Contracts you should never sign
There&#x27;s this HN obsession with negotiating on non-competes. Here&#x27;s the problem. Say that I work for Acme Corp that makes Fancy Widgets for Bridgettes with 11 Digits and I&#x27;m hiring a software engineer. We put out the offer and give them time to respond. They come back saying they would like the offer to be $10k higher. No problem... As the hiring manager, I might already know that we have $10k leeway, or at the most, I&#x27;ll have to go ask someone a level or two above me.<p>Another candidate gets an offer and sees the non-compete clause (which is the same across all of Acme Corp&#x27;s 10k employees) and asks for that to be removed. As the hiring manager, what do I do? My boss leads a division but doesn&#x27;t have authority to change boilerplate contracts. Neither does her boss. So we need to go to Legal. But who do I reach out to there? The company&#x27;s general counsel doesn&#x27;t have time to deal with this. So I guess I start emailing around? Who do I go to who actually has the authority to change this? It becomes too much of a hassle and I turn candidate #2 away. Oh, and by the way, had candidate #2 signed the contract, they would have been banned from working for any other company whose business is primarily selling Fancy Widgets to people named Bridgette who have 11 fingers. It probably wouldn&#x27;t have been an issue anyway.<p>My point is that people sometimes overthink this. Yes, non-competes are bad. I&#x27;d argue that they are immoral and certainly bad policy. But not every non-compete is created equally and sometimes maybe you&#x27;d be better off negotiating for other things that might be easier to negotiate on and would be more useful anyway. If you are a software engineer, it&#x27;s often unlikely that you&#x27;d find yourself working for a direct competitor anyway.