William Chops Westfield wrote:
> On Dec 22, 2005, at 7:05 PM, Aaron wrote:
> 
>> "The Employee agrees to keep the company informed of his ideas and
>> suggestions towards the technical development of the lines of 
>> equipment to
>> be engineered, sold and/or managed by the Company.  [...]
> 
> Standard.  Better than some, since it expresses interest only in ideas
> related to the company's products.  It ought to be accompanied by a
> request for disclosure of any existing "inventions" that you are 
> claiming
> pre-date your employment...
> 
>> [no moonlighting]
> 
> I don't think I've seen one of those, though I vaguely require needing
> permission to do things outside of my first job (which was granted.)
> 
> 
>> ...the Employee agrees not to work directly for
>> any competitor of the Company ...
> 
> (Is this in the USA?)  As someone mentioned, this tends to be illegal.
> It also tends to be pursued only in really nasty cases involving the
> upper echelons, especially in sales (bigwig sales guy moves to new
> company and immediately starts bad-mouthing the old companies products
> to all his old contact list...)

Wasn't there a big stink between MS & Google? The MS employee left,
went to Google and the courts permitted it.

> It might be worth asking what happens if you want to modify portions
> of the agreement, but if you like the job and were planning spending
> most of your efforts toward the new company anyway, it probably isn't
> very important.  I haven't heard much about companies abusing this
> sort of agreement, although there are occasional issues over wholesale
> spin-offs where a significant group moves off to some new company with
> an idea that could have been implemented at the first company.  (and
> you KNOW how many internet startups are filled with ex-cisco employees!)

I signed a similar agreement with my employer. But I first asked
around to see what other thought about it. It turns out that the
company only is interested in products directly related to their
business (I have examples) and they've even funded start ups
for some of the employees. They do frown on moonlighting (taking
a second job) as I found out when I tried to get a part time
job at Radio Shack (wanted some extra Christmas money). BTW, Radio
Shack had the worst agreement I've ever seen. They wanted you to
sign away all your rights to them. Any idea, even if it's for
another employer was theirs. I told them that I can't sign that
agreement. They told me I can't have the job. I'll never work for
them.

> I don't think it's common for a company to show you the exact employment
> agreement before you start, though if you're planning on doing outside
> stuff it might pay to ask.  Stay at a company long enough and you'll
> probably be asked to sign agreements that have been modified or newly
> created long after your initial employment (like the "ethics agreement"
> here that says we can't put firefox on the company-owned laptops...  
> That
> created quite a bit of ... heat on some internal mailing lists!)

We've got that policy at work also. No Open Source! But the
company recently switched to Firefox as a supported browser.
RedHat is being used on various projects and I don't think
they have a clue to the stuff we've being using on our Unix
servers for the last 28 years.

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