I worked at Amazon in the early aughts. They had the same non-compete then. I worked around it by going to business school after I left. By the time I took my next job, the 18 months had expired. Plan your post employment very carefully -- both financially and career wise when you join one of the big 4. When you receive a salary offer, calculate the actually salary by assuming 18 months of unemployment.
Even in the states where these agreements are enforceable, they usually only are enforceable for a job in the same role, a competitive business, and the same physical location. I worked for a company for about a decade with an agreement like this; the people who left usually got out of it by lying about where they're going, working remotely for a while, or getting their next employer to change their title.
That's interesting. At first glance, I thought you were suggesting "just switch roles completely!" But, you aren't saying that, you are saying the new employer just needs to be clever in creating a role with a different name.
But, then again, for some roles a public presence is needed, like public speaking. You can't temporarily have the role of "janitor" and go out and speak authoritatively about AWS at a conference with that role. Maybe people will get the joke after understanding the true state of these agreements.
Maybe. Are you important enough to get administrative attention after you're gone, or does your HR department only care as much as they have to complete their offboarding checklist?
People may talk, but the reality is that nobody is listening.
Companies are not sending private detectives, to follow engineers to their new job, and finding out specifically what they are working on, and if the contract is enforceable or not.
Mostly, people just forget about you, once you leave. People get away with lying all the time.
> You can't temporarily have the role of "janitor" and go out and speak authoritatively about AWS at a conference with that role.
It is my understanding that you can often get away with being a lot more subtle than that. Things like throwing a proprietary product name in your title, a title that sounds more like a manager, etc.
I forget the details because, frankly, it had no impact on me, but at one company, I remember a new executive simply not being able to fulfill some of the duties of his new role for several months until his non-compete expired. If the company wants you bad enough, they will find a way to make it work.
I and many of my colleagues worried about non competes at Amazon. But mine wasn’t enforced and I’ve never heard of a “rank and file” individual contributor or non-exec manager having it enforced. My impression is it’s only worth it for VPs or other very high level employees. But the scare tactics evidently do work, in terms of scaring employees to stay or to jump through extra hoops (moving states even if they don’t want to) to avoid enforcement.
Has anyone here had a company try to enforce their non compete, and can share their insights?
I've only heard of noncompete agreements being enforced out of spite against someone who has quit on bad terms, not because of a genuine interest for noncompetition.
When I was leaving Amazon, the logic was generally -- don't go to the same org in a different company. E.g. if you work in S3, don't go to Google Cloud Storage. If you land in ads or maps or search or whatever, that should be fine.
Though, it's really up to Amazon whether they want to keep you unemployed for 18 months, which is (in my mind) totally unethical to even have in the contract in the first place.
California Business & Professions Code section 16600 makes clear that any non-compete provision between employer and employee will not be enforceable under California law
Yep, I've seen contracts where they say "Clause x/y doesn't apply in the State of California" and then the employer try to tell me "Well, it's not a non-compete" .. bullshit. It clearly is.
I got the impression from friends that it was a worse situation in India with relieving letters[0], the way it was explained to me you needed your current companies written permission to start a new job and that is frequently abused.
One thing about California law. If you are terminated involuntarily (1), then you can do whatever you need to do to make a living. Build a competing product, hire your former co-workers, sell to your former customers, whatever. Your previous employer can't deny you future income, not one dime. (1)Involuntarily, except for cause, and those causes must be given in writing at the time you are hired.
I'm pretty sure Google does depending on which State you work in. If it's in California, it's illegal, but if you get hired by Google of NY, they have no restrictions there, so it's probably in that contract.
I'm not sure what happens if you're hired in California and then transfer somewhere else.
Likewise, if you get hired by Amazon in Cape Town, it's illegal. In South Africa non-competes are only legally valid for top-tier exec-level positions, and even then maybe not.
Since it's Washington State we're talking about: Googlers who join in WA state do not have a Non-compete in their contract (at least the "rank and file" engineers), even though Google could add it and Amazon/Microsoft have one.
In fact Google took it a step further and tried to lobby to get non-compete banned in WA State:
There was an almost full-ban on non-compete that was proposed a few years ago in Washington State. Google came to the public hearings with full support for the law as it is (which make sense given the status for non compete in California - and how it had gotten sued by Microsoft over one employee, and now again by Amazon). The law would have made it that non-compete are void if laid-off, and void if over 1 year max or if you're not an executive employee.
But Microsoft, Amazon, and the hospitals lobbied hard against it. (Hospitals are using those non-competes on both nurses and doctors apparently)
So the bill got rewritten where it only applies to people with a total comp less than 185k, and where student debt could be subtracted to that 185k. This, again, got fought more by opponents.
Now the ban on non compete only applies to people whose yearly salary (total comp as listed on W-2) is less than 100k, So doctors and tech workers at those companies get nothing out of it, except the clarification that non compete:
- cannot be for longer than 18 months
- if employee is laid off and non compete is enforced, the company must pay base salary for the duration of non-compete.
Geekwire had a good coverage of it over the years:
When I left Amazon, I also left Washington for California, in large part because of this. I'm highly specialized, and I wasn't about to take an 18-month hiatus in my career. You would think Washington state would work harder at keeping their high-tax-revenue tech workers around.
> You would think Washington state would work harder at keeping their high-tax-revenue tech workers around.
Washington State has no income, capital gains, or payroll tax. All we[0] have are consumption taxes that people with lower incomes are forced to pay more of as a percentage of their incomes versus people with higher incomes. This is doubly so since people with higher incomes have the financial leverage to minimize consumption taxes[1]. There's little tax-based incentive to attract and retain people with high incomes. If anything, we are somewhat of a drain on the overall society because we price out and displace people who don't have those incomes while we pay, on a percentage-of-income basis, comparatively little back into society relative to what we're earning.
I'm certain some people will come along under me and crow about how this is the whole reason why they moved to Washington instead of another but I am not particularly moved by any reasoning someone might put forward.
0 - My bias: I am a very well paid employee living in Seattle so I include myself in this but am also active in advocacy for levying taxes on myself and people like me for a more equitable tax system in this city, county, and state.
1 - Buying in bulk, buying a single higher-cost good that will last longer than lower-cost goods that must be replaced, evading taxes by traveling or buying online and accepting the risk of not being held accountable for paying the consumption tax
While I also live in Washington and would be fine with raising taxes to be more equitable, higher taxes here would certainly increase the relative attractiveness of California. I'm already right on the edge of deciding to move due to having lived most of my life in sunny regions and really disliking the gloomy weather here. I don't think that would be a typical response though as most people would still prefer the lower cost of living in WA.
> I'm already right on the edge of deciding to move due to having lived most of my life in sunny regions and really disliking the gloomy weather here.
I'd say that's valid enough reason to move on its own. I've lived in Seattle for forever and the weather is one of the things that has kept me here through economic ups and downs.
The cost of living is only "low" here for people like us who are already doing very well for ourselves and I'm not at all enjoying the yawing inequity becoming increasingly wider. I'm not someone who pines for the "better days" of yesteryear or wants to cling tightly to some treasured local watering hole. We need a sane tax policy and a sane housing policy otherwise this all comes to a crashing halt.
Lobbying for it in Washington is to hurt Microsoft and Amazon while doing nothing to them. If they lobbied for a full ban in Montana, I would give them credit.
I have been working for Google NY since 2014 and I do not have a non-compete nor does anyone else I know of. Maybe it's different at the director and above level but that's above my pay grade.
Please don't assume things you don't have any knowledge of. Lots of companies don't put things like non-competes in their employment contracts just because they can.
Amazon was the best offer I got out of undergrad. I came very close to doing some very bad things to myself when I got rejected from Facebook and Google after my onsites and was depressed for months.
Please have some empathy for people like me that can't waltz into any job and don't say things like this.
Why is that you, and other people here, are treating a contract like it's law? Companies can put pretty much anything they want in a contract, it does not mean its enforceable. You have to take into account your jurisdiction.
There are a lot of people who simply don't have the resources to fight a non-compete clause. Do you think a fresh grad working at Amazon 1-2 years in an SWE role is equipped to take on Amazon's undoubtedly massive top talented legal team if they choose to litigate? The law may be on their side but the resources to pursue it may not and any reasonable doubt of being incorrect could be financial or even career suicide.
If a business can get even a small fraction of its labor to follow unenforcable/essentially illegal requirements, they've made significant headway, even if they don't ever choose to attempt to litigate. Over time, those practices can become normalized and set industry standards where they become more and more successful.
I think it should be illegal to even stipulate such requirements in contracts to begin with to prevent businesses from eroding labor rights over time. There should be massive fines in place that penalize even stipulating those sort of clauses to make sure businesses only include reasonable language/requirements.
This is ultimately what it comes down to. Contracts between very rich/powerful entities and relatively poor/powerless entities, in practice, can contain anything the rich/powerful entity wants because the poor/powerless entity cannot afford litigation. Cell phone contracts, car leases, employment agreements, basically anything written by a company and targeting an individual--just read one of them. All the clauses protect and benefit the company, and very little good is in there for the individual. And they are take-it-or-leave-it: There's generally no negotiation or ability to add individual-favoring terms [1]. Try negotiating the legal terms in your cable bill and let me know how that worked out for you. Contracts among equals tend to be more fair because each side is on a level playing field.
1: Yes, I am aware that there are a few software engineers out there with specialized skills who have successfully managed to negotiate some non-salary terms out of their employment agreements. Congratulations, you are not representative of the general employee population.
