Have you ever worked for a company that didn't ask you to sign one?
That's not rhetorical, I'm curious--it seems that virtually every company has some amount of proprietary information, isn't that what drives competitive advantage in software?
I signed them when I was younger, but have been able to avoid them since a couple of years. In my opinion, the law should be enough in most cases.
Recently I was offered a good and well-paying job. Late in the recruitment phase there was this far-reaching NDA I would have to sign. I asked to be given two days to read and evaluate it, which apparently labeled me as someone very strange, I should just flip through it in 10 seconds and sign like everybody else.
Two days later when I questioned their HR/Legal about some of the clauses they got very uncomfortable, and tried to avoid making a big deal out of them, saying it was "standard" and "at this site, they had never taken anyone to court based on it".
I didn't sign, and hence they could no longer offer me the job. Oh well, their loss, they would have to do without the value I could provide to their business.
> That's not rhetorical, I'm curious--it seems that virtually every company has some amount of proprietary information, isn't that what drives competitive advantage in software?
Very rarely in the software side IME. Software is basically a commodity at this point - sure, there are better and worse ways to write it, but given the requirements and UI, any vaguely competent company could implement it in comparable timeframes. Competitive advantage tends to lie either in a faster turnaround time on making changes (but there's no secret to how you do that - hire good programmers and keep your codebase clean - taking a competitor's code is not going to help with this), or in the non-software side of the business (client relationships etc.)
That's not rhetorical, I'm curious--it seems that virtually every company has some amount of proprietary information, isn't that what drives competitive advantage in software?