> lots of of very smart, talented instructors take on these jobs to make ends meet while they look for something else that allows them to pursue their passions with their extensive educations.
My point is that you can't attract and retain top talent by offering low pay and no job security.
You are confirming said point by showing any person of talent taking this job is only for a short, temporary period while looking for something else.
From what I know, it's not that "people lie to themselves" about those terrible jobs, but more like the article describes: concerted effort by the employer to flood their reviews pool with inaccurate positive reviews, and muzzle accurate negative ones.
Some of the worst companies I ever encountered also had the best Glassdoor reviews and scores.
Sounds ironic, but makes perfect sense when you consider:
1. When a system is so easy to game simply by acting dishonestly, score will correlate with unscrupulous willingness to lie to your future workforce.
2. For these kinds of unscrupulous terrible employers, Glassdoor is seen as nothing more than an easy way to market themselves. Certainly cheaper than investing in your workforce, trying to make your employees happy, or fixing any of your real issues.
I'm fine going through tough technical interviews.
I'm not fine spending 3-5+ hours on some trivial coding task that can be gamed and was issued to me by folks who may not have even thoroughly checked my resume.
Given the current supply/demand curve, and the fact that top employers like FAANGs do not require this sort of time and effort (and for a good reason), I don't have to jump through that hoop.
How do you get senior candidates to spend any time and effort on submitting "work samples"?
I'm a senior engineer. Last time I interviewed, I received multiple offers from brand-name employers. None of them required any work samples, just hard technical interviews.
A few times I saw a small unknown company that piqued my interest. I talked to them. Occasionally one would require me to do some sort of a task.
Why would I do it?
I don't need to do any of that for the top employers in the market. Why would I spend hours of my time, and precious coding time, especially on some small company I never heard of before?
I haven't done that in years, and doubt I'll ever do it again. The only way you could get me to do it is if I was desperate for a job.
By requiring this sort of time and effort from candidates, you are screening out the best ones, those who can get multiple offers from great employers without jumping hoops for you.
Just something to remember the next time a startup CEO tells you that "we" have to "work hard and give up some of our compensation" to "make a positive change in the world".
> Why would a WeWork object to paying Neumann's rent? WeWork is bascially Neumann anyway! Why would Tesla object to buying Musk's other companies? Tesla is basically Musk anyway!
The shareholders do mind, because these actions may violate the CEO's fiduciary duty to act in their best interest. They can sue him for violating said duty.
Less relevant in WeWork's case, but very relevant in Tesla's case, since it's a public company, and in fact Tesla and Musk have been sued for neglecting their duties before:
> The entire image and “vibe” of this guy / his team is supposed to be an egalitarian re-invention of the status quo. The kibbutz story. The “community adjusted EBITDA.” The rebranding to “We.”
This is all just marketing. It's like believing all the actors in a commercial really are elated and blissful just because they chose the right brand of soda.
I apologize if I came across as overly harsh. I did look up your resume, and it does confirm my assertions. In fact, you are not directly contradicting any of them.
I made three assertions:
1. You will not be able to negotiate away non-compete clauses with large, powerful employers.
2. You may be able to negotiate them as a senior candidate for smaller companies.
3. Junior candidates will find it hard to negotiate their offers, including waiver of non-competes.
You agreed with my 1st assertion.
Your resume shows you to be a perfect example of the 2nd assertion. You are a senior engineer, an expert in his field, who worked in very senior technical roles in a series of small and very small companies. As such, you were in the best possible position to negotiate.
You seemed to dispute my 3rd assertion with your claim that you were able to negotiate non-competes away "early in your career", but your resume shows you took a Lead Programmer position in your very first year of full-time work. So you were never really a junior - you were a senior engineer working for small operations since the earliest stage of your career.
This is great for you, congratulations. It doesn't change the fact that your situation is unique, and doesn't generally apply. Not to most engineers, and certainly not to fast-food and similar unskilled workers mentioned in the article. These are people who don't have much money, really need the job, and often have limited choices in their area. They don't have the money to relocate, nor do they have leverage to negotiate.
So while I applaud you for being in the favorable position to negotiate away clauses since your first year of employment, I still caution against concluding that this is how it works for everyone else as well.
> Yes, you have to be good at your job and hard to replace before you make demands.
You are required to sign a non-compete before accepting the job. You cannot be "hard to replace" because you haven't started that job yet.
They won't even "replace" you - they just won't hire you!
> At any rate, I've had plenty of success striking all non-compete agreements
As I mentioned elsewhere, this is possible if you are a very strong senior candidate negotiating with relatively small employers who are desperate to hire you and don't have many alternative candidates.
At larger corporations, I've been told straight up that the non-competes are policy and won't be waived for anyone.
If you check the history of non-compete lawsuits, you'll find some very senior employees being sued, so this statements seem true.
What does "open source contributions" and "community work" have to do with non-compete clauses?
Non-competes prevent you from working for your employer's commercial competitors. I.E. if you leave Uber, you can't go work for Lyft.
Also, it's naive to assume you can just "sell" an employer on a contractual change that goes against their goals.
Saying "I'm a software engineer, and I plan to continue being a software engineer after we part ways, instead of waiting tables" also sounds like a strong "sell", but it does not work based on my experience.
It's not about convincing anyone, it's about power and who has it.
Of course. It also encourages competition, especially from new startups.
Imagine Facebook had to wait for a couple of years to be able to hire any senior engineers with the knowledge and skills to scale their services.
They would lose momentum, and quite possibly fail as their service would be constrained by severe scaling and reliability issues.
The reason Facebook and other unicorns were able to thrive in SV is because they were able to poach dozens of experienced engineers from other companies, that are all arguably its competitors.
If you like startups, non-competes are some of your worst enemies.
How about embargo of the EU, which currently pollutes at roughly the same rate?
Did you know that energy production in the US is overall more environmentally friendly than in Germany, for example?