Topics of Systems Administration
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@IRJ said in Topics of Systems Administration:
@travisdh1 said in Topics of Systems Administration:
@IRJ said in Topics of Systems Administration:
@scottalanmiller said in Topics of Systems Administration:
As my employer said at the time "You can't bag groceries in Oregon", that was their policy. No job, of any sort, anywhere in the country. Their policy was that they were a "US business" and "all US business" was a competitor. Clearly that doesn't work in court, but the number of people who had won against them were.... very few. Famously, two just did a few months ago. But it's taken that long.
Wow that is totally illegal and would never even stand up in court. Hell you could probably represent yourself in such a scenario and still win.
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I can almost guarantee they would not go after you if you went to another industry
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No way that is holding up in court. No way that takes 10 years to win. Maybe 10 weeks?
You do know how slow the courts are to react to anything, right? Also most people could never hope to pay a lawyer that could take on a company of that size no matter how wrong the company is.
You would have free attorneys lining up by thousands to take this case. Because it's that ludicrous.
Nope, none. It was super costly even without going to court. In the REAL WORLD, no one does this for free. This isn't a hypothetical case, I lived through it.
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@marcinozga said in Topics of Systems Administration:
@travisdh1 said in Topics of Systems Administration:
@IRJ said in Topics of Systems Administration:
@scottalanmiller said in Topics of Systems Administration:
As my employer said at the time "You can't bag groceries in Oregon", that was their policy. No job, of any sort, anywhere in the country. Their policy was that they were a "US business" and "all US business" was a competitor. Clearly that doesn't work in court, but the number of people who had won against them were.... very few. Famously, two just did a few months ago. But it's taken that long.
Wow that is totally illegal and would never even stand up in court. Hell you could probably represent yourself in such a scenario and still win.
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I can almost guarantee they would not go after you if you went to another industry
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No way that is holding up in court. No way that takes 10 years to win. Maybe 10 weeks?
You do know how slow the courts are to react to anything, right? Also most people could never hope to pay a lawyer that could take on a company of that size no matter how wrong the company is.
If the case was a sure win, you'd have lawyers lining up ready to work on contingency.
Exactly. That's how scary this is... a "really likely to win", but with insane costs between now and then. Losing everything is a pretty big risk, even if you are "really likely" to win big.
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@IRJ said in Topics of Systems Administration:
Yep assuming this was in NY (Wall St). It wouldn't even go to court.
https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/non-competes.pdf
From NY gov :
Are non-competes legal?
A non-compete is only allowed and enforceable to the extent it (1) is necessary to protect the
employer’s legitimate interests, (2) does not impose an undue hardship on the employee, (3) does
not harm the public, and (4) is reasonable in time period and geographic scope. An employer’s
legitimate interest may include protecting an employer’s trade secrets and confidential
information and preventing employees from taking specialized skills they gained on the job to a
competitor. A non-compete’s restrictions must be no greater than necessary to protect the
legitimate interests of the employer.
To determine if a non-compete is enforceable, courts consider an employee’s job duties, the
employer’s business interest, and the language of the agreement. A court will not enforce a non-
compete unless it determines the non-compete meets the criteria in the above paragraph.
A court may require an employee to comply with some parts of a non-compete agreement, even
if other portions of the agreement are unreasonable, such as length of time or geographic scope.
Generally, upon finding portions of a non-compete unreasonable, a court may invalidate the
agreement entirely or may enforce the agreement for a shorter time or in a smaller area.Not NY, not Wall St. Hence a huge part of the problem. That's why the industry doesn't use NY as its base, the enforcement of non-competes is part of the draw.
But to be sure, they threatened a giant NY firm and got them to rescind a job offer because of the lawsuit of the non-compete even in NY. So nothing you say changes that they managed to enforce it. The law has nothing to say on the matter, it's the threat of a lawsuit against an employer that does the actual damage.
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@IRJ said in Topics of Systems Administration:
@marcinozga said in Topics of Systems Administration:
@travisdh1 said in Topics of Systems Administration:
@IRJ said in Topics of Systems Administration:
@scottalanmiller said in Topics of Systems Administration:
As my employer said at the time "You can't bag groceries in Oregon", that was their policy. No job, of any sort, anywhere in the country. Their policy was that they were a "US business" and "all US business" was a competitor. Clearly that doesn't work in court, but the number of people who had won against them were.... very few. Famously, two just did a few months ago. But it's taken that long.
Wow that is totally illegal and would never even stand up in court. Hell you could probably represent yourself in such a scenario and still win.
