Quote: "Well yah, you can't work for a competitor"
We had an interesting one a few years ago. Our contract stated that we could not work for a competitor for upto 6 months after leaving our company. A friend of mine left and went straight to our most direct competitor. I mean they were so similar that not only did they do almost exactly the same thing, but their company came from a split in an old company. And the other company formed at the time was us. Even our systems (Over 6000 different programs) are almost identical upto a point (each company basically took tapes and printouts and rewrote the systems) and written in the same languages.
Anyways, our company took this bloke and the other company to court. For months he was not allowed to work at the new company and just stayed home. In the end the judge agreed with our company but said why 6 months? Why not 1 month, or 2 years for example? Our answers were not good enough and they won. Cost a bomb and he got paid (and damages probably) loads for ages playing games at home (they had to phone each day to make sure not at work, and in those days wouldn't have worked well from home on our system). Nice. Apparently it was a landmark case and we had the BBC with cameras at our doors and everything.
Also our contracts always said whatever programs we write while working there is the companies property. *Even* if it was written at home, *even* using languages we bought ourselves on our own computers, in our own time, even with languages that had nothing to do with our job (ie. never learnt them at work using their training) and even if we wrote something that was absolutely nothing to do with our job. Yeah, I'd like to see them hold that one up if it came down to it...
Another good one was whatever external course you get put on, then if you leave the company (ie. you choose to leave) then you have to pay a percentage of the cost of the course, which goes down over the years. This sort of makes sense, but is no good if they chuck you on something just for their benefit and did you little good and you don't use it. For example I went on a £20k ($50k) course for a week or two (was the 911 week so loads of fun. Plus my Granddad died, and we got bought out so lots of redundancies, so really didn't like that course) doing Cognos utilities (expensive MIS products). I knew all I needed to know but the company wanted me on them. Had I left the company that year I would have had to foot something like £15-18k of the original cost! Difficult to uphold that one too I bet. Bit different if you do an expensive network course and then leave to be a network manager directly afterwards (someone did that at our place).
Cheers
I am 99% probably lying in bed right now... so don't blame me for crappy typing
Current fave quote : "She was like a candle in the wind.... unreliable...."