You negotiate with your feet by walking away and finding another company that has terms that are more to your liking. You may not have the power to rewrite the contracts presented to you, but you have the agency to choose where you want to work.
It's also a chilling effect on many potential employers, especially small ones. When I was with a very small consulting firm, if someone interested in employment had a non-compete that was remotely relevant--or even an NC that wasn't very clearly not relevant--it was a very short discussion. Management just wasn't prepared to take even a small risk.
Lying to a potential employer is a pretty bad first step. If I caught you doing it, say because someone mentioned it in a casual conversation, I'm going to fire you the same day. Same with lying on a resume even if it's utterly irrelevant multiple years later. It's also going to color any future professional interaction because you're an untrustworthy individual.
I'm pretty sure I don't want to be in a position where I'd be fired if a 10-year old lie came out.
Interesting, wonder if some startup that didn't want to deal with the risk could just have a checkbox if you have a current in-effect non-compete agreement and just pipe those applications to /dev/null? Maybe if more companies were picky, people would fight back and try to negotiate better agreements... but then again probably depends on location, In Silicon Valley you can be a more picky potential employee compared to say rural Ohio.
I think the implication is the average engineer at Amazon isn't capable of getting into another FAANG, because Amazon is the easiest/least well paying company in FAANG.
The general thought process is to make you sign away as much as they can, and later worry about if it was required or something they even want to consider enforcing.
Very shady. Move to a place where those terms are unenforceable. I think its less about Amazon being scared and more of a tool to suppress wage growth.
I don't see the contradiction. Amazon are afraid of their employees having more power. Their success was built upon an open market, but they are trying to prevent others from benefiting from this.
I saw a comment on here a couple years ago or so that referred to this practice as "Ladder Licking". Lick the steps behind you so that nobody else can climb up the same ladder that you did.
Non-competes are usually about proprietary information / intellectual property. Amazon does not want someone learning their secret sauce recipe and then take it next door and start using it. That same non-compete also means you might not be able to get a higher paying job next door, which is a side-effect that only benefits employers.
A "Proprietary Information and Assignment Agreement" is about protecting proprietary information. It is illegal in all 50 states to use trade-secret information at a new employer. See Anthony Levandowski.
A Non-compete is about labor market, wage, and competition suppression.
IMPORTANT: Moving to California no longer means your out of state non-compete is unenforceable!!!
"In the past, it was commonly believed that out of state non-compete agreements may be unenforceable if the employee is first to file an action in a California court asking that the court declare the non-compete agreement unenforceable."
"Thus the employees [...] argued that the enforcement of the [Washington non-compete agreement] would violate California’s policy of not enforcing non-compete clauses. The California court disagreed [and upheld the non-compete"
"Extradite" is not the right word - these are civil matters, the loser doesn't go to jail, he just has to pay something.
The question is more like: "could a sentence in Washington, resulting in a fine or other monetary obligation, be enacted or enforced in California?"
I don't know American law, but I'd be surprised if there were no mechanisms for Washington to tell California (and viceversa) "this dude owes us money, use your powers to make him pay please".
It's a civil tort, not a crime. Amazon would presumably have to serve process to the California resident ex-employee, who would need to show up to court in Washington or send representation to present their case.
It's a civil matter, not criminal. Extradition is irrelevant.
The states agreed to honor court decisions in other states in Article 4 of the Constitution: "Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State." If a court in Washington says you owe money, it's enforced the same as if it were a court in California.
Reminds me of a post employment copyright assignment clause added to the other employment paperwork when I started my latest job. I was near the end of my savings after being laid off, so I had no real room for saying “no”.
US employers are getting pretty shady with all these post-job “agreements”.
Yeah, when I worked for Tudor Investment they gave me a 3 inch thick binder of an “employee handbook” on the first day and made me sign that I’d agreed to the terms of this literally unreadable document.
In retrospect I should have known worse things were to come from those assholes.
It should be illegal to add terms after the initial contract is signed. The only reason they do it is because they know once you’re in the door, you already turned down other offers and therefore have less leverage.
Probably not - at least not in most of the US. Continued employment is considered to be sufficient 'consideration' for at-will employees when presented with a modification to your contract.
Post-employment copyright assignment? As in, code you wrote after you left their employment would still be owned by them, without them paying you for it??
I can't seem to access the original source. Is it a non-compete for entry level workers the way Jimmy Jones tried to put in place? If so, it is silly and not reasonable. Those used to be for senior level people who could actually do some damage. A kid stocking stuff? I do not think so.
Out of interest, in the US can you turn to anyone who represents your interests in this case? There are no unions and no worker-representatives at all, aren't there?
Is everybody scared to stand up to your employer in those cases?
Sure, you have to pay for it, but you have to pay for it indirectly if it's a union anyways. It's unfortunate that the costs aren't spread over the entire organization, but getting the opinion of a lawyer is not that expensive for a software engineer.
Personally I suspect that if he refused to sign this and they fired him for that he could have recovered significant damages under promissory estoppel, but that's something you'd need to check with a lawyer before actually doing it.
I beg to differ. They did not "add" a non-compete. They scared him into signing one.
Someone at Amazon put a paper on his desk and said that unless he signs it, they would not "authorize my employment". Whatever that means.
So I signed. Because what
other options did I have?
The option not to sign. He had an offer from them and he agreed. That is a legal binding contract that they have to abide. So don't sign and say "Sorry, but we have a legally binding agreement. And this is not in line with it.".
If you let people scare you by saying something, they will continue to play tricks on you. Stick to what is written.
But I suggest standing your ground in such a situation. They wanted to work with him. They had a contract with him. So there was a lot of pressure on them too. If they breached the contract they would lose an employee and face legal repercussions.
I think you're vastly overestimating both the leverage a low-level employee would have in one of those megacorps and the amount of autonomy that an HR rep would have in a case like this. They have a process to follow, and that process does not include negotiation. Maybe they have the power to escalate the request to someone with decision making power, but that's going to take time, and their flowchart probably does not allow for allowing somebody to start work provisionally until that escalation is solved.
What "legal repercussions" are you thinking of? The author stated that their new contract was "at will", so their employment could be terminated for any reason at all.
(Not defending Amazon here. But the employee had been put into a position where they had no realistic choice but to sign.)
This seems really shady. It seems to imply it's legal for companies to restrict what you do after you don't work for them anymore? Any historians around? How did the US get to a place where employers have near total control of their employees, even after they're no longer paying them?
That just sounds bad. I've also heard of contracts that essentially prohibit side projects or moonlighting. Are software developers not aware they don't need to accept these restrictions to make a living? I guess maybe companies impose the restrictions under duress like in this story. Still, I'm surprised companies with such unethical employment practices can manage to hire anyone.
Employers having near-total control of their employees was the norm through much of history - capitalism is a development of feudalism. Then unions fought for workers' rights and much was won in much of the world, and workers' rights overall improved ever since in countries where they could organise politically across sectors. An assumption that freedom of companies to do whatever they want leads to better outcomes for society has eroded some of this in more recent years, but all in all we're doing better than a hundred years ago.
The US, on the other hand, cracked down on unions and prevented them from gaining political power in the same way that they did across Europe, and the rest is history.
I keep getting invitations from Amazon recruiters who say are impressed with my LinkedIn profile. I keep ignoring, and even said I'm not interested, but they keep sending it again after a while. Must be desperately looking for devs
I think it’s more that recruiting is a sales job, often with a commission attached to it. I wouldn’t say that Amazon is “desperate for business,” but they still emailed me every few weeks about moving our business into AWS.
> In Europe, and in some states in the US, employment restrictions after job termination are illegal
This is unfortunately not true, at the very least in Spain and the UK (that I know of) they are legal - although more regulated in written and in practice (to certain extents) than the Wild West that seems to be most of the US.
In France, non-compete need to be both reasonable (not to broad) and paid extra on top of the salary when you quit the job. If there's no monetary compensation for the non-compete, they are just invalid.
I find this position reasonable, non-competes are an extra burden on the employee so they should be paid for.
In nearly all countries any contract must be at "arms length". Otherwise you could do fancy things, for example regarding taxes. :-)
This is actually a reason why you can not, for example, enforce something that is given freely. E.g. I give you a contract where I promise you to give you my house for free. If I change later my mind, in many jurisdictions you could not force me to write over my house since there is not "arms length". It is something for nothing.
Similarly, as I understand it In the US most noncompete contracts are actually unenforceable due to the concept of consideration[0]. Every noncompete I've signed offered me nothing of value in exchange for my agreement, they weren't part of the negotiation process and were simply presented with the health insurance and other forms on my first day with a implied "sign this or you don't have a job". However that wouldn't stop someone from calling your new employer and threatening to sue.
We may be talking about different things. Executives often negotiate a contract that contains a noncompete. That noncompete has clear consideration as it was negotiated as part of a total deal of employment, theoretically the employee is more highly compensated for this term of the contract. However rank and file employees are often not presented with the noncompete contract until their first day of work after salary negotiations have already taken place and the position accepted. Such an agreement probably isn't enforceable[0] as far as I can read[1] as it's hard to argue its part of the employment contract as the contract is signed after you are already employed and have reported for your first day of work[2]. If it was a employment contract it would've came attached to the offer letter.