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I can almost guarantee they would not go after you if you went to another industry
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No way that is holding up in court. No way that takes 10 years to win. Maybe 10 weeks?
You do know how slow the courts are to react to anything, right? Also most people could never hope to pay a lawyer that could take on a company of that size no matter how wrong the company is.
If the case was a sure win, you'd have lawyers lining up ready to work on contingency.
yep
Exactly, and they weren't. It was full price and VERY hard to find someone willing and able to do it. Had to find a specialty lawyer as non-competes like this are super unique.
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@IRJ said in Topics of Systems Administration:
@IRJ said in Topics of Systems Administration:
Are non-competes legal?
A non-compete is only allowed and enforceable to the extent it (1) is necessary to protect the
employer’s legitimate interests, (2) does not impose an undue hardship on the employee, (3) does
not harm the public, and (4) is reasonable in time period and geographic scope.Well it fails (1), (2), and (4)
yup, all sounds nice. But we are talking real world here. And common law says that the judge decides the case based on his opinion not the written law. There's no such thing as a guaranteed win in the US and with deep pockets, any case can be drawn out.
All of those reasons were considered "really likely" to protect me, eventually. But none of them do anything for you when you have to pay a lawyer to defend you in court.
I think you've never dealt with a corporate lawsuit where they have money to burn. It sounds nice to show NY law codes and say that they mean X, but given that it's not NY and that what the law "means" is anyone's opinion, that doesn't matter. What matters is that lawyers are expensive, court cases are risky, and the potential damage is staggering.
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For reference, a hedge fund LOSING a non-compete is so uncommon, that it makes the news. Nothing that makes the news like this, involving two employees, is ever a "guaranteed win". This is an "unlikely win that astounded people."
https://www.pionline.com/courts/bridgewater-loses-case-against-former-employees
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@marcinozga said in Topics of Systems Administration:
@travisdh1 said in Topics of Systems Administration:
@IRJ said in Topics of Systems Administration:
@scottalanmiller said in Topics of Systems Administration:
As my employer said at the time "You can't bag groceries in Oregon", that was their policy. No job, of any sort, anywhere in the country. Their policy was that they were a "US business" and "all US business" was a competitor. Clearly that doesn't work in court, but the number of people who had won against them were.... very few. Famously, two just did a few months ago. But it's taken that long.
Wow that is totally illegal and would never even stand up in court. Hell you could probably represent yourself in such a scenario and still win.
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I can almost guarantee they would not go after you if you went to another industry
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No way that is holding up in court. No way that takes 10 years to win. Maybe 10 weeks?
You do know how slow the courts are to react to anything, right? Also most people could never hope to pay a lawyer that could take on a company of that size no matter how wrong the company is.
If the case was a sure win, you'd have lawyers lining up ready to work on contingency.
So here is someone who fought the non-compete. Thankfully they won so the info went public. Their lawyers cost them $2 million!
$2m is a lot to have to spend to "hopefully win". Now they won, and won big. But they took a gamble, one that for someone with little kids, it's pretty hard to take. But you don't fight these guys with free lawyers, even if any existed, because any mistake and you lose literally everything.
Normal people can't just pay $2m to fight a company like this, but that's what it takes. If you don't have that kind of money, your "unenforceable non-compete" is essentially iron clad. That's how US law works. If you can't afford to fight it, no rights apply to you. Just how it is. We can't claim the law is on our side all we want, but until we can afford the attorneys and court costs and risks, it doesn't even exist for us.
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They also got busted for falsifying evidence. This kind of stuff increases the risks if they lose, but makes it far harder to fight when you go to court and they make false claims.
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And it's truly crazy to think that hedge funds like this would be willing to enforce non-competes if losing was so easy. They'd lose out of hand over and over again. But they don't. Sure, they lose once in a while, but mostly they win. Their win by either making it impossible to fight, to scary to fight, or just too likely to be drawn out so long that it's a loss no matter what happens. And remember, no company can safely employee you until you win, because they are named in lawsuits, too. So hiring someone fighting a non-compete is completely insane as you take on an absurd amount of risk for "no reason". No employer, anywhere, will knowingly hire someone with a non-compete case going on. And before you say "just don't tell them", they get served by a lawyer before you start - they always know.
Hedge funds will do this because it works, over and over again. Their tactics either win often enough, or draw out cases long enough, to get people to settle or whatever. They only need to drag out the court case the length of the non-compete (which doesn't take much in the US legal system) to win, then they can quickly make a settlement with a gag order and walk away having won. Sure, costs them some money, but money that they consider well spent.
