Thread by @dvassallo

You can tell that your employer is an abusive coward when your employment contract restricts you from working wherever you want after you leave your job. The wealthiest person on earth is one such wimp! 🐔

Some people are saying that these clauses are known upfront before joining. Well, that wasn't the case for me when I joined Amazon.

Let me tell you how Amazon squeezed non-competitive clauses into my contract about 2 years into my job in a very unethical manner: 👇

So, I joined Amazon in Nov 2010, in Dublin Ireland. In Europe, and in some states in the US, employment restrictions after job termination are illegal. So my original contract had no restrictions on what I could do after my job ended.

Then on April 2012, I got promoted to Level 5, and signed a new Confidentiality and Invention agreement. Once again, since I was still in Dublin, it contained no post-job restrictions.

A month later, I got an offer to move to Seattle. The offer letter explicitly said that my existing employment terms and conditions will remain unchanged, except for becoming an employee-at-will (i.e. the company can fire me without reason, which is illegal in EU). Fine with me.

I accepted the offer, and I entered the US on an L1B visa on Jul 29 2012, subject to my employment at Amazon. The next morning I went through Amazon's "new hire" orientation in order to get my employment eligibility verified.

Over there they asked me to sign a new NONCOMPETITION agreement. I said that I wasn't expecting any changes in my employment contract, and that I hadn't seen this new agreement before. The Amazon person told me that I should have gotten it with my job offer package.

I explained that I wasn't a new hire, and I never received the new contract. But they insistent that this was standard and non-negotiable, and if I didn't sign right there, they would not be able to authorize my employment.

So I signed. Because what other options did I have?

The new agreement added a bunch of restrictions on where I could work, and who I could work with, for up to 18mo after my job ended.

These cowards are so scared that they believe they need this shit to retain their employees. And they forced this on me in a very unethical way.

When I left my job last Feb, they conveniently packaged all my contracts in 1 PDF, and reminded me that these will survive beyond my job termination. So, to make my case, I hereby present all the evidence. This is what you'll get into if you join Amazon: dvassallo.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/twitter/Daniel…