Not that strange, but certainly fucking annoying: at universities it’s becoming more common to have “closed searches” for upper administrators like presidents, provosts, deans, etc. This is very much a labor/management thing, and historically (in the US) public universities have had open searches, where faculty and staff get to meet candidates, ask them questions, etc. Upper admins have taken over all decision making power in recent decades, but in the past few years they’ve even started preventing faculty/staff from even knowing who is applying to be their new uni president. Under pressure to do something about “the consent of the governed,” admins have “allowed” some faculty and staff to view interviews and things, but are forced to sign NDAs to do so.
At public universities, using taxpayer money, promising large amounts of taxpayer money to some person. It’s stupid and annoying.
Place I used to work had a “we own all the IP you generate” clause, except it wasn’t very clearly written so could easily be read to mean literally all IP - write a song on the weekend, they own that. Got the wording tweaked in my contract to make it explicitly only cover things done in connection to my role, on company time, but I do wonder about my former colleagues. At least one of them has a mildly successful YouTube channel that I guess the company technically owns?
Won’t stand up in court. You can’t just put anything into a contract and expect it to stand up. You can’t bind yourself into slavery (which that is kind of close to) or break the law, or force all sorts of conditions on the other party.
I don’t know that it’s that clear cut - trying to enforce a provision like that would almost certainly be seen as unreasonable, but unless there is some specific law forbidding it in your jurisdiction you’d probably need to ask a court if it conflicts with broader employment law rules to the level that a court would nullify it. Getting an answer to that question is likely to be very expensive, even if you are right.
It’s definitely a risky strategy to just say “try me”, I guess it depends what it’s all over. I doubt that lawyers would even want to pursue it, after maybe a few letters.
I found my completed but unsubmitted NDA form from my last job under a stack of papers after I left. HR just forgot to ask me for it and I forgot it existed
I worked on a website for some folks that make juice. They… I guess they think they have something special? They don’t… I’ve looked through it all. Nothing you can’t find online. Same shit every college town juicer selling celery this and tumeric that and activated charcoal whatever.
But, I suppose I could use this info to start an analog of their business. I mean, I don’t want to, at all. But I could. 🤷♂️
Not really my own NDA, but kind of remarkable on its own. I discovered a number of people I know have been living according to witness protection. Apparently witness protection has recurring favored locations and the area is like Bellwood for Witsec. Funniest part is they all know each other and themselves have no idea half the time. It feels like that one joke with that one zoo that gets people in animal costumes to live as animals only to find out the whole zoo are animals.
Most of the NDAs I’ve signed were from Amazon. I was regularly recruited by the AWS UX team to test changes to their web console in exchange for gift cards. But it meant for a while that I was legally prohibited from telling people inane shit like, “they might add a ‘cluster’ column to the RDS database list.” Stop the presses!
I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone that my flatmate isn’t allowed to work for another company in their industry for twelve months after they leave their current job.
The company is owned by a foreign national and their hiring documents were full of weird, improper regulations, including any residents of the house not revealing any of the NDA that my flatmate signed, so while I didn’t sign anything, I was technically(impractically and I can’t imagine legally) forbidden, according to a clownish NDA, from discussing all sorts of things.
Yes, I read the whole thing just to see what else it said.
The company technically owes the signing employee at least 6 months of any revenue connected to any project connected to that employee’s position at the time of signing.
It’s supposed to be a salaried compensation point, but is vaguely worded incorrectly enough that it logically says any project connected to that position at all must direct a portion of its revenue to that employee, regardless of any circumstance.
Without any qualifications such as length of hire, time spent on the project, nominal involvement, a minimum of 6 revenue months of projects connected to that position must be directed toward the employee.
That’s relatively common… if the company isn’t full of dick bags you can usually get specific carve-outs. Nobody gives a shit about the game you’re programming on the side - they’re just unfamiliar with corporate espionage laws and being overly defensive.
At EOD any real lawsuit is going to pretty much ignore any NDA that isn’t hyperspecific. I mentioned in another comment that I signed an NDA preventing me from disclosing the contents and parties in another NDA… that’s highly fucking enforceable, and it’s necessary because normally surface level information about contracts aren’t considered secret knowledge. But all the ones we programmers sign are nearly completely horseshit - not because you can freely violate it, but because disclosing proprietary business practices is already illegal unless explicitly allowed.
I had the same thing. It was an otherwise very interesting short term contract that I really wanted to do. I had a spare time project that I was already working on though. I ended up taking it and pausing my side project until the contract finished. One of the more ridiculous things it said was something like ‘no inspiration you have during the contract validity may be monetized’.
That’s what finally convinced me to release it later as Copyleft, not because I thought they would come after me but because patent law can get fecked.
I also met my wife on a gig where we both signed NDAs with non-fraternization clauses.
Funny story but that’s how the patent law works in Germany and I believe at least Japan aswell. I don’t know about other places but I wouldn’t be surprised if this applied to the majority of the industrialised world.
If you come up with an idea that could be patented while employed, you must to tell your employer about it and offer it to them. In return, they must either register it themselves and give you an appropriate compensation or decline ownership of it; allowing you to register it yourself.
Rationale behind that, if you work in i.e. IT and invent an IT-related thing after you’ve clocked out for the day, you probably wouldn’t have had the idea if you hadn’t spent the majority of your day working on the topic for a couple years.
I think this is actually quite fair as, even if the company decides to keep it for themselves, it’d register, use, license and defend the patent for you (for a great cut of course).
I might have forgot it coming through the doors at work.
Fuck that logic <3
Edit: I’d guess the law was made by employers so the loopholes must be plenty to spin the compensation for low level staff enough to justify giving 1% or something from the patent revenue.
My current job tried to get me to sign one that would prohibit me both from discussing the content of the NDA, and had a noncompete rider that was extremely aggressive.
I told them I wouldn’t sign it, and it was unenforceable in this state anyway, so they might as well drop it. They did, but the whole thing made me super leery of working here. Corporate bullshit all the way down.
An NDA can’t ever block discussing itself - I know because I had to sign an NDA in perpetuity covering who the other signatory was on a different NDA also in perpetuity. Everything subject to that inner NDA is now completely irrelevant, but the companies involved still definitely exist and are just as litigious as ever.
I later went on to design some computer processing systems and storage systems related to US Healthcare tracking which is mostly not covered by an NDA, though the work is proprietary and not shareable, and it’s much more worthy of the crazy NDA I signed in my twenties. NDAs are much more about who and less about what - if you’re working restocking vending machines with Suisse Credit, you’ll probably need to sign an NDA… but a more modest company doing legitimately secret stuff usually doesn’t care.
You can always always discuss any contract with a lawyer. It is incredibly illegal to try and bar someone from seeking a professional opinion on a contract. If any company tries this then immediately reach out to a labor attorney.
In Illinois, where I am, NDAs aren’t enforceable unless they’re provided at least two weeks before the start of employment, so they can be reviewed by legal counsel. They have this one a week after I started, one of many ways it was unenforceable.
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