They'd not do this if they and their teams of lawyers didn't think that it was working and would continue to work. So when we say "this would never work", remember that it does work, all the time, and highly paid legal professionals advice it because it's so effective.
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@scottalanmiller said in Topics of Systems Administration:
For reference, a hedge fund LOSING a non-compete is so uncommon, that it makes the news. Nothing that makes the news like this, involving two employees, is ever a "guaranteed win". This is an "unlikely win that astounded people."
https://www.pionline.com/courts/bridgewater-loses-case-against-former-employees
This is not an apples to apples comparison. Those two guys left and started their own competing hedge fund. And they took one of Bridgewater's clients.
This is completely different.
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@stacksofplates said in Topics of Systems Administration:
@scottalanmiller said in Topics of Systems Administration:
For reference, a hedge fund LOSING a non-compete is so uncommon, that it makes the news. Nothing that makes the news like this, involving two employees, is ever a "guaranteed win". This is an "unlikely win that astounded people."
https://www.pionline.com/courts/bridgewater-loses-case-against-former-employees
This is not an apples to apples comparison. Those two guys left and started their own competing hedge fund. And they took one of Bridgewater's clients.
This is completely different.
Not really, it's slightly different, but it was still two people who weren't competing and didn't do anything wrong and they were sued anyway, and information was falsified. The part that matters (that they had a non-applicable non-compete that was enforced anyway) was the same.
I had no way to take their clients, because I wasn't going into sovereign trading, and therefore was a different industry, prop rather than sovereign, but their claims were the same - nearly identical. So the case I was having to deal with was essentially this one exactly. And I wasn't starting my own firm exactly, but there were startup similarities.
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Something that's important to also consider is that most states require "compensation" be considered in non-competes. If you are being paid $8/hr, a non-compete is worthless no matter what it says. You can work for McDonald's and go to Burger King across the street, doing the same job and if you were making $8, nearly any state will nullify the non-compete then and there, no questions asked.
But when you reach a certain pay threshold, it's considered like executive pay and non-competes carry staggering weight. The available scope of the non-compete scales with pay and position. And there are things that are done to try to make them matter more. Like, in my case, false claims of access to data were made. Not that I had accessed data that I shouldn't have, but only that they couldn't prove I hadn't had access to data that they felt shouldn't get out and that they claimed "any business could leverage."
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@scottalanmiller said in Topics of Systems Administration:
@stacksofplates said in Topics of Systems Administration:
@scottalanmiller said in Topics of Systems Administration:
For reference, a hedge fund LOSING a non-compete is so uncommon, that it makes the news. Nothing that makes the news like this, involving two employees, is ever a "guaranteed win". This is an "unlikely win that astounded people."
https://www.pionline.com/courts/bridgewater-loses-case-against-former-employees
This is not an apples to apples comparison. Those two guys left and started their own competing hedge fund. And they took one of Bridgewater's clients.
This is completely different.
Not really, it's slightly different, but it was still two people who weren't competing and didn't do anything wrong and they were sued anyway, and information was falsified. The part that matters (that they had a non-applicable non-compete that was enforced anyway) was the same.
I had no way to take their clients, because I wasn't going into sovereign trading, and therefore was a different industry, prop rather than sovereign, but their claims were the same - nearly identical. So the case I was having to deal with was essentially this one exactly. And I wasn't starting my own firm exactly, but there were startup similarities.
I'm sorry, what? So you're saying that two employees who leave and start a competing hedge fund, possibly take a client, bridgewater having 9 months of discussions with them privately before even opening the arbitration process is only slightly different than a Sr Unix system administrator leaving the company?
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@stacksofplates said in Topics of Systems Administration:
@scottalanmiller said in Topics of Systems Administration:
@stacksofplates said in Topics of Systems Administration:
@scottalanmiller said in Topics of Systems Administration:
For reference, a hedge fund LOSING a non-compete is so uncommon, that it makes the news. Nothing that makes the news like this, involving two employees, is ever a "guaranteed win". This is an "unlikely win that astounded people."
https://www.pionline.com/courts/bridgewater-loses-case-against-former-employees
This is not an apples to apples comparison. Those two guys left and started their own competing hedge fund. And they took one of Bridgewater's clients.
This is completely different.
Not really, it's slightly different, but it was still two people who weren't competing and didn't do anything wrong and they were sued anyway, and information was falsified. The part that matters (that they had a non-applicable non-compete that was enforced anyway) was the same.
I had no way to take their clients, because I wasn't going into sovereign trading, and therefore was a different industry, prop rather than sovereign, but their claims were the same - nearly identical. So the case I was having to deal with was essentially this one exactly. And I wasn't starting my own firm exactly, but there were startup similarities.