[1]"The very basic requirements are that the non-compete must (1) be in writing; (2) be part of an employment contract; (3) be based on valuable consideration; (4) be reasonable in scope of time and of territory; (5) not be against public policy." - https://lincolnderr.com/is-my-non-compete-enforceable/
[2]”One of the most common reasons that courts refuse to enforce Non-Competes is that employers make the mistake of obtaining the agreement from an already-hired employee without providing the employee with anything of value in return. Generally, such agreements are unenforceable because the employee did not receive any additional “consideration.”" - https://macelree.com/the-top-10-mistakes-with-non-competitio...
IANAL. But, for example, in some jurisdictions you can write in the contract that all over time is already compensated with your salary. As long as the salary is significantly above market pay there won't be any issues. If you pay market rate and the employee is regularly pulling 60h work weeks, you are setting yourself up for big liability issues.
No, they have to pay your full salary for the whole time. So to enforce a 18 month non-compete agreement they have to compensate you with 18 months of salary.
It's worth noting that this is usually a significant pay cut from the usual total comp, since annual bonuses in some areas of finance tend to be >50% of total comp.
Gardening leave payments are better than nothing if only because they force a company to put some skin in the game if they actually care about enforcing the contract. But, in many cases (I believe the newish Massachusetts law for example) it's not 100% and, as you say, even if it is 100%, it's often exclusive of bonuses, even when bonuses are pretty much a normal expected part of comp and RSUs. Plus it's maybe an 18 month pause on someone's career.
Sure, for some people, 18 months off at half pay or so might seem like a pretty sweet deal. It certainly isn't for everyone.
In Spain it also needs a reasonable compensation, AFAIK estimates are around 80% of the salary the employee would have received during the period the post-employment limitation lasts.
It can be paid "while you are employed", which becomes a notable point of friction in contracts where part of your negotiated gross salary suddenly appears assigned for that purpose instead.
Things may get funny because at termination the company may have in fact paid only a part of the compensation that the agreed period would require. What happens then? Is the period reduced proportionally? Is the non-compete voided entirely? Moreover, the contract is binding both ways, which means at termination the employee might require the employer to honor their side and pay for the entire period regardless if the employer never intended to enforce it. Most of those quirks have not been tested to my knowledge, but it would be fun to watch.
Please correct me but my understanding is that in essence it’s sort of like the US. There are legally defined reasons you can’t be fired but there are plenty of reasons you can and if they want to fire you, a legal reason can be found without too much trouble.
You can still sue for wrongful termination but the total amount you are able to recover is limited to 1 month salary for each year worked at the firm?
You can write anything you want into a contract. Even that you are obligated to give BJs until the end of your life to your previous employer. Good luck trying to enforce this in court. A shitty non compete? I would tell my previous employer "go sue me". A friend actually had this problem and he met with his previous employer and told them: "Look, I don't care what you want, I will keep working for my new employer. If you don't like that you can pay me the same amount of money and I sit a home and do nothing." They passed.
The enforcement is them dragging it out in court for as long as it takes to bankrupt you.
Amazon has a large vested interest in retaining these clauses and wielding them as a weapon. To the extent that only a few upper employees may have the resources to fight back long enough to avoid being destroyed.
You have a point there but don't forget, suing works both ways. And while the company may assume they can sue you into bankruptcy, lawyer could assume the opposite. If they counter-sue, a big company is able to pay damages. As with most things in live, they work both ways.
Lawyers love to sue big companies. Do you know why? Payment is guaranteed if they win. And if company XYZ insists on an unreasonable non-compete without compensations, then this screams class action.
No not really. It's a mater of orders of magnitude.
If your attorney bill is one million dollars, you are probably bankrupt and destitute.
If the company loses, and they have to pay their attorney one million, and your attorney one million, and maybe a few hundred grand of lost wages for you, that's still absolutely nothing for them. Pocket change. It will not materially affect their budget.
It's legal to put clauses in contracts, but employment tribunals almost invariably strike them down. Unless something clearly nefarious is going on, they are utterly unenforceable.
IANAL but this looks to me (sorry, in Spanish) like an example of one that was enforced without anything particularly nefarious, and included the employee having to return the compensation and pay an additional amount for damages on top of that. https://cdn.cuestioneslaborales.es/wp-content/uploads/2014/1...
I've heard that law firms in England put terms in employment contracts that prevent an employee from working for another law firm for 12(?) months within 10(?) miles. They're called "restrictive covenants", I believe.
Since law firms often have multiple offices, a common trick is to be officially employed at a far-away office while mostly working at home and sometimes "visiting" the nearby office. For the first 12 months.
Mentioning that the reason you left might have been because you were being sexually harassed probably deflects some threats, but these things rarely get as far as a public court so it's anyone's guess what gets mentioned in private in such cases. I have absolutely no idea how the damages would be calculated if enforcement of a restrictive covenant did get as far as a court. It's certainly an interesting question. Perhaps for an ensurer if people need to ensure against it.
Amazon apparently fraudulently issued an employment offer and contract that they never intended to honor. It will certainly make me think twice about ever signing a contract with Amazon.
Screwing people over in every way that's legally permissible is... not always considered praiseworthy. And you can blame Amazon for straight-up lying to the guy about how the terms of his employment would change after the transfer.
Off topic but how much of Jeff's wealth would it take to transform Amazon into the best place to work in the world? Solid pay, fair employment, etc, the whole thing across the board.
Even if it took 2/3rds, Jeff would still be one of the most wealthy individuals in the world.
Jeff could make a real change and set and example. Yet he doesn't and I for one can not understand why after you have more than a billion in wealth you would need any more.
I don't understand how you think he should go about doing that ?
Do you think he's spending his net worth on a yearly basis so if he refrained from spending 2/3 and redistributed it would make Amazon amazing ? Or are you saying he should kill profitability and let his shares tank by 2/3 ?
I don't really like Amazon but I don't be see what your comment means in practice (I hear it often tho)
You can make a modest argument for that as it relates to Amazon retail. Mass retail is a hyper low margin business, and one in which the labor skill required is very low, which produces the low incomes: the employees are very easy to replace and the sales & profit per employee ratio is very low.
Bezos doesn't derive more than 1/4 of his wealth from the Amazon retail business however. His wealth primarily comes from AWS.
Your premise collapses badly in tech. The big flaw in your premise is the notion that the profit maximization equation involves slashing compensation to the lowest levels possible. In tech - and most high-skill segments - that is not the optimal equation.
The employees of Microsoft - to name one example of many - are among the best compensated workers in all of history, anywhere, at any time, doing anything. Many other tech giants with extreme profits mirror that outcome, including at such companies as Facebook and Google.
Microsoft is the second most profitable non-state corporation in history, and will soon surpass Apple as #1. They're presently generating $52 billion per year in operating profit and will double in size in the next seven or eight years. They learned a long time ago to share the wealth to attract the best talent, because it was more than worth it for the printing press profits they get in return.
More broadly speaking, tech employees in the US as a major sector are the best paid in world history, and they're the most coddled by a large margin. There is nothing remotely like it in any other segment of the global economy.
For 2019, approximately 1.4 million US software developers earning a median of ~$110,000 per year (and that's not total compensation, which leaves out a lot). Show me anything else comparable to that anywhere else on the planet.
Sure sounds like reciprocity derived from enormous profits to me. By maximizing profitability, they can pay their workers better; by paying their workers better, they can attract the best talent and maximize profitability.
> Your premise collapses badly in tech. The big flaw in your premise is the notion that the profit maximization equation involves slashing compensation to the lowest levels possible. In tech - and most high-skill segments - that is not the optimal equation.
Agreed.
> The employees of Microsoft - to name one example of many - are among the best compensated workers in all of history, anywhere, at any time, doing anything.
Doubtful. There are careers that in average pay much more. For example, an interventional cardiologist in the bay area makes $500,000 a year in average.
And just as there are software engineers that make more, there are cardiologists that make more.
> Sure sounds like reciprocity derived from enormous profits to me. By maximizing profitability, they can pay their workers better; by paying their workers better, they can attract the best talent and maximize profitability.
Reciprocity means the money you are getting is proportional to the value you created. While you can make money working at a highly profitable company, 100% reciprocity would mean that 100% of the profit and dividends are distributed according to merit. That is not the case.
That means that an NT kernel engineer should probably be making like $10,000,000 a year, for example.
I don't think it works like that. Jeff is rich in the same way that Gates was rich in the 90s. Almost all of his wealth is tied up in company stock, and selling a large portion of that would certainly affect the price and his wealth.
It's not like Jeff has a bank account with 100b in it.
That being said, I think the real question here is "could Amazon become the best place to work without losing money?"
My guess is yes. But shareholders wouldn't like it.
It is not about money. Jeff is not going to have more or less money because Amazon has non-competes. US law needs to change to remove non-competes entirely.
The world would not care. Amazon may look like big, but in the ocean of all employers and employees it's a small drop.
Political and cultural shift needs more than just fixing one small place. It needs political and cultural action, simple example won't suffice.
I.e. transforming Amazon could be a small facet of such a campaign as a template and example but mostly worthless without that other work.
You can be an entrepreneurial genious and still not understand how to create political and cultural shifts. So... the program you are suggesting would be quite remarkable and would require remarkable skill and vision. Redistributing profits wont suffice.
All of his wealth is wrapped up in Amazon stock. If he tried to sell 2/3 of his stock, not only would Amazon's share price tank (the founder is selling most of his stock), but he would lose control of Amazon and his net worth would be cut in half or more due to the stock tanking while he was selling. Jeff Bezos' net worth is simply the amount of shares he controls in Amazon multiplied by whatever the current price of the stock is. It is entirely theoretical and there is no real way for him to actually obtain his "net worth" in cash.
