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

416 points throwarayes | 1 comments | 21 Jun 25 16:02 UTC | HN request time: 0.212s | source

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

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airocker ◴[21 Jun 25 23:47 UTC] No.44341579[source]▶
So if you are against this, you are okay with Coca Cola’s secret to be divulged by any employee to any competitor? If you cannot let companies maintain trade secrets, you may as well close them down.
replies(4): >>44341592 #>>44341594 #>>44341634 #>>44342882 #
airocker ◴[22 Jun 25 02:37 UTC] No.44342882[source]▶
why downvote this? I have gone through this route and can vouch this is for a good cause, this conversation may mislead people into believing stealing is okay.
replies(1): >>44346044 #
detaro ◴[22 Jun 25 11:36 UTC] No.44346044[source]▶
because it's an obvious straw man.
replies(1): >>44347922 #
1. airocker ◴[22 Jun 25 15:55 UTC] No.44347922[source]▶
Maybe it is not, you need much more context about the OP to declare this as a straw argument. Confidentiality agreements are generally very boilerplate. If someone is thinking that this is preventing them from working at something, they are possibly just not understanding what stealing means. This guy possibly had similar understanding of laws: https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/former-uber-executive-s...