(Star those things about programmers)
Original: those things about programmers (ID: iProgrammer)
Everyone has heard of the case of losing money in violation of a competition agreement, but it is not common for a compensation amount of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Google engineer was sentenced to $179 million in compensation for violating the competition agreement.
Anthony (Anthony Levandowski) joined Google in 2007 and worked on the Google Street View team with Sebastian Thrun, the father of Google's self-driving cars.
Before leaving, he had basically been working on unmanned vehicle technology and should be a member of the core team. During the period, he established two related companies to do side projects, both of which were acquired by Google.
In January 2016, he left Google and founded the driverless startup Otto. In 2017, Otto was acquired by Uber. Later, there was a trade secret lawsuit between Waymo and Uber, a subsidiary of Google's self-driving car, and Anthony was the central figure.
According to TechCrunch, in December 2019, an arbitration panel ruled that Anthony and Ron (Lior Ron) had participated in unfair competition, violated their contract with Google, and left to start Otto, a competing self-driving car company.
On March 4, the San Francisco County Court in California confirmed this ruling. Ron reached a settlement with Google last month and paid $9.7 million in compensation (Tencent Technology reported on this matter, and Ron’s compensation was paid by Uber). However, Anthony challenged the ruling, but the San Francisco County Court has rejected his request.
Anthony may not have to pay the huge sum of money himself, because the responsibility may fall on his employer Uber, depending on the contract he signed.
However, Anthony filed for bankruptcy protection on March 5, saying that $179 million far exceeded his assets. Allegedly, its assets are between 50 million and 100 million US dollars.
Domestic engineer sentenced to compensation for breach of competition agreement
For the cases of domestic compensations, you can refer to " Former Baidu R&D Engineer Was Compensated for Violation of Competitive Agreement " in December 2018. The comments in the article are worth reading.
Competitive agreements are generally limited to these three types of employees:
Workers who are obliged to keep confidential;
Senior managers of the employer;
Senior technical personnel of the employer;
If you are not exposed to the company’s trade secrets, technical secrets, or you are not a company executive, then you are not obligated to sign a non-competition agreement. The law does not require employees to sign, but requires the company and employees to negotiate and sign, and companies cannot force employees to sign. Therefore, according to regulations, employees can refuse to sign.
The limitation period of the competition agreement cannot exceed 2 years. You can search for other related information by yourself.
In addition, the competition agreement is not a confidentiality agreement, so don't get confused.
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