Well, many of them sure, but not all of them. For example, Bill Gates has his wealth distributed across a wide range of investments, which means that Gates' ability to turn his wealth into cash is much much greater than Jeff's.
As for the theoretical part, billionaires with all of their wealth tied up in a single company generally only have access to billionaire kind of money through loans with incredibly generous terms that they pay back by selling a bit of their stocks every year.
He wouldn't need to even touch the shares, the share itself give him control of Amazon and with that, he could institute such change offset against profit margin.
Though many of use foresee many jobs at amazon being candidates for robots and with that, can imagine the last thing Amazon wants are unions that would get in the way of such plans, if such plans were there. Kinda a case of the shoe fits, and drive against empowering those who you eventually down the line, will replace and make redundant.
Also the supply and demand factor, so many companies will only increase employee incentives/remunerations if they find it hard to get and in the current climate, they kinda have lots of people willing to endure what they offer as it's better than nothing. Which is kinda the crux we have seen playout for eon's and sadly, don't see that changing anytime soon.
Who's saying he has to sell his stock? He should be giving it away to his employees, all the way to the lowest-wage factory and warehouse workers. They're the ones who make the company work, and he doesn't give a shit about them.
Jeff has been building Amazon since 1994. Do you seriously believe the moral thing for him to do is to give away his shares to some low-skilled, easily replaceable employee who is just looking to make a quick buck ?
It's very funny how the 'job creators' weren't able to do anything against coronavirus closing and everyone staying at home. If they're so damn good, why did their stocks crater during the COVID-19 quarantine?
The people who are strapped to activity monitors in overheated warehouses, packing millions of orders each day, risking contracting COVID, do more to build Amazon and ensure it’s continued existence than Bezos has ever done.
>Moore said he's gotten countless buy-out offers over the years, but he couldn't envision selling the business to a stranger. "It's the only business decision that I could make," he said. "I don't think there's anybody worthy to run this company but the people who built it. I have employees with me right now that have been with me for 30 years. They just were committed to staying with me now and they're going to own the company."
You make it sound like selling all at once and flooding the market is the only option. He could slowly sell off shares over many years and thereby exchange personal power at amazon for tangible good in the world. He choses to maintain his position because that's where his priorities are. He's within his rights to do that, but let's not pretend one of the most powerful people in the world has his hands tied.
Isn't he doing exactly that with Blue Origin? AFAIK he's selling about $1b of AMZN stock every year to fund it. He's also recently pledged $10b to fight climate change.
To clarify, I'm not arguing one way or the other, I'm just stating that the fact that Bezos' net worth is largely in Amazon shares vs. cash is pretty irrelevant to a discussion of the potential distribution of that wealth.
I like to think that dilemma is why Bezos has pledged a billion a year to invest in Blue Origin. Nice excuse to extract some cash without spooking the market.
I agree that Jeff could spread his wealth around more and should spread his wealth around more. I think the driving factor is ambition and applies to a lot more people than Jeff. You need a certain amount of ambition to reach Bezos status, how do you turn that off when you get there?
Most people don't until death or near death. Gates is the most recent example to re-shift his ambition to bettering the world... but of course, a non-trivial amount of the world now believes he is trying to put chips in people to track them.
Just because he has Amazon stocks of that value doesn't mean he can turn all of that into cash. Economics explained has a great video on the various types of billionaires [1], which uses Jeff directly as an example of the lowest class of billionaire.
Just because the wealth isn't immediately liquid doesn't mean it can't be used. People borrow against illiquid wealth as a rule rather than as an exception. I don't think this argument holds water.
I wonder what does someone like Jeff Bezos think regarding this situation in his own company?
Especially since Bezos is a strong advocate for long term thinking and that annoying mantra "still day one".
Can they not see the fallacy of these policies? Burning bridges and thinking short term?
They might have a prospective pool of talents regarding fresh graduates, but more and more people are actively trying to avoid AWS and companies with similar "reputations".
As someone whose had friends suffer similar immigration-related shakedowns by big corps, all I can say is that this is despicable and more common then you’d imagine. In my experience, it comes when you try to move companies, with them demanding illegal, exhorbitant reimbursement for legal fees or maybe there’s going to be a “mix-up“ with your paperwork.
I know HN leans anti-union, but think if you actually had the power to stop companies from doing this to yourself, your friends, and coworkers. Think if it was part of the very basis of employment that such intimidation was not allowed and that people were at the ready to come together and stop anyone who tried. The point of organizing is to give workers this parallel, durable form of power, that persists beyond any one negotiation.
I had an employer that forced many of us to sign a very restrictive NCA. At the time they did it for me, I had been there about 20 years (I was middle management).
I did sign it, as not doing so meant termination (I know one or two others that chose termination). I have no idea what the terms of their termination were (like if they got a pat or a kick in the butt).
I also had determined, by then, that I would be doing different stuff, afterwards (which I am).
It was a bad NCA. It explicitly stated that, if they laid me off, or fired me, I still couldn't go to another company that fell under their definition, and it was a very broad definition. If I had gotten a job as a clerk at a drug store, it could have been construed as a "competitor or customer," because of the photo-processing lab.
Probably unenforceable, but that's beside the point. It still would have required me to hire a lawyer, and would probably have poisoned me to potential employers.
yeah. i’m pretty sure stuff like this is completely unenforceable. this sounds like being forced to sign it so you can easily make the argument that you signed it because you had no other choice and you were threatened with termination.
the comment i was answering to was about a job were they added the NCA after the person was employed there for 20 years!!!
as far as your comment goes:
nope. Amazon cannot afford a legal battle for each and every one of their employees. Also Amazon knows they’re going to look really stupid if they do go the route of suing you. Only case where I have seen NCAs trying to be enforced is in case of high profile executives where they are actually trying to send a message more than enforce the NCA. It’s a stupid posturing game that rarely works.
>as far as your comment goes: nope. Amazon cannot afford a legal battle for each and every one of their employees. Also Amazon knows they’re going to look really stupid if they do go the route of suing you. Only case where I have seen NCAs trying to be enforced is in case of high profile executives where they are actually trying to send a message more than enforce the NCA.
Do you have any source whatsoever for this? Companies enforce non-competes all the time. Wall Street Journal thinks it is rising 60% over the last decade (2013)[0]. I think your experience of what you "have seen" is wildly out of touch with reality.
I tried to find a source supporting your position, that companies don't enforce non-competes, but couldn't. The best I found was this[1] article about one lawyer willing to take on NCA cases for employees on extreme-contingency arrangements, since he apparently practices in a state where fee agreements must be reciprocal (i.e., if there is a fee agreement in your NCA, you get your fees paid if you win). If you live in such a state and can get that man to represent you, great. Otherwise, as he describes:
>There have been several cases where we have invested $100,000 worth of attorney time and $10,000+ of hard, out-of-pocket costs to defend a poor or working class person against a bogus non-compete agreement. And there have been a couple cases where it’s gone far past that: $200,000+ in attorney time, $20,000+ worth of case expenses. I’m sorry, but no other lawyer in America does that. I’m the only one.
>In many of these cases, you will need to execute perfectly or you will lose. You have to make 100 perfect moves and the other side only has to get 1 thing right. It’s absurd. It’s messed up. But that’s how it is.
Now, in reply to you saying: "It’s a stupid posturing game that rarely works."
This individual does agree that in many cases the companies are posturing and will lose. But unless you can afford the $XX,XXX-$XXX,XXX to pay a lawyer to get there (or find a unicorn, like him, who will work on contingency), you lose by default. Whether you think it's a "stupid" move to posture or not, the companies do it, routinely, and at an increasing pace.
> Wall Street Journal thinks it is rising 60% over the last decade (2013)
Rising from what number to what number? How does that compare to how many employees Amazon has?
If it’s up to 5 from 3, that’s a completely different proposition than up to 5000 from 3000.
One easy thought experiment is to look at how many people have left Amazon in the last couple of years vs how many were sued. My anecdotal evidence says it’s an extremely low number and it’s usually top level executives.
BTW I am not approving of or justifying the behavior big corporations have. Far from it.
Making the argument is the wrong phasing. Instead, what he should have said is "I can almost certainly get away with breaking the non-compete, and it is unlikely that anyone will notice".
Tech companies are not sending private detectives to follow every engineer that left the company.
This fantasy world, where major tech companies are preventing random engineers from leaving to work for other big tech companies, is just not true. It happens all of the time, and almost nobody gets sued.
Like, I don't know what to tell you. Like half of the engineers that I know, have job hopped, sometimes multiple times, between these top tech companies. They aren't being sued.
They go work at microsoft, and then leave for Facebook, or uber, or "insert rando prestigious tech company here", and I don't know of a single one, of all of my friend that I know, who has ever been sued for job hopping between top tech companies as an engineer.
It just does not happen, for the average tech employee, outside of weird, extreme, egregious cases.
Do companies enforce every single time? No. Can they try to enforce, and win, if your manager is upset, dislikes you, or is just a bad manager? Yes. Do they ever enforce? Sure do[0]. Do you have any data about this or could you find any article indicating it's safe to not worry about non-competes (if they are enforceable in your state)? I looked, and I couldn't find any such thing.
Most times the employee is just going to give up, and pursue other opportunities that the employer can't or won't enforce a non-compete against. There isn't always going to be a lawsuit.
