Does this sound right?

[Drakkon]

Recently I've started looking for a new job and after getting all my ideas straight I talked to HR person where I currently work and was informed that I wouldn't be able to go and work for anyone that would be in competition with the company we are contracted with. So in other words I work for company X who is currently in a contract with Y. I cannot go to work for Y (due to X's non-compete) and i cannot work for any companies that are in competion with Y (due to contract non-compete). The problem with this is that I'm in such a unique field that finding jobs is slim and skill set so limited that any job i enjoy would be in direct competition with Y. Y is keeping a close eye on me as I was lead programmer for one of their top selling products - made over $1 mill this year so far- and 2 new products are going out this month with my name in them - and is big enough that i dont want to deal with their lawyers.

Does this sound right? How can i get stuck in a contract with company Y when working at company X without being informed? and how can it make it so i can compete without getting in trouble?

 

[MrWizzard]

If you are smart enough to make a product that makes over $1 Mill this year. Then you are smart enough to figure this out.

 

[GeekDrew]

Without being informed? There wasn't a non-compete clause in your contract?

 

[DaiShan]

Read the NC that you signed to see what it says. The HR person may be misinformed. Also, not that you would want to go through the hassle of challenging it, but if you are in a very unique field, the courts have held that in certain situations (where you legitimately cannot find other work that does not violate the non compete agreement) an NC can be ignored. A company cannot "blackball" you from an industry.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: Drakkon
Recently I've started looking for a new job and after getting all my ideas straight I talked to HR person where I currently work and was informed that I wouldn't be able to go and work for anyone that would be in competition with the company we are contracted with. So in other words I work for company X who is currently in a contract with Y. I cannot go to work for Y (due to X's non-compete) and i cannot work for any companies that are in competion with Y (due to contract non-compete). The problem with this is that I'm in such a unique field that finding jobs is slim and skill set so limited that any job i enjoy would be in direct competition with Y. Y is keeping a close eye on me as I was lead programmer for one of their top selling products - made over $1 mill this year so far- and 2 new products are going out this month with my name in them - and is big enough that i dont want to deal with their lawyers.

Does this sound right? How can i get stuck in a contract with company Y when working at company X without being informed? and how can it make it so i can compete without getting in trouble?

If you have a specific technical skillset, AFAIK you can generally work for a 'competitor' as long as you are not actually working on something that directly competes with what you used to work on. People have gone to court over non-compete agreements like this; the consensus seems to be that they can't completely bar you from using your technical skills, just from taking a new job where you would be essentially doing the same thing for a competitor.

Example: you're a hardware engineer at Intel working on CPUs. You can't go to AMD and work on their CPUs (since you have inside knowledge of Intel's CPUs and plans), but you could go to, say, NVIDIA and work on their GPUs or chipsets. Intel can't completely lock you out of the computer hardware industry on the basis that you used to work for them. I've heard of cases along these lines.

However, IANAL (and you should probably consult one if your company wants to play hardball on this.)