Strange clause in Amazon's confidentiality/noncompetition agreement
Just taking a look at the documents from Amazon and see this: ``` During employment and for 18 months after the Separation Date, Employee will not, directly or indirectly, whether on Employee’s own behalf or on behalf of any other entity (for example, as an employee, agent, partner, or consultant), engage in or support the development, manufacture, marketing, or sale of any product or service that competes or is intended to compete with any product or service sold, offered, or otherwise provided by Amazon (or intended to be sold, offered, or otherwise provided by Amazon in the future) that Employee worked on or supported, or about which Employee obtained or received Confidential Information. ``` This (18 month after the separation) looks like a very broad restrictive clause which in my opinion can potentially prevent an SWE to do almost anything related to engineering. What do Amazon people think about it? People who are already in Amazon, do you also have such thing in your agreement and does it worry you?
It’s like a very common non-compete clause in financial industry. 18 months would be a maximum in this case. How long do they actually enforce, it depends. Usually you will get paid if they choose to enforce. But I never heard of any tech company ever enforce non-compete clauses. BTW California does not honor any non-compete agreement.
Google went after someone who left and took autonomous secrets to uber. That’s a recent example but yeah usually companies don’t go pursue it
Yeah that was some vp who downloaded gigabytes of trade secrets just before leaving. Most small fry nobody cares about.
Speaking from experience, Amazon won't negotiate NDA terms with individuals. I pushed back on several of their terms before and they just insisted it was their standard NDA and tried to down play the absurdly broad and one-sided terms (and this was just to interview on-site). So it's likely take it or leave it. I choose to leave it because it gave me the feeling they wouldn't treat employees well.
Idve thought most companies have the same boilerplate. I know ms does.
I've been on both sides of NDA discussions and boiler plate really means it includes any and everything in that one party's favor. It then takes negotiations to arrive at anything close to a fair and neutral agreement. Admittedly, an employee/candidate NDA is very different and less negotiable than a customer/partner NDA, but an onerius candidate NDA in my opinion means their interview process is all wrong.
The courts largely consider such unreasonable terms as unenforceable. Consult a lawyer familiar with that state's laws/case law to determine whether any specific clause is likely to cause you trouble in your situation, but my rule of thumb is anything that sounds unreasonable to you will probably sound the same to a court.
It reads rather over broad to me and potentially unenforceable. Amazon would argue that the limiting language makes it narrow enough to comply with non-compete jurisprudence, but I’m not confident it does. Further reading: https://thenoncompeteblog.com/2019/10/22/corporate-misuse-of-non-compete-agreements-as-insurance-against-ex-employee-claims/
As long as you aren’t stealing trade secrets you’ll be fine
This is the key: that the Employee worked on or supported, or about which Employee obtained or received Confidential Information.
Thank you for the answer. Technically every information I get in my current company is confidential. Also the way I see it, if I work on AWS, it looks like I can't work on Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure.
There are thousands of teams at AWS and a thousand services. I work at AWS but do not know any confidential data about any of the existing services (just the new service My team is building). So yeah I could go to azure or GCP or anywhere else as long as I’m not building that exact same service there