Have you gone over the detailed career trajectory of all these engineers you know? Do you think they would volunteer, without prompting, that they couldn't take XZY job due to a non-compete?
Even if you have had detailed conversations with, say, two dozen people, if big companies enforce on 5% of people, it's not unheard of that you personally might not know someone it happened to. That's especially true if you happen to live in CA, where non-competes are unenforceable.
all those people are VP level and above. If you’re a VP you can afford the lawyer. Hell even if you’re an unknown drone (maybe with the exception of fresh out of college people) you can probably afford the lawyer.
The point is it has a chilling effect[0], fast food restaurants aren't having employees sign noncompetes[1] because they think they have specialized knowledge, the purpose is to reduce churn and therefore training costs.
Ok, so, that just means that people need to be more informed.
The reality is that people move between top tech companies all the time. It is extremely common. And basically nobody is having those non competes enforced, for a random engineering job.
With how infrequent this stuff happens, and how often people jump between companies, I find it much more likely that the number is closer to 0.1% for a random software engineering job.
Or, in other words, it is nothing that anyone needs to worry about.
Your link is irrelevant because those examples were for VPs.
I am not talking about VPs. I am talking about a random software engineer at a top tech company. Those people don't have to worry.
Most times when I see a non-compete, I tell them I won't sign it and the company will just remove it. Only recently in Chicago did I have to walk away from two jobs because they wouldn't change their employment contracts:
If a company isn't willing to negotiate their work agreement (and I understand this is difficult with a legal department; they prefer to have unified contracts for all employees based on their start year), then there is no "meeting of the minds" when it comes to signing that agreement. It's not a work contract at that point, it's an EULA.
I personally know people who were told by potential employers they couldn't be considered because of non-competes. They are unethical and they should be banned national wide in the US and not just in certain states like California.
Non competes have their place. But it should cost the employers to enforce it.
The most obvious way is to require paying the employee their previous average total compensation, while still allowing the employee to work outside the non-compete. There should also be some form of “as time goes on you need to pay more to prevent them from taking a competing job”. If you don’t want to pay someone to not work for a competitor, then your non-compete should not be valid.
They do this in finanance, New York has relatively enforceable non-competes. Typically they'll pay you your full salary for the period of time you're not working.
Pretty much what we have in France. Over here it doesn't have to be the full salary; only enough to be deemed "reasonable" by a judge, and judges working in courts related to employer-employee litigations tend to be more employee friendly.
If it isn't paid, the non-compete isn't enforceable.
It also requires a few more limits to be enforceable:
- "reasonably" limited in time
- geographically limited
- a specific activity / role
So they usually aren't ever enforced, because most of the time employers don't find them worth it.
It covers high-priced sales executives, C-levels, and very senior engineers just fine. Those are the positions that might reasonably take sensitive financials or trade secrets with them.
Joe Blow Web-developer? There shouldn't be a need. And if there is, pay him for the duration.
Nothing about the definition of the word “contract” suggests they have to be negotiable.
Noncompetes are not inherently unethical and should absolutely not be outlawed. If a company wants to pay you $500k to not work and you are willing to be paid $500k to not work you should have the right to come to a mutual agreement with them on the matter.
It’s a free country, if you don’t like the noncompete, find some other place to work. No one is forcing you to sign it.
The fundamental notion of contracts is, as they said, a meeting of the minds. "You do what I tell you or else" is pretty far from that.
Whether or not they're "inherently" unethical is a matter for philosophers. But in practice, they're clearly used heavily as an anticompetitive measure and to exploit labor. Those are definitely unethical, and contrary to free markets.
Your last line is willfully blind to labor history. Quite a lot of employers have done their best to make sure other options are limited. Employers definitionally have a huge power advantage, and there's nothing wrong with leveling the playing field to prevent exploitation.
> "You do what I tell you or else" is pretty far from that.
The "or else" here is you walk away and seek out an agreement with someone else. You're not forced to sign a contract just because it's not negotiable.
> Those are definitely unethical, and contrary to free markets.
I don't think it's unethical or exploitative to pay someone $500k to sit on a beach and relax for a year. Many non-competes are also industry specific, so you can even double dip and get a job while collecting your gardening leave payout as long as it's not within the same subfield you used to work in.
You can argue that certain low-wage, low-skill employees need a paycheck every two weeks or starve, and these people have zero leverage or ability to walk away from a punitive contract, but highly paid tech workers don't fall into this category. There are plenty of options out there for you if you don't want to sign a noncompete. Some people like the idea of getting paid a bunch of money to not work, just because you don't like noncompetes doesn't mean you are entitled to force your personal preferences on other people against their will by outlawing such agreements.
Sometimes non-competes are so lucrative that employees sue their own employers to force them to uphold them even when the employers don't want to.
You're arguing against a straw man. The original poster was clear enough: negotiate the contract, if the company won't budge then don't sign. That is your leverage.
There is a question about whether or not the contract is ethical, but that's irrelevant to the original point. Which is simply this: contracts should be negotiable. If they're not, use your leverage.
ALL contracts are negotiable, it's just a matter of which parts. Your salary is part of the contract, and everyone should be negotiating that.
> You're arguing against a straw man. The original poster was clear enough: negotiate the contract, if the company won't budge then don't sign.
Where did I say that you're not entitled to refuse to deal with companies that won't negotiate with you? Of course you're free to walk away if you the company doesn't want to negotiate with you, but the company isn't doing anything wrong by not wanting to negotiate and there is no legal or moral requirement for them to negotiate.
> contracts should be negotiable
Disagree. Contracts can be whatever the entity who draws them up wants them to be. If you don't like it don't sign it.
Non-negotiable contacts are totally fine and legal. They are called adhesion contracts. Not everything that is enforceable in a negotiated contact is enforceable in a contract of adhesion.
I don't think it's unethical or exploitative to pay someone $500k to sit on a beach and relax for a year.
Generally, that's not how non-competes work in the US. They are typically unpaid. WA just changed their laws. CA mostly outlaws them all together. Most other states allow them.
You're also possibly arguing for a position of higher power as an employee than is typical. Most employees don't have the luxury of forgoing offers based on contract language that HR promises won't be enforced (until it is).
You are taking a very small percentage of noncompetes, the ones where people get paid well for doing nothing, and acting like that's the common case. The sit-on-a-beach ones are negotiated by people with very high leverage. I've never heard of a friend in tech getting one; the only people I know personally who have gotten them are finance quants with PhDs and long track records.
You conveniently omit what I'm referring to above with "those", which is not the four-leaf-clover, sit-on-a-beach contracts. It's the rest, which involve no pay and foreclosed employment options. Those are indeed unethical (in that they exploit power to create negative-sum outcomes) and contrary to free markets (in that they reduce both supply and demand to advantage a powerful market player).
But it is all about making you no compete without paying you.
Company could for example still keep you hired for that time, without requiring you to perform any work for them. I don't believe non-compete ban would apply for that time, since you are technically still their employee so you still have your responsibilities as long as you are being paid.
That law is about imposing it on employees without giving them any choice. If you can freely negotiate, it isn't stopping you from signing it[1].
Besides a company could still keep you employed without requiring you to work for them to prevent you from working for a competitor. The thing is that they would rather not pay and prevent you from finding a job at another place, and that's what the law protects from.
> It’s a free country, if you don’t like the noncompete, find some other place to work.
There is actually a much better solution than this.
The better solution is to sign the contract, and then completely ignore it, afterwords.
The reality is, that in many top tech places it is extremely difficult to enforce non-competes. And it is perfectly possible, most of the time to get away with ignoring them completely.
HN readers often wonder how to fix non-competes. Here's a simple idea: if you run a start-up, stand up for your employees and don't put this crap into offers.
Basically I don't put anything in an employment agreement that I wouldn't sign myself.
on the other side of the coin, Take Two just killed an indie studio that was refusing to cede control over ksp 2 development direction by poaching the majority of its employers
not saying non-competes are straight up good, but it's not that they exist in a vacuum because every employee is the evil guy from monopoly.
I like the solution that we have here, non competes without monetary compensation are immediately void. so if they want to handcuff you, they have to pay for it after employment for as long as they want the non compete to be enforceable.
it's a minor simple thing, but haggling on the non compete handout is much easier than trying to get the non compete removed.
There's a vast difference between a noncompete agreement between employee and employer and a noncompete/nonsolicitation clause in a contract between businesses.
The first limits the individual employee's ability to compete in the marketplace. The second prevents a business partner from leveraging their position to kill your business.
Almost everyone (except the shareholders) benefits from employer-employee noncompetes being banned outright. Almost everyone suffers from having business-business nonsolicitations being banned outright. Why the studio's lawyer didn't include it in the contract is beyond me...
I've been in the DBMS business for three decades and have never heard of this happening. In California it's a vanishingly rare case. What has happened is that every new DBMS company I know has benefited from the flow of engineers from legacy companies. This would have been impossible with non-competes.
I have signed a similar non-compete without knowing the 18month clause is there when I moved to Austin to work for Amazon with an L1B visa.
My plan once I leave Amazon is to move to California and work out of there for 18months before moving back to Austin to get around this issue.
I've always signed them as a sign of good faith (sometimes amending with my own IP so there's no misunderstand about something I've already done if the company is in the same space) figuring that they have no teeth. In 30 years in the industry moving between small and large companies here in the Seattle area, having signed a NC everywhere, I've never even been asked about a previous NC, nor do I know anyone else that's had an issue. From what I understand, they are very difficult to take action on. Perhaps in the upper echelon's of management this is more of an issue, or for very narrowly-defined technologies or market-segments.
