any more. I'm reading stories now about how certain doctors make barely liveable wages because they pay most of their big salary to their malpractice insurance company, and as a result are either leaving the states they live in (insurance rates are different state-to-state, so they may be insane in Illinois and quite reasonable in South Carolina) or leaving the field altogether. OB/GYN is particularly hard hit; pretty soon you won't be able to have a baby under a doctor's care because no one wants to take the risk of you suing them because your baby wasn't perfect.
20+ years ago, it wasn't like this, and doctors made tons of money after they finished med school and paid off their loans. You might have to wait until 30 before being super-rich, but once you were past that point, you were set for life.
As for "investing your tuition", most people don't have the cash to pay for their tuition outright. They get student loans, and pay them back later. So they can't exactly "invest their tuition" into a business; they'd have to get a business loan, which may not be that easy depending on what you're trying to do. Also, starting and running a business takes an entirely different set of skills from those required for being a doctor. This is sort of like telling an engineer to pursue a career in the fine arts instead. Even if it paid well, he might be really bad at it.
I had this happen twice in my experience.
First guy left and started a company exactly mirroring one of our product lines. He was one of the first employees of the firm, and started before we really had proper employment contracts. Additionally, he had come up with that line of business in the first place, and now decided to strike out on his own. We couldn't do anything about that, and it didn't feel like we should.
The other guy was actually someone I had hired myself in late '90s. Bright guy but didn't know much about the business. He learned quickly and was running an area of about 80 people when he decided to go to a competitor. We made it clear to him that we'd sue him if he tried: after all this time it was clear he learned everything from us, and now he was going to take the know-how and give it to someone else. We didn't want him working for us either after that.
I followed the story of Google/MS for a while, and I am actually friends with the person at Google who recruited this Lee guy. Still, it seems pretty clear that he did sign a contract with MS promosing not to do exactly what he did. And he wasn't some kid out of college when he did it, either - he knew what he was getting into and he probably had the baragining power to negotiate the terms. He didn't, and now he broke the contract, and it seems that he indeed is going to transfer the know-how to Google. Therefore MS is doing the right thing for its shareholders (which by the way means a vast majority of America's mutual-fund holding public) by defending against this.
To put it in terms you people will understand, it's as if someone who led an open source project decided to work at a company making a closed-source equivalent and brought the source with him, in violation of whatever licence that source is under. In this case Lee isn't bringing over source but he is bringing an equivalent value of insight into MS's research. After all, there are a lot of smart people out there, why did Google target this particular person? The motives are obvious.
Mock Tech Interviews & Free Resume Review
Your first two paragraphs were essentially in agreement with what I said.
To clarify the rest;
True, a person may be able to get a student loan but not a business loan, and the skillset for medince might not transfer to business (at least directly.) But I don't know of anyone who was brilliant at medicine and totally stupid at everything else. A doctor's abilities would transfer to somthing worthwhile.
Similarly, a person could work for the time that they would have spent in medical school + the time that they would have spent paying off their student loans and then have a bundle of cash to invest.
I should have made my point about business clearer; that in terms of average risk and average reward for a student of a certain level of ability, a business career offers a better average return than a medical career.
It used to be that money alone was enough to attract the best and brightest into the medical field. But that's not true any more.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
It's the true "Ownership" society. US becomes more like Mexico and other Latin America countries: a few rich entities own most of the business entities, own most of the land, etc.
Instead of a 30-yr mortgage, the next big real estate wave will be 50-yr leases on properties. Everyone will argue that the leases are "iron-clad" equivalent to actually owning the property, but they'll casually overlook or find a way to completely obfuscate terms like "can be terminated at any time by the lessor"...
another "cool" one will be home "ownership", where you may own the physical home, but not the property it sits on. Condos, townhomes, etc. are already like this, but look for it happening in residential single-family detached housing developments too. One way to pass this by everyone's radar screens will be shifting property tax burden from the real property side (the whole development will be taxed at some small rate), and shifting it instead to a "building tax". Buildings are not real property, btw...
... that some judges would put up with if given enough financial incentive is insane. I officialy need to get off this planet, now.
If those lawsuits become a common practice after some times higly exiprienced prospective employees would ask employer to add clause to non-disclosure agreement preventing employer from lawsuit in case they change a job.
Oh right, its capitalism... so thats OK then
Or maybe tech companies could avoid this mess by treating employees like life-long investments, treating talented and intelligent people like an integral part of the company instead of an expense, instead of treating them as a resource to be drained and discarded, instead of outsourcing their jobs when they become inconvenient or too expensive, instead of making them sign restrictive employment contracts, instead of hiring them on in a temporary basis, instead of cutting back benefits. Maybe then employees wouldn't feel the need to leave and go to a competitor.
Oh, that's right. That would require companies to compete to retain employees. I forgot... they don't want to do that. They just want the money, no matter who gets walked on.
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
Lee, come to Hong Kong to start a new Google Lab! Under Hong Kong's law, such agreement can hardly valid.
http://www.ieaa.org/~adrian/
If I got this right, from reading /. for the past couple of days... Mr. Lee would then get sacked from Google, and resort to podcasting the software work he does?
