Similar story:

My dad was part owner of the business which he got out of 10 years ago. The company went bust a couple years ago and the debt collectors started trying to get what they could.

One of those was a laundry service that would wash uniforms of the employees. My dad had signed the contract for it 25+ years ago to start the account going. On the contract it stated my dad was personally liable for owed fees. But when he originally signed it, he crossed out those 2 words (personally liable) and turned it over signed.

He pointed this out to the debt collectors when they came knocking and they stopped bothering him.

"Lesson: Read the contract."

I did a year of law school, then left because I was miserable and it was too much money to be miserable for. I did, however, take contracts, and I cannot stress this enough. Read the contract. Read it again. Anything that looks off, ask about. It might be innocent, standard, or something you don't need to worry about, but it might be important. As you mention, it's also a great signal about the intentions of the other party. Finally, anytime someone tells you something is "standard" in a contract, it's bullshit. "Standard" lease agreements (the ones you can get by Googling) regularly contain unenforceable language. The only standard elements a contract needs are: an offer, an acceptance, mutual assent to be legally bound by the terms, and consideration (the promise of an exchange of value for something else of value). Anything else in the contract doesn't have to be there.

This depends on where you are. Quebec, for example, has a single standard residential apartment lease. It's written by the Régie du logement so everything in it is, by definition, enforceable.

Quebec, once again, is a special exception.

Many state "Association of Realtors" have "standard" contracts they recommend. They might be a bit biased toward the landlord, but have been refined over time to be generally acceptable by all parties and take into account state and local law.

I have renegotiated terms of almost all my freelance contracts. Usually, a non-compete was the main culprit. Generally, the non-competes don't come from the client, but from a mediator that wants to prevent me from bypassing them and working directly for the client, which is fair. But sometimes they're still ridiculously broad. For example: I'd already worked for a major bank, quit that project because of a new baby, and when I looked for a new project, found one at the same bank through a different recruitment agency. They wanted a non-compete on all my work for that bank. That was obviously not fair, so I got it reduced to only the department where I would be working. I'd be free to work for any other department.

I once had a contract like this, but it was for office space.

In the contract, it stated that if I didn't show up for more than a week (I had to let them know in advance), my landlord would own everything inside.

When I questioned it, they told me it was 'boiler plate' and told me to find another place to rent.

I found another place within two days that had a better location, free Internet access, and a fantastic contract.

It's a state law, but I would be shocked if there were any state where that term was legally enforceable. I live in Massachusetts, and I would LOVE it if, after a 9 day vacation, my landlord started selling my belongings. The lawsuit would, not only be lucrative, but fantastically entertaining.

Do you (or anyone else) have advice for people who are employees? What do I do if Large Company X wants to hire me and they hand me their standard contract -- with me being a mid-level engineer of no note (and thus no real leverage).

The first thing -- and this is critical -- is understand that you could be held to each and every clause of the agreement you sign. So don't sign anything that you don't want to do, unless you're down to I need a job or I can't eat levels of desperation.

Your leverage is you can decline the offer.

I had, btw, a former google manager who got funded by a16z slip a clause into an offer agreement that said if I conducted any business on my personal media device (ie phone), they had the unlimited right to search it on demand. Obviously there was no way I'd agree to that, so putting work gmail on my phone was right out. But what if texting me on the weekend meant conducting business? They'd also left in language backdating the employment agreement (presumably because it was an update for existing employees), so as written it would have extended to before our phone screen... which I took on my cell phone. I don't work for them because the ceo said his lawyer insisted on it, I responded that the lawyer works for the ceo (not the other way around), he said blah blah blah, I told him he was a liar. The clause was on him and if he wouldn't forgo it he should at least have had the integrity to stand up and say I want this. And that was that.

I've also lost a job in nyc at the written offer stage because new company's counsel determined it would have violated my noncompete with old employer. These aren't empty words you're signing. CA mostly bans them and it's really important to employees, because right or wrong, you really don't want to get caught in the middle of a pissing match with people who have company-funded lawyers.

