Google screws over its DoubleClick employees
It wasn’t long after Google acquired the advertising company DoubleClick for over $3 billion that it announced that it would be laying off 300 DoubleClick employees.
Now we learn that shortly before laying them off, Google required all DoubleClick employees to sign non-compete contracts, meaning that after leaving the company they couldn’t work for a competitor for a full year.
I really despise non-compete contracts for lower-level employees. If you’re the owner of a company and you get bought out and accept an offer, then I completely agree that the company buying out should have you sign such a contract. But forcing an employee who had no say whatsoever in the buyout process, an employee who has no financial stake in the company (other than the fact that it supplies his pay checks) and didn’t benefit from the buyout at all, to sign one of these contracts? I understand why it’s done but I also think it should be tough shit on the buyer’s part.
With the decline of the newspaper industry I think this is going to become a real problem. Just as those laid off DoubleClick employees won’t be able to take a job within the industry for at least a year, these newspaper reporters are getting screwed out of making legitimate career moves just because their publishers jumped ship.
I’ve had jobs here and there, and on some of them this non-compete deal was a part of the regular contract. So you sign a contract for a job and get this with it. Fair enough I suppose, if you don’t like it, you don’t have to accept the job. I never thought of the risk of a buyout when signing one of those though.
But what google did here was just plain dirty. And unneccesary. I’ve been a google fan for a very long time, and I’ve never been under the impression that they need dirty tricks to eliminate competition, just doing what they do really really good seems to have gone pretty well for them so far.
Who knew.
I understand the logic behind non-compete contracts, I just find them dirty in general because they restrict the mobility of lower-level employees.
it’s hard enforcing them except in high profile cases.
I’m not a fanatic about unions, but this would be a case where a labor union would play a constructive role.
Non competes are very hard to enforce in most states.
I don’t understand how Google made them do anything. Did the Google HR people pull knives, or threaten to make them listen to Maurice Chevalier recordings for hours on end? Seems unlikely. It seems more likely that Google offered them a package, and in return asked for a non-compete agreement. If the Double-Click soon-to-be-ex employees wanted to compete with Google, they could have skipped the package.
It’s not like one expects loyalty or fair dealing from an employer. We are all short-term employees, even the ones who have been at it for many years. We all serve at the pleasure of a supervisor who may not know an elbow from an asshole. In fact, after a decade at a job one is still less valuable to the organization than the new VP of engineering who showed up last week.
FWIW, non-compete clauses are enforceable in MA. It’s said to be one of the reasons we have not had the kind of high tech growth that CA has had. I don’t know, but that’s what the paper’s say.