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[ 1.1 ms ] story [ 345 ms ] threadSeems a little overzealous if you are a rank and file
But, then again, for some roles a public presence is needed, like public speaking. You can't temporarily have the role of "janitor" and go out and speak authoritatively about AWS at a conference with that role. Maybe people will get the joke after understanding the true state of these agreements.
Wait, do we even have conferences anymore?
Companies are not sending private detectives, to follow engineers to their new job, and finding out specifically what they are working on, and if the contract is enforceable or not.
Mostly, people just forget about you, once you leave. People get away with lying all the time.
It is my understanding that you can often get away with being a lot more subtle than that. Things like throwing a proprietary product name in your title, a title that sounds more like a manager, etc.
Has anyone here had a company try to enforce their non compete, and can share their insights?
Though, it's really up to Amazon whether they want to keep you unemployed for 18 months, which is (in my mind) totally unethical to even have in the contract in the first place.
https://california.public.law/codes/ca_bus_and_prof_code_sec....
California Business & Professions Code section 16600 makes clear that any non-compete provision between employer and employee will not be enforceable under California law
(Though nothing is actually enforcable in India like you said, simply because you would probably be retired before the case would get a court date)
[0]https://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/20945/what-is-...
This is only true of Amazon. As far as I'm aware, none of the others have non-competes (Google certainly doesn't).
So maybe the more succinct advice is, just don't work for Amazon.
I'm not sure what happens if you're hired in California and then transfer somewhere else.
For example, if the company pays you your old salary for a year after you leave, the non-compete with be enforceable.
If they just part ways with no reasonable exchange of value for the non-compete period, all you have to claim is this is how you make your crust.
Those folk have a serious legal consititution.
Since it's Washington State we're talking about: Googlers who join in WA state do not have a Non-compete in their contract (at least the "rank and file" engineers), even though Google could add it and Amazon/Microsoft have one.
In fact Google took it a step further and tried to lobby to get non-compete banned in WA State:
There was an almost full-ban on non-compete that was proposed a few years ago in Washington State. Google came to the public hearings with full support for the law as it is (which make sense given the status for non compete in California - and how it had gotten sued by Microsoft over one employee, and now again by Amazon). The law would have made it that non-compete are void if laid-off, and void if over 1 year max or if you're not an executive employee.
But Microsoft, Amazon, and the hospitals lobbied hard against it. (Hospitals are using those non-competes on both nurses and doctors apparently)
So the bill got rewritten where it only applies to people with a total comp less than 185k, and where student debt could be subtracted to that 185k. This, again, got fought more by opponents.
Now the ban on non compete only applies to people whose yearly salary (total comp as listed on W-2) is less than 100k, So doctors and tech workers at those companies get nothing out of it, except the clarification that non compete:
- cannot be for longer than 18 months
- if employee is laid off and non compete is enforced, the company must pay base salary for the duration of non-compete.
Geekwire had a good coverage of it over the years:
https://www.geekwire.com/2016/non-compete-bill-stalls-washin...
https://www.geekwire.com/2018/effort-kill-non-competes-washi...
https://www.geekwire.com/2019/tech-leaders-sound-off-washing...
And the original bills: http://lawfilesext.leg.wa.gov/biennium/2015-16/Pdf/Bills/Hou...
http://lawfilesext.leg.wa.gov/biennium/2017-18/Pdf/Bills/Hou...
final bill: https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary?BillNumber=1450&Initiativ...
Washington State has no income, capital gains, or payroll tax. All we[0] have are consumption taxes that people with lower incomes are forced to pay more of as a percentage of their incomes versus people with higher incomes. This is doubly so since people with higher incomes have the financial leverage to minimize consumption taxes[1]. There's little tax-based incentive to attract and retain people with high incomes. If anything, we are somewhat of a drain on the overall society because we price out and displace people who don't have those incomes while we pay, on a percentage-of-income basis, comparatively little back into society relative to what we're earning.
I'm certain some people will come along under me and crow about how this is the whole reason why they moved to Washington instead of another but I am not particularly moved by any reasoning someone might put forward.
0 - My bias: I am a very well paid employee living in Seattle so I include myself in this but am also active in advocacy for levying taxes on myself and people like me for a more equitable tax system in this city, county, and state.
1 - Buying in bulk, buying a single higher-cost good that will last longer than lower-cost goods that must be replaced, evading taxes by traveling or buying online and accepting the risk of not being held accountable for paying the consumption tax
I'd say that's valid enough reason to move on its own. I've lived in Seattle for forever and the weather is one of the things that has kept me here through economic ups and downs.
The cost of living is only "low" here for people like us who are already doing very well for ourselves and I'm not at all enjoying the yawing inequity becoming increasingly wider. I'm not someone who pines for the "better days" of yesteryear or wants to cling tightly to some treasured local watering hole. We need a sane tax policy and a sane housing policy otherwise this all comes to a crashing halt.
Please have some empathy for people like me that can't waltz into any job and don't say things like this.
If a business can get even a small fraction of its labor to follow unenforcable/essentially illegal requirements, they've made significant headway, even if they don't ever choose to attempt to litigate. Over time, those practices can become normalized and set industry standards where they become more and more successful.
I think it should be illegal to even stipulate such requirements in contracts to begin with to prevent businesses from eroding labor rights over time. There should be massive fines in place that penalize even stipulating those sort of clauses to make sure businesses only include reasonable language/requirements.
1: Yes, I am aware that there are a few software engineers out there with specialized skills who have successfully managed to negotiate some non-salary terms out of their employment agreements. Congratulations, you are not representative of the general employee population.
I'm pretty sure I don't want to be in a position where I'd be fired if a 10-year old lie came out.
And David says he joined as one level about entry level! It's not like he was a VP, which makes Amazon's actions even more egregious.
A "Proprietary Information and Assignment Agreement" is about protecting proprietary information. It is illegal in all 50 states to use trade-secret information at a new employer. See Anthony Levandowski.
A Non-compete is about labor market, wage, and competition suppression.
"In the past, it was commonly believed that out of state non-compete agreements may be unenforceable if the employee is first to file an action in a California court asking that the court declare the non-compete agreement unenforceable."
"Thus the employees [...] argued that the enforcement of the [Washington non-compete agreement] would violate California’s policy of not enforcing non-compete clauses. The California court disagreed [and upheld the non-compete"
http://www.carr-mcclellan.com/insights/why-assuming-out-of-s...
Thankfully these clauses don’t work in California
The question is more like: "could a sentence in Washington, resulting in a fine or other monetary obligation, be enacted or enforced in California?"
I don't know American law, but I'd be surprised if there were no mechanisms for Washington to tell California (and viceversa) "this dude owes us money, use your powers to make him pay please".
The states agreed to honor court decisions in other states in Article 4 of the Constitution: "Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State." If a court in Washington says you owe money, it's enforced the same as if it were a court in California.
US employers are getting pretty shady with all these post-job “agreements”.
In retrospect I should have known worse things were to come from those assholes.
It should be illegal to add terms after the initial contract is signed. The only reason they do it is because they know once you’re in the door, you already turned down other offers and therefore have less leverage.
Is everybody scared to stand up to your employer in those cases?
Sure, you have to pay for it, but you have to pay for it indirectly if it's a union anyways. It's unfortunate that the costs aren't spread over the entire organization, but getting the opinion of a lawyer is not that expensive for a software engineer.
Personally I suspect that if he refused to sign this and they fired him for that he could have recovered significant damages under promissory estoppel, but that's something you'd need to check with a lawyer before actually doing it.
Someone at Amazon put a paper on his desk and said that unless he signs it, they would not "authorize my employment". Whatever that means.
The option not to sign. He had an offer from them and he agreed. That is a legal binding contract that they have to abide. So don't sign and say "Sorry, but we have a legally binding agreement. And this is not in line with it.".If you let people scare you by saying something, they will continue to play tricks on you. Stick to what is written.
That puts a lot of extra pressure on someone to keep their job.
But I suggest standing your ground in such a situation. They wanted to work with him. They had a contract with him. So there was a lot of pressure on them too. If they breached the contract they would lose an employee and face legal repercussions.
What "legal repercussions" are you thinking of? The author stated that their new contract was "at will", so their employment could be terminated for any reason at all.
(Not defending Amazon here. But the employee had been put into a position where they had no realistic choice but to sign.)
That just sounds bad. I've also heard of contracts that essentially prohibit side projects or moonlighting. Are software developers not aware they don't need to accept these restrictions to make a living? I guess maybe companies impose the restrictions under duress like in this story. Still, I'm surprised companies with such unethical employment practices can manage to hire anyone.
The US, on the other hand, cracked down on unions and prevented them from gaining political power in the same way that they did across Europe, and the rest is history.
As far as the US: noncompetes are broadly legal. California is notable as being a state where they are not.
There is a history section on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-compete_clause
If your employer is sufficiently broad, the California Labor Code basically prohibits side projects or moonlighting:
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
This is unfortunately not true, at the very least in Spain and the UK (that I know of) they are legal - although more regulated in written and in practice (to certain extents) than the Wild West that seems to be most of the US.
I find this position reasonable, non-competes are an extra burden on the employee so they should be paid for.
