"Yes, you can quit and work somewhere else"

How exactly will it help when all employers adopt stupid and evil clauses in their contracts? Because that's what they do. Legal documents ("best practices") seem to circulate between companies, growing more bulk with each round. There's no place in this process for the consideration of employees' wishes. There can't be because legal department is famously isolated from the rest of the company and only cares about covering their own ass. They don't care about productivity. They don't care about happiness. They only care about having all bases covered. So I don't see why they won't grab every right from you that they can without violating the law.

If the law is where they stop, then there should be the law and nothing else. There's no reason for all those contracts-writing people to be employed.

I think for many people it's going to be hard to fulfill the following:

> ... except for those inventions that either: (1) relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer’s business, or actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of the employer ...

As a programmer, there's not a lot I can do that is going to be considered wholly unrelated to what I'm employed for... at least it would be murky enough that the employer would have a good court case. This is infinitely more so for anyone working with Google, Apple, or any other company that has got their fingers in everything.

xugle, it seems your account got caught by the reapers. I found your comment to be informative, so it must have been some sort of mistake.

>Yes, you can quit and work somewhere else.

As if people always have that luxury. What if most companies in your field (e.g computer games) follow similar practices? "Go work at another field"? Why fell prey and bow down, looking for work elsewhere, and not try to change the system instead?

If a company didn't allow black or gay employees would that be acceptable, and people be told to just "work somewhere else"? I think not, people would revolt and try to change the laws so that the company cannot do that. Why should BS NDAs be any different?

People forget that:

a) we're not necessarily talking about the top 1% of employees companies fight over, but also for the rest 99% of the people, that don't have an upper hand in negotiations and don't always have the luxury of moving around, staying out of a job long enough to find a better one, etc.

b) we're not necessarily talking about a "seller's market" such as programming

c) even if we did (b), we're not necessarily talking about now and the Valley, but also about times and places where unemployment is rampant.

I'm with you, though you're fighting a pointless battle on HN, a great bastion of the privileged who don't even know their own privilege. They are young, male, predominantly white with knowledge that is (almost always) accidentally gained in a field of absurdly high demand.

99.9% of the world doesn't have the leverage we do. The amount of clucking and tsk-tsk-ing HNers do at the rest of the world is sickening.

This entire "well duh, quit" argument is the employment equivalent of "let them eat cake".

It's not a pointless battle. There are two possible reactions to any such post: engagement, which provides the possibility of changing the other person's mind, or disengagement, which at minimum gave you a little practice at making your point. The cost is the time and energy expended to write the post in the first place; as long as that doesn't outweigh either possibility, it's not pointless.

Not every company in your field is going to have contracts like that, I can pretty much guarantee that if you are willing to work for a smaller company you can negotiate something. And I did quit my job because we were bought by a larger company with a contract I didn't like just this summer. It's quite possible I'd be making more money if I hadn't restricted myself in this way, but, well, integrity is worth something. Also, what do you mean that being a programmer isn't a seller's market. Unemployment in our industry is just 2.5 percent!

I believe the point was that programming is a seller's market, so the ease with which someone like you may be able to switch jobs doesn't necessarily translate to other industries.

But even for programming, who says there's always another company doing the same work in your area that's hiring? Unemployment may be low for us, and telecommuting may be a valid option for many, but it seems easy to suggest there are practically infinite possibilities for programmers when the list can actually be pretty small depending on your geographic location, resume/skill set, and a variety of other personal factors.