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Tell HN: Beware confidentiality agreements that act as lifetime non competes

416 points throwarayes | 19 comments | 21 Jun 25 16:02 UTC | HN request time: 2.116s | source | bottom

Just a note of warning from personal experience.

Companies don’t really need non-competes anymore. Some companies take an extremely broad interpretation of IP confidentiality, where they consider doing any work in the industry during your lifetime an inevitable confidentiality violation. They argue it would be impossible for you to work elsewhere in this industry during your entire career without violating confidentiality with the technical and business instincts you bring to that domain. It doesn’t require conscious violation on your part (they argue).

So beware and read your employment agreement carefully.

More here https://www.promarket.org/2024/02/08/confidentiality-agreeme...

And this is the insane legal doctrine behind this

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inevitable_disclosure

1. tgsovlerkhgsel ◴[21 Jun 25 19:20 UTC] No.44340047[source]▶
OTOH, beware letting yourself be intimidated by scary looking but unenforcable clauses that are all over contracts. In doubt, spend a bit of money on a lawyer to figure out what your real situation is.

I know of several cases where lawyers said "don't bother arguing with them about clause X, just sign it and ignore it".

replies(4): >>44340685 #>>44340737 #>>44340959 #>>44341065 #
2. voidfunc ◴[21 Jun 25 20:57 UTC] No.44340685[source]▶
This is pretty much the advice every lawyer has given me in the past. The likelihood of it coming up is very low. Sometimes it's good to not be special.
replies(1): >>44340806 #
3. BobbyTables2 ◴[21 Jun 25 21:08 UTC] No.44340737[source]▶
I suspect our primary school upbringing of “follow the rules” holds a lot of people back.

Seems like a lot of successful people in business know exactly how far they can step over the line without suffering serious consequences.

replies(1): >>44341499 #
4. ghaff ◴[21 Jun 25 21:19 UTC] No.44340806[source]▶
The one time I had to sign a non-compete--because my company was acquired--I just signed it because it was quite specific and I wasn't going to be an exec of a storage company anytime soon. Probably didn't matter much because I left a few months later anyway.
5. PaulHoule ◴[21 Jun 25 21:45 UTC] No.44340959[source]▶
I had a non-compete cause in a contract, I wound up in a dispute over unemployment insurance and the contract came up, the judge told me that the non-complete cause didn't make any sense at all but that's because it was poorly written.
6. dimitry12 ◴[21 Jun 25 22:05 UTC] No.44341065[source]▶
What are the keywords for finding a lawyer who can advise on non-competes?

Asking because it turned out nearly impossible to find a local lawyer to advise on a dispute couple months ago - with 9 out of 10 telling me they only do divorces or real estate or immigration. I was literally calling one by one from a list based on what I believe were relevant search criteria on State Bar website.

replies(2): >>44341139 #>>44347141 #
7. RhysU ◴[21 Jun 25 22:18 UTC] No.44341139[source]▶
https://g-s-law.com/flat-fee-employment-agreement-review/

I had them recommended to me. I have used them and was pleased.

replies(1): >>44341979 #
8. thfuran ◴[21 Jun 25 23:29 UTC] No.44341499[source]▶
Societies where no one has any regard for rules aren't great either.
replies(1): >>44341566 #
9. inetknght ◴[21 Jun 25 23:45 UTC] No.44341566{3}[source]▶
You can't make billions of dollars by following rules...
replies(3): >>44342325 #>>44345906 #>>44348246 #
10. dimitry12 ◴[22 Jun 25 00:47 UTC] No.44341979{3}[source]▶
Thank you! Not my states but seems spot on and I can extract keywords from there.
11. epicureanideal ◴[22 Jun 25 01:28 UTC] No.44342325{4}[source]▶
Society would be better if we could, and we would all benefit.

Looking at what the growth trajectories are of countries with high corruption, it’s not great, so our growth is probably still reduced by the corruption or lawlessness that still exists.

replies(1): >>44342748 #
12. thfuran ◴[22 Jun 25 02:20 UTC] No.44342748{5}[source]▶
Why do you think having billionaires at all is of benefit to society? Or do you just mean that the people inclined to break rules to accumulate unreasonable wealth would just follow them instead if that worked as well and that is what would benefit society?
replies(1): >>44343007 #
13. epicureanideal ◴[22 Jun 25 02:54 UTC] No.44343007{6}[source]▶
Because in a well organized society where wealth accumulation is not by corruption, then by definition it would be by creating value, which benefits everyone.

The alternative is something like oligarchs that extract wealth because of state granted monopolies, corporatism that strangles competition with anti competitive regulation, etc. The accumulation of wealth is all out of proportion and possibly not even correlated in those cases with the production of actual value.

replies(1): >>44345761 #
14. thfuran ◴[22 Jun 25 10:45 UTC] No.44345761{7}[source]▶
Wealth is accumulated by capturing value, not by creating it.
replies(1): >>44349804 #
15. ◴[22 Jun 25 11:10 UTC] No.44345906{4}[source]▶
16. dctoedt ◴[22 Jun 25 14:17 UTC] No.44347141[source]▶
> What are the keywords for finding a lawyer who can advise on non-competes?

If you're in California, try the following; they all know their stuff and aren't in supercostly BigLaw firms (although I think most are BigLaw alumni):

- Betsy Bayha - https://www.linkedin.com/in/betsy-bayha-560107/

- George Grellas - used to post here a lot, not so much recently - https://grellas.com/our-team/george-grellas/

- Sean Hogle - https://www.linkedin.com/in/epiclaw/

- Kyle Mitchell - https://kemitchell.com/

replies(1): >>44349151 #
17. teaearlgraycold ◴[22 Jun 25 16:35 UTC] No.44348246{4}[source]▶
Ideally less people would be attaining that kind of personal wealth. Companies should be scaled back as well IMO.
18. dimitry12 ◴[22 Jun 25 18:29 UTC] No.44349151{3}[source]▶
Thank you!
19. epicureanideal ◴[22 Jun 25 19:58 UTC] No.44349804{8}[source]▶
Technically true, but ideally it would be capturing a portion of value created by them, rather than a portion of value created by others, is my point.