This is actually a reason why you can not, for example, enforce something that is given freely. E.g. I give you a contract where I promise you to give you my house for free. If I change later my mind, in many jurisdictions you could not force me to write over my house since there is not "arms length". It is something for nothing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arm%27s_length_principle
[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consideration
[0]"Performance of existing duties is not good consideration" - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consideration
[1]"The very basic requirements are that the non-compete must (1) be in writing; (2) be part of an employment contract; (3) be based on valuable consideration; (4) be reasonable in scope of time and of territory; (5) not be against public policy." - https://lincolnderr.com/is-my-non-compete-enforceable/
[2]”One of the most common reasons that courts refuse to enforce Non-Competes is that employers make the mistake of obtaining the agreement from an already-hired employee without providing the employee with anything of value in return. Generally, such agreements are unenforceable because the employee did not receive any additional “consideration.”" - https://macelree.com/the-top-10-mistakes-with-non-competitio...
Sure, for some people, 18 months off at half pay or so might seem like a pretty sweet deal. It certainly isn't for everyone.
It can be paid "while you are employed", which becomes a notable point of friction in contracts where part of your negotiated gross salary suddenly appears assigned for that purpose instead.
Things may get funny because at termination the company may have in fact paid only a part of the compensation that the agreed period would require. What happens then? Is the period reduced proportionally? Is the non-compete voided entirely? Moreover, the contract is binding both ways, which means at termination the employee might require the employer to honor their side and pay for the entire period regardless if the employer never intended to enforce it. Most of those quirks have not been tested to my knowledge, but it would be fun to watch.
You can still sue for wrongful termination but the total amount you are able to recover is limited to 1 month salary for each year worked at the firm?
You can write anything you want into a contract. Even that you are obligated to give BJs until the end of your life to your previous employer. Good luck trying to enforce this in court. A shitty non compete? I would tell my previous employer "go sue me". A friend actually had this problem and he met with his previous employer and told them: "Look, I don't care what you want, I will keep working for my new employer. If you don't like that you can pay me the same amount of money and I sit a home and do nothing." They passed.
The enforcement is them dragging it out in court for as long as it takes to bankrupt you.
Amazon has a large vested interest in retaining these clauses and wielding them as a weapon. To the extent that only a few upper employees may have the resources to fight back long enough to avoid being destroyed.
https://www.mahanyertl.com
If your attorney bill is one million dollars, you are probably bankrupt and destitute.
If the company loses, and they have to pay their attorney one million, and your attorney one million, and maybe a few hundred grand of lost wages for you, that's still absolutely nothing for them. Pocket change. It will not materially affect their budget.
Do you? Does your new employer like you enough to pay for attorneys?
I don’t know what your Spanish dude did. Most of the generic cut-and-paste clauses you find around are utterly unenforceable.
Since law firms often have multiple offices, a common trick is to be officially employed at a far-away office while mostly working at home and sometimes "visiting" the nearby office. For the first 12 months.
Mentioning that the reason you left might have been because you were being sexually harassed probably deflects some threats, but these things rarely get as far as a public court so it's anyone's guess what gets mentioned in private in such cases. I have absolutely no idea how the damages would be calculated if enforcement of a restrictive covenant did get as far as a court. It's certainly an interesting question. Perhaps for an ensurer if people need to ensure against it.
Edit: don't get me wrong, I'm not saying what Amazon did is OK, I'm saying it's probably legal, it's the employment laws in the US that are unethical.
Even if it took 2/3rds, Jeff would still be one of the most wealthy individuals in the world.
Jeff could make a real change and set and example. Yet he doesn't and I for one can not understand why after you have more than a billion in wealth you would need any more.
Do you think he's spending his net worth on a yearly basis so if he refrained from spending 2/3 and redistributed it would make Amazon amazing ? Or are you saying he should kill profitability and let his shares tank by 2/3 ?
I don't really like Amazon but I don't be see what your comment means in practice (I hear it often tho)
Bezos doesn't derive more than 1/4 of his wealth from the Amazon retail business however. His wealth primarily comes from AWS.
Your premise collapses badly in tech. The big flaw in your premise is the notion that the profit maximization equation involves slashing compensation to the lowest levels possible. In tech - and most high-skill segments - that is not the optimal equation.
The employees of Microsoft - to name one example of many - are among the best compensated workers in all of history, anywhere, at any time, doing anything. Many other tech giants with extreme profits mirror that outcome, including at such companies as Facebook and Google.
Microsoft is the second most profitable non-state corporation in history, and will soon surpass Apple as #1. They're presently generating $52 billion per year in operating profit and will double in size in the next seven or eight years. They learned a long time ago to share the wealth to attract the best talent, because it was more than worth it for the printing press profits they get in return.
More broadly speaking, tech employees in the US as a major sector are the best paid in world history, and they're the most coddled by a large margin. There is nothing remotely like it in any other segment of the global economy.
For 2019, approximately 1.4 million US software developers earning a median of ~$110,000 per year (and that's not total compensation, which leaves out a lot). Show me anything else comparable to that anywhere else on the planet.
Sure sounds like reciprocity derived from enormous profits to me. By maximizing profitability, they can pay their workers better; by paying their workers better, they can attract the best talent and maximize profitability.
Agreed.
> The employees of Microsoft - to name one example of many - are among the best compensated workers in all of history, anywhere, at any time, doing anything.
Doubtful. There are careers that in average pay much more. For example, an interventional cardiologist in the bay area makes $500,000 a year in average.
And just as there are software engineers that make more, there are cardiologists that make more.
> Sure sounds like reciprocity derived from enormous profits to me. By maximizing profitability, they can pay their workers better; by paying their workers better, they can attract the best talent and maximize profitability.
Reciprocity means the money you are getting is proportional to the value you created. While you can make money working at a highly profitable company, 100% reciprocity would mean that 100% of the profit and dividends are distributed according to merit. That is not the case.
That means that an NT kernel engineer should probably be making like $10,000,000 a year, for example.
It's not like Jeff has a bank account with 100b in it.
That being said, I think the real question here is "could Amazon become the best place to work without losing money?"
My guess is yes. But shareholders wouldn't like it.
Political and cultural shift needs more than just fixing one small place. It needs political and cultural action, simple example won't suffice.
I.e. transforming Amazon could be a small facet of such a campaign as a template and example but mostly worthless without that other work.
You can be an entrepreneurial genious and still not understand how to create political and cultural shifts. So... the program you are suggesting would be quite remarkable and would require remarkable skill and vision. Redistributing profits wont suffice.
As for the theoretical part, billionaires with all of their wealth tied up in a single company generally only have access to billionaire kind of money through loans with incredibly generous terms that they pay back by selling a bit of their stocks every year.
Though many of use foresee many jobs at amazon being candidates for robots and with that, can imagine the last thing Amazon wants are unions that would get in the way of such plans, if such plans were there. Kinda a case of the shoe fits, and drive against empowering those who you eventually down the line, will replace and make redundant.
Also the supply and demand factor, so many companies will only increase employee incentives/remunerations if they find it hard to get and in the current climate, they kinda have lots of people willing to endure what they offer as it's better than nothing. Which is kinda the crux we have seen playout for eon's and sadly, don't see that changing anytime soon.
It's very funny how the 'job creators' weren't able to do anything against coronavirus closing and everyone staying at home. If they're so damn good, why did their stocks crater during the COVID-19 quarantine?
Example:
https://abcnews.go.com/WN/owner-multi-million-dollar-company...
>Moore said he's gotten countless buy-out offers over the years, but he couldn't envision selling the business to a stranger. "It's the only business decision that I could make," he said. "I don't think there's anybody worthy to run this company but the people who built it. I have employees with me right now that have been with me for 30 years. They just were committed to staying with me now and they're going to own the company."
I swear, the slacktivists went nuts over the "fight for $15!!!", Amazon gives them $15 and suddenly it's not enough all the sudden.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MeRN7LE1LQ
Especially since Bezos is a strong advocate for long term thinking and that annoying mantra "still day one".
Can they not see the fallacy of these policies? Burning bridges and thinking short term?
They might have a prospective pool of talents regarding fresh graduates, but more and more people are actively trying to avoid AWS and companies with similar "reputations".
I know HN leans anti-union, but think if you actually had the power to stop companies from doing this to yourself, your friends, and coworkers. Think if it was part of the very basis of employment that such intimidation was not allowed and that people were at the ready to come together and stop anyone who tried. The point of organizing is to give workers this parallel, durable form of power, that persists beyond any one negotiation.
[0]https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/why-i-turned-down-an-aws-...
I did sign it, as not doing so meant termination (I know one or two others that chose termination). I have no idea what the terms of their termination were (like if they got a pat or a kick in the butt).
I also had determined, by then, that I would be doing different stuff, afterwards (which I am).
It was a bad NCA. It explicitly stated that, if they laid me off, or fired me, I still couldn't go to another company that fell under their definition, and it was a very broad definition. If I had gotten a job as a clerk at a drug store, it could have been construed as a "competitor or customer," because of the photo-processing lab.
Probably unenforceable, but that's beside the point. It still would have required me to hire a lawyer, and would probably have poisoned me to potential employers.
A lawyer near you just had a delighted vision of profits. Amazon can afford a $XX,XXX-$XXX,XXX legal battle over your non-compete, can you?
as far as your comment goes: nope. Amazon cannot afford a legal battle for each and every one of their employees. Also Amazon knows they’re going to look really stupid if they do go the route of suing you. Only case where I have seen NCAs trying to be enforced is in case of high profile executives where they are actually trying to send a message more than enforce the NCA. It’s a stupid posturing game that rarely works.