"One zero zero one one zero one one, zero one zero..."
Hope he has a nice radio voice.
[I guess I should cut down on reading Slashdot. Or posting, at least.]
I worked as a contractor for a couple of years. I got a salary increase with a performance review. Buried in the document was a non-compete clause. It was for three years and had a 100 mile radius. If the pay increase was accepted, then it is considered that the non-compete was accepted. The contract company had different clients and you could not work for their clients either as employee or contractor(different company).
Supposedly, it is null and void since Colorado does not allow for non-competes. Looking at the paperwork, it mentioned that legal action is subject under the courts in the State of Maryland. So that possibly means that legal action would not take place in my home state of Colorado but in Maryland at my cost and convenience for the company. I got layed off but luckily, the company I went to work for did not have connection to the contract company.
More than likely, if I fought it, I would have won at but at considerable legal expense.
What is even worse, I am far from being an executive. At one time, non-competes were done in the rareified air of executive row and not on the lower rungs of the corporate ladder but not anymore. It is now the executives have more freedom but people who are not executives are the ones shackled.
non-disclosure 'agreements' for almost 30 years. Its got worse since I came here ten years ago to the States.
I developped my best ideas based on the situations I found at the client sites. Those solutions to the problems are transferrable, but what they were a solution TO is not demonstrable because I can't show the data that led me to the conclusions I reached.
I'm sick and tired of people having made the same mistake over and over because they don't start having the problem until they reach a certain volume and complexity of data. And given how they were thinking as they blundered their way onto the problem, I don't expect them to blunder their way into the solution.
They know they have a problem (it costs too much) but they are looking to put a band-aid (off shoring and out sourcing) on a different boo-boo (its hard to admister things when the're done our way.)
I'm leaving the field because of it.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I also am frequently engaged in product testing for competitors on similar products. Yet I have no problem compartmentilizing my life between my various activities. Just as I would not discuss upcoming features in VMWare with people involved in the Microsoft Virtual Server R2 group, I wouldn't reveal classified information to anyone. I take my oaths and contracts seriously as do any player who wants to remain a player. Break your word once and your reputation is toast.
Furthermore, all these companies need to get a clue. Turnover in all aspects of the IT community is a fact of life. The average is less than two years in any development and many other IT jobs. They won't pay to keep people and frequently won't even engage in upgrading their skills. That's something left to the employee. So when they jump ship, they are surprised? BTW, what about all those H-1B's that take those skills and competitive information back to their home countries at the end of their employment? They aren't using it? I don't think so. They are. It is just that the legal systems in those countries don't give our mega-corps legal recourse.
Get a clue big guys!
"[I]t is a wise man who admits the limits of his knowledge or skill, and that pretending either causes harm." --Terry Go
I'm just curious, how would people respond if it were Microsoft hiring Google's executives and talent for their purposes? Probably not well.
And yes, this is -20 Super-redundant.
Yeah, and if you manage to get in front of a judge, you have a very high chance ending up bankrupt.
I don't understand how the arguments could be so negative in this thread.
He signed a contract for a VERY large sum of money which, if he was going to receive this money and then quit at a future time, he couldn't work for a competing company doing the same things he did while working at Microsoft.
He then, on his own, decided to leave Microsoft (he wasn't fired) and work at Google working on the same thing he worked on at Microsoft.
The argument that he is not able to be self-sufficient is ridiculous when you look at the monetary figures. If this was being tried against a low level employee who was not privy to high level company decisions and was not being paid because of this, then I think this would be a different story (not legally...but maybe ethically). However, he was paid hansomely and part of the contract for him to be paid so much contained the non-competitive agreement.
Why sign the contract? Why leave Microsoft and then start working for a competitor in the same field he worked for at Microsoft in less than 1 year? He brought this on himself but since Google was willing to pay him for this as well, he really has nothing to lose.
In a book a few years back about light industry in northern Italy, which he offers as a model for other hot regions of innovation (read Silicon Valley, etc) Charles Sabel argued that leakage of knowledge among firms is essential to building innovative synergy. This means that NDAs, for example, can seriously block the building of mind-share among communities of professionals across multiple firms. As we know, many companies acquire other companies not for their product portfolios, but for the knowledge their workers have. I've long tried to get evidence of alternative practices in the software industry--that everyone signs NDAs, yet the employers know that the NDAs get violated at countless coffee shops and watering holes, yet they do little about it, as everyone benefits in the long run. I know AnnaLee Saxenian at Berkeley has done a little bit of work on this, but I can't find much else. Anyone able to offer help in this? I'm rfrost[at]umich.edu. Thanks.
This is starting to read like a William Gibson novel where changing jobs involved paramilitary troops.
Fortunatly, we haven't slid that far into dystopia yet. Apparently MS expects Lee to never again hold a job suited to his skills. Naturally, they're not prepared to give him a lifetime of gardening leave, especially when they have an army of lawyers prepared to convince the government to do their bullying and arm twisting for them. We can only hope the courts will make it clear that that's not acceptable, but I suspect we'll be lucky just to have them tell MS no (but probably not before MS bleeds Lee and Google for all they can).