non compete clause on RSU agreement
I was in the interview process of amazon, and I heard that Amazon's employment contract says you can't join Amazon's competitors 18 months after leaving and everyone has to sign to be able to work at Amazon. Does Amazon's RSU agreement also have the non compete clause? What about other companies' practices? like Google, FB,uber? is that illegal in CA? #tech #amazon #facebook #uber
Amazon does indeed have an 18 month non compete agreement, but despite the scary sounding legal language it doesn't really limit your options too much. It's pretty specifically scoped to direct competition of the specific things you worked on. So if you worked on Prime Video you might run into trouble doing the exact same thing at Netflix for example, but it has to be a very direct match. If you're moving to a company in another domain and not working on the exact same services to directly compete with Amazon you'll be fine. Also, despite the agreement, Amazon would have to actually enforce it to mean anything to you personally. I can't imagine what would drive Amazon to actually pursue enforcement for random engineers leaving. This is the kind of thing that might be looked at if you're super high level and being poached by a direct competitor, but otherwise rarely even gets considered.