What if you just don't tell your old company anything?

How are they going to enforce a non-compete if they think you are unemployed, but you actually aren't?

If you need a reference?

If I were in that position I'd markup the contract sections that I was concerned with and send it to my HR contact. Some will be happy to accept changes, some will negotiate the terms, and some will say "standard contract or no contract". I can't imagine any HR person ending the relationship just because you ask.

At that point, it's really up to you to weigh the specifics of the offer and the drawbacks of any contract terms they won't budge on.

Hiring is fairly expensive, and if you've gotten to the point where you've got an offer along with a contract you're fairly far into the process. You don't have a ton of leverage, but you definitely have more than 0 leverage.

You can try to make whatever changes to the contract are important to you but ultimately you have to evaluate your desire for the job vs. how restrictive the non-compete is likely to be on the day you want to move on.

In spite of the various folks on here saying you "should never sign a non-compete" that's bench advice that isn't necessarily especially helpful. In my case, quite a few years ago my company was acquired by another (MA company that is very pro non-competes; you can probably guess who if you follow the space). We were given non-competes to sign (that, in my case at the time wasn't really very restrictive).

We had a choice of signing in the sense of we could sign or we could walk out the door. Perhaps I could have walked out the door for abstract principle but, frankly, that wouldn't have been very sensible.

They might have said you would walk out the door, but the reality is that they would have been firing you and that would have been a whole can of worms for them.

Except not really. It would have been "So, sue us." It's not even clear that you would have a case; you're just having to sign an agreement that already applies to all current employees. In any case, is it really worth spending 10s of K$ to fight them?

I interpreted CyberDildonics' comment differently. It may be structured as "sign or walk out the door", but that sounds like "sign this or quit." But in truth, it's "sign this or we fire you".

Depending on local laws, this may make you more (or less - I am not a lawyer and have no experience in this field!) likely to get unemployment benefits.

The point is, the company wants you to quit and quitting is different than being fired. Unemployment benefits, severance, insurance, visas etc are all things that may be different if the company fires you. When they say 'there is the door' they are misdirecting people from the fact that the real alternative choice will cost the company a lot more money.

Certainly. My point is that "fairly minimal" for being fired is more than "none" for quitting.

Good luck. I've tried crossing out undesirable terms in the past at several Large Company Xs. The response is always "WTF is this? Sign the contract unmodified, or there's the door!" Of course, I was not looking forward to another 6 month job search, so I signed it.

> Good luck. I've tried crossing out undesirable terms in the past at several Large Company Xs. The response is always "WTF is this? Sign the contract unmodified, or there's the door!"

On the other hand, I had the experience as a junior employee of crossing out and initialing objectionable portions of a hiring agreement in NY and several years later having the corporation issue a new employee handbook and agreement with the passages in it. I again crossed them out and initialed it and returned the forms. I never heard a word.

You need to view the terms of the contract as part of the pay / benefits / conditions package that you consider before you take a job.

Very few people would accept a job before they found out what salary was on offer, and so you shouldn't accept a job before you've read the contract. It's all part of the same thing: "We will give you this much money, in return for you doing these things ..."

If you've been looking for work for a while and you've only received 1 offer then you'll probably accept it even if it pays less than you were hoping for, or if the contract has clauses you don't like. You take the best that you can get.

But if you've got a number of offers (or reasonably expect to have a number of offers) then you are probably willing to turn down a job (or negotiate) over salary, and you should do the same over contractual clauses.

If someone verbally offers you a job with a salary you're happy to take, it's perfectly reasonable to say "That all sounds fine, and I'll be happy to respond formally once I've had a chance to read a copy of the contract", but don't accept the job until you've received and read the contract, because that is the thing that you're actually agreeing to.

The last paragraph is gold. It's easy to forget to make acceptance conditional on seeing the contract in the excitement of getting hired.

I worked for IBM for a short while, in California. All of the agreements that I signed with them acknowledged that California law gave me special rights, and nothing in the contract could take away those rights. That's the kind of "Large Company X" that you want to work with.