Dude, you got a Dell lawyer: HPE sues high-flying ex-exec after defection to EMC HPE is suing a former senior executive who absconded to Dell with a head allegedly full of trade secrets. In a complaint [PDF] filed to the Delaware State Chancery Court, HPE alleges that KC Choi, the departed Vice President of Global Solutions Architecture, violated a 12-month non-compete agreement when he fled to EMC just …
Exactly. These non-competes are almost never enforceable. I can't think of a single high profile case where someone has been told they cannot work for another competitive company. It is just a scare tactic. HPE is probably looking to claw back some cash.... It is especially ridiculous for first level employees who don't not have any strategic IP. At will employment. If the corporations don't like it, they shouldn't have set up the system that way.... The corporations want it both ways though. Supreme loyalty from employees, but zero loyalty towards employees.
".....These non-competes are almost never enforceable....." Tell that to Dave Donatelli and Dave Johnson. The former was forced to work in a non-storage part of HP for a year by his old employer, EMC. The higher up you are the more likely you will have a non-compete and the much more likely your employer will take action if you swan off to a competitor.
LinkedIn has him in California so it will be unenforceable. It not only depends where the company is but where the employee lives/works as well. One HP exec did a nice one moving from Houston, Texas - where non-competes are enforceable - to California - where they are not - prior to jumping to Cisco. HP sued and lost.
Generally there has to be some consideration, in the legal sense, in place to make the non-compete enforceable. They cannot just hand you a non-compete and make you sign it. Most states look for the parties to have equal negotiating power, which is almost never the case in a "sign this or you're fired" situation. If they say, "here is x dollars in a bonus, if you take it you must stay for two years and not compete for one year after leaving", then it may be enforceable... depending on the state. Generally though worst case is that you will have to pay back the x dollars. That is what happened with Hurd and Oracle, HP. Hurd had to pay back, give up a portion of his stock grants, etc, but was then allowed to work at Oracle. He may have been able to fight that as well, but Oracle probably just wrote him a check for the amount he was giving up.
I have worked for IBM. I would rather work for IBM again than HPE. Not that IBM is without its problems, but IBM's managers are pretty standard "shareholder value" executives. "Cut our way to prosperity" management. HP has gone from train wreck to train wreck for the last 15 years. Autonomy, Compaq, Mercury, Voodoo, EDS, Palm. I have no idea what HPE's strategy is... what this guy supposedly has key insight into. They just spun out services, basically the remains of EDS. They are selling off software. I guess they are just going to sell commodity servers and storage as the cloud providers slowly eat away at that business... and that is it.
HP has no ethics whatsoever. I was there for 3 years.... when I hit 141% of my sales quota and hit bonus accelerators. Then HP came back 30 days AFTER the fiscal year end and told me they made an error in my quota. They retroactively increased my quota bringing me down to 101% from 141%. Yes I sued them after I left and got my $ back.
I worked for KC Choi's organization. In my 33 years, KC is in the top two most professional people I a have ever met in this business. KC is extremely respectable and treats those below him equally. KC can talk to customers at all levels. I would work for him at any corporation on the planet. Meg Whitman and another VP I know at HP are perhaps the worst people I have ever met. After all they invented the legal means of Age discrimination that HPE now executes to be rid of anyone 40+ yrs of age. Screw HPE, Arrogant bastards. What kills me is how many robots at HPE believe KC would even think about disclosing the information. They assume they are the only HPE has the knowledge. People who know him, wold trust him with their life.
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