I'm sorry, what? So you're saying that two employees who leave and start a competing hedge fund, possibly take a client, bridgewater having 9 months of discussions with them privately before even opening the arbitration process is only slightly different than a Sr Unix system administrator leaving the company?
Yes, that's what I'm saying. The non-compete claims were extremely similar. Really, once you are a C-suite executive, the rest is background noise in a court case. If I had had access to the data that they falsified, I'd certainly have been in a position to use it, anywhere. There were lies and not something I'd agreed to, but that's not provable.
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@stacksofplates said in Topics of Systems Administration:
So you're saying that two employees who leave and start a competing hedge fund, possibly take a client, bridgewater having 9 months of discussions with them privately before even opening the arbitration process is only slightly different than a Sr Unix system administrator leaving the company?
I had months of talks too. And it was 2014, not 2013. These guys got drawn out for seven years, even paying $2m to their attorneys. That I was a UNIX admin actually makes it worse because, according to the fund, admins have potentially unlimited access to data to take elsewhere as IT is the keeper of all data. So their claim was that IT, especially UNIX admins having access to more than anyone else in the company, could never go anywhere for risk of disclosing something that they'd seen.
So yeah, it's different. Worse, in fact. According to them.
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Think about this.... even if I had $2m to blow, and if I was able to settle as quickly as these guys, I'd still have another 6-9 months of being unemployed, unemployable and being destitute! It's been SO long since I was there. So much of life has passed by. To think that I'd have been completely screwed all this time and doing nothing but fighting a court case that I was only "pretty likely" to win, that's crazy. I can only guess that you are not internalizing how scary and impossibly hard this is to fight when you can't get hired and you have to keep paying a lawyer; but this conversation is showing just how bad it would have been. I'd likely be looking at years yet, with little hope left as the money would have been long gone.
It's a war of attrition. All you need is to run out of money and not be able to pay the lawyers, and you lose. And they can afford to pay for forever, if they have to. They have zero need to ever see the process end.
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I was thinking "what is a Sys Admin" but guessing from the topics you can see what one does.
I always get confused what "duties" people associate with all the different titles in IT
e.g. I'm down as being Infrastructure/Network Manager. But in peoples views where do my duties start and end?
(But maybe this is for another topic) -
@hobbit666 said in Topics of Systems Administration:
I was thinking "what is a Sys Admin" but guessing from the topics you can see what one does.
Kind of, but I think it's worth explaining (and it's in my outline draft already.) It's actually in the preface.
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@hobbit666 said in Topics of Systems Administration:
I always get confused what "duties" people associate with all the different titles in IT
Well, there are titles and roles. Titles are all but meaningless. Roles are, in theory, very concrete. For example, the title of System Admin, as you can see from the discussion, means literally nothing. People who've never touched a server can get the title. People who don't know what it means, get the title. Titles are given by managers who, rarely, know anything about IT and even more rarely, care. Titles are about politics.
Example: I could get a job that title's me "Server, MD" because they think it sounds cool or funny. Or even a title like "Dark Overlord of the Universe". These are all legit, true, and legal.
Roles describe what you do. If you are a children's book author full time, but tell people you are a car mechanic, we all understand that that would be lying even if you changed your oil a few times a year. System Administration is a title so clear it shouldn't require much explanation. System is short of "operating system" and admin is a generic English word that refers to someone who manages or oversees a thing (rather than someone who designs it.) For example, an office manager runs an office, but doesn't necessarily design or staff that office, they are in charge of running what exists by role. So a System Admin is a term for the person who manages the running operating systems (presumably of servers, but that's not actually a requirement) of a business or organization. Like all roles, no one does one role 100% of the time, not even a doctor or lawyer, everyone wears another hat now and then. We consider it acceptable to refer to yourself as a role (outside of a joking context) when it is something you do at very least as your modal average task, but broadly as your median average task, and universally when it's about the 80-85% of your roles tasks. Going with modal alone is not very accepted because there are terms for those people where they aren't median. Of course, this all assumes removing "non-role time" before considering (idle time, coffee time, lunch, office banter, etc.)
Example: Claiming to be "Server, MD" or "Dark Overlord of the Universe" as your actual role would violate not only the truth and ethics, but would be illegal (like you claim it under oath, in a court filing, to the IRS, to another job, etc., and in some cases can't claim it at all).
Exception: System Engineers in the state of Oregon are banned by law from using their actual role in any description because of an arcane anti-truth law about engineering titles likely created by a university or union.
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I am serious. And don't call me Shirley.