Do you have any source whatsoever for this? Companies enforce non-competes all the time. Wall Street Journal thinks it is rising 60% over the last decade (2013)[0]. I think your experience of what you "have seen" is wildly out of touch with reality.
I tried to find a source supporting your position, that companies don't enforce non-competes, but couldn't. The best I found was this[1] article about one lawyer willing to take on NCA cases for employees on extreme-contingency arrangements, since he apparently practices in a state where fee agreements must be reciprocal (i.e., if there is a fee agreement in your NCA, you get your fees paid if you win). If you live in such a state and can get that man to represent you, great. Otherwise, as he describes:
>There have been several cases where we have invested $100,000 worth of attorney time and $10,000+ of hard, out-of-pocket costs to defend a poor or working class person against a bogus non-compete agreement. And there have been a couple cases where it’s gone far past that: $200,000+ in attorney time, $20,000+ worth of case expenses. I’m sorry, but no other lawyer in America does that. I’m the only one.
>In many of these cases, you will need to execute perfectly or you will lose. You have to make 100 perfect moves and the other side only has to get 1 thing right. It’s absurd. It’s messed up. But that’s how it is.
Now, in reply to you saying: "It’s a stupid posturing game that rarely works."
This individual does agree that in many cases the companies are posturing and will lose. But unless you can afford the $XX,XXX-$XXX,XXX to pay a lawyer to get there (or find a unicorn, like him, who will work on contingency), you lose by default. Whether you think it's a "stupid" move to posture or not, the companies do it, routinely, and at an increasing pace.
[0]https://www.wsj.com/articles/litigation-over-noncompete-clau...
[1]https://www.pollardllc.com/poor-people-non-compete-cases/
Rising from what number to what number? How does that compare to how many employees Amazon has?
If it’s up to 5 from 3, that’s a completely different proposition than up to 5000 from 3000.
One easy thought experiment is to look at how many people have left Amazon in the last couple of years vs how many were sued. My anecdotal evidence says it’s an extremely low number and it’s usually top level executives.
BTW I am not approving of or justifying the behavior big corporations have. Far from it.
Tech companies are not sending private detectives to follow every engineer that left the company.
This fantasy world, where major tech companies are preventing random engineers from leaving to work for other big tech companies, is just not true. It happens all of the time, and almost nobody gets sued.
Like, I don't know what to tell you. Like half of the engineers that I know, have job hopped, sometimes multiple times, between these top tech companies. They aren't being sued.
They go work at microsoft, and then leave for Facebook, or uber, or "insert rando prestigious tech company here", and I don't know of a single one, of all of my friend that I know, who has ever been sued for job hopping between top tech companies as an engineer.
It just does not happen, for the average tech employee, outside of weird, extreme, egregious cases.
Most times the employee is just going to give up, and pursue other opportunities that the employer can't or won't enforce a non-compete against. There isn't always going to be a lawsuit.
Have you gone over the detailed career trajectory of all these engineers you know? Do you think they would volunteer, without prompting, that they couldn't take XZY job due to a non-compete?
Even if you have had detailed conversations with, say, two dozen people, if big companies enforce on 5% of people, it's not unheard of that you personally might not know someone it happened to. That's especially true if you happen to live in CA, where non-competes are unenforceable.
[0]https://www.geekwire.com/2017/business-personal-amazon-web-s...
[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect
[1]https://www.foodandwine.com/news/fast-food-non-compete-agree...
The reality is that people move between top tech companies all the time. It is extremely common. And basically nobody is having those non competes enforced, for a random engineering job.
With how infrequent this stuff happens, and how often people jump between companies, I find it much more likely that the number is closer to 0.1% for a random software engineering job.
Or, in other words, it is nothing that anyone needs to worry about.
Your link is irrelevant because those examples were for VPs.
I am not talking about VPs. I am talking about a random software engineer at a top tech company. Those people don't have to worry.
https://battlepenguin.com/tech/why-i-dont-sign-non-competes/
If a company isn't willing to negotiate their work agreement (and I understand this is difficult with a legal department; they prefer to have unified contracts for all employees based on their start year), then there is no "meeting of the minds" when it comes to signing that agreement. It's not a work contract at that point, it's an EULA.
I personally know people who were told by potential employers they couldn't be considered because of non-competes. They are unethical and they should be banned national wide in the US and not just in certain states like California.
The most obvious way is to require paying the employee their previous average total compensation, while still allowing the employee to work outside the non-compete. There should also be some form of “as time goes on you need to pay more to prevent them from taking a competing job”. If you don’t want to pay someone to not work for a competitor, then your non-compete should not be valid.
If it isn't paid, the non-compete isn't enforceable.
It also requires a few more limits to be enforceable:
- "reasonably" limited in time
- geographically limited
- a specific activity / role
So they usually aren't ever enforced, because most of the time employers don't find them worth it.
It covers high-priced sales executives, C-levels, and very senior engineers just fine. Those are the positions that might reasonably take sensitive financials or trade secrets with them.
Joe Blow Web-developer? There shouldn't be a need. And if there is, pay him for the duration.
This is similar to the British concept called “gardening leave”.
Noncompetes are not inherently unethical and should absolutely not be outlawed. If a company wants to pay you $500k to not work and you are willing to be paid $500k to not work you should have the right to come to a mutual agreement with them on the matter.
It’s a free country, if you don’t like the noncompete, find some other place to work. No one is forcing you to sign it.
Whether or not they're "inherently" unethical is a matter for philosophers. But in practice, they're clearly used heavily as an anticompetitive measure and to exploit labor. Those are definitely unethical, and contrary to free markets.
Your last line is willfully blind to labor history. Quite a lot of employers have done their best to make sure other options are limited. Employers definitionally have a huge power advantage, and there's nothing wrong with leveling the playing field to prevent exploitation.
The "or else" here is you walk away and seek out an agreement with someone else. You're not forced to sign a contract just because it's not negotiable.
> Those are definitely unethical, and contrary to free markets.
I don't think it's unethical or exploitative to pay someone $500k to sit on a beach and relax for a year. Many non-competes are also industry specific, so you can even double dip and get a job while collecting your gardening leave payout as long as it's not within the same subfield you used to work in.
You can argue that certain low-wage, low-skill employees need a paycheck every two weeks or starve, and these people have zero leverage or ability to walk away from a punitive contract, but highly paid tech workers don't fall into this category. There are plenty of options out there for you if you don't want to sign a noncompete. Some people like the idea of getting paid a bunch of money to not work, just because you don't like noncompetes doesn't mean you are entitled to force your personal preferences on other people against their will by outlawing such agreements.
Sometimes non-competes are so lucrative that employees sue their own employers to force them to uphold them even when the employers don't want to.
https://www.natlawreview.com/article/employer-s-waiver-non-c...
Does that sound like exploitation to you?
There is a question about whether or not the contract is ethical, but that's irrelevant to the original point. Which is simply this: contracts should be negotiable. If they're not, use your leverage.
ALL contracts are negotiable, it's just a matter of which parts. Your salary is part of the contract, and everyone should be negotiating that.
Where did I say that you're not entitled to refuse to deal with companies that won't negotiate with you? Of course you're free to walk away if you the company doesn't want to negotiate with you, but the company isn't doing anything wrong by not wanting to negotiate and there is no legal or moral requirement for them to negotiate.
> contracts should be negotiable
Disagree. Contracts can be whatever the entity who draws them up wants them to be. If you don't like it don't sign it.
Generally, that's not how non-competes work in the US. They are typically unpaid. WA just changed their laws. CA mostly outlaws them all together. Most other states allow them.
You're also possibly arguing for a position of higher power as an employee than is typical. Most employees don't have the luxury of forgoing offers based on contract language that HR promises won't be enforced (until it is).
You conveniently omit what I'm referring to above with "those", which is not the four-leaf-clover, sit-on-a-beach contracts. It's the rest, which involve no pay and foreclosed employment options. Those are indeed unethical (in that they exploit power to create negative-sum outcomes) and contrary to free markets (in that they reduce both supply and demand to advantage a powerful market player).
Company could for example still keep you hired for that time, without requiring you to perform any work for them. I don't believe non-compete ban would apply for that time, since you are technically still their employee so you still have your responsibilities as long as you are being paid.
Besides a company could still keep you employed without requiring you to work for them to prevent you from working for a competitor. The thing is that they would rather not pay and prevent you from finding a job at another place, and that's what the law protects from.
[1] https://www.gtlaw.com/en/insights/2018/12/california-employe...
There is actually a much better solution than this.
The better solution is to sign the contract, and then completely ignore it, afterwords.
The reality is, that in many top tech places it is extremely difficult to enforce non-competes. And it is perfectly possible, most of the time to get away with ignoring them completely.
Basically I don't put anything in an employment agreement that I wouldn't sign myself.
not saying non-competes are straight up good, but it's not that they exist in a vacuum because every employee is the evil guy from monopoly.
I like the solution that we have here, non competes without monetary compensation are immediately void. so if they want to handcuff you, they have to pay for it after employment for as long as they want the non compete to be enforceable.
it's a minor simple thing, but haggling on the non compete handout is much easier than trying to get the non compete removed.
Almost everyone (except the shareholders) benefits from employer-employee noncompetes being banned outright. Almost everyone suffers from having business-business nonsolicitations being banned outright. Why the studio's lawyer didn't include it in the contract is beyond me...
Happy to be proven wrong.