How strict is Nike about enforcing a non-compete agreement? I was offered a position with a competitor and I don’t want it to come back and bite me where the sun doesn’t shine if I accept. The pay and benefits are slightly better than what I am getting now but I don’t want to take it if there is even a slight chance that the company will take action.
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had a non compete and started to work for adidas. sr. Director level move, and nothing happened.
You have to read the NDA/Noncompete agreement you signed when you started. A few years ago it said that if Nike chooses to enforce it they will pay you 50% of your Nike salary for a year.
When you quit, you do not need to say why or if or where you are going to be working next.
Within a few days of your last day, you should hear from Nike Legal letting you know if they choose to enforce the non-compete or that it's being waived.
The advice on this forum ranges from legitimately useful and well meaning to downright terrible. Let's be clear, damaging or destroying company property is illegal and a major flag that you are trying to hide something. They can and will recover the data from your phone and laptop even after you think you've trashed it (forensic data recovery is a thing and while expensive, it does work). Also, just deleting files (regardless of hardware damage) can be considered something leaving you open to enforceable action since your work product is also company intellectual property. Regardless, any large corporation will have remote backups of everything on your laptop and phone so it's pointless to try to erase your files. They already have them.
This is a bait question by the HR wh–es.
They sew veiled threats, put the we will sue you into the ground.
At your new job, have them put into your employment contract, the proviso that if your current employer sues you, that they pay for legal representation, and that you are still paid two years, regardless of any injunctive actions.
This is the Silicon Valley way, where they take this sh**t very seriously.
If you do not live in a house, find a new apartment, quietly move, tell no one, in the moving, review everything you pack, if it says Nike, throw it out. Take your current laptop or Apple toy, wipe it clean. Take the machine, plunge it in your tub for one hour, take it out, drain it in the sink, Screen hinge up.
Tell Nike IT you dropped it when out by the lake, and turn it in to them.
Put a hard day of work in your Nike office, leave your work space as is. Do not clean, you have taken nothing with you.
Have your newly retained lawyer, Google the lawyer that Nike hates the most, send in your resignation notice under their banner. Any matters regarding this, please direct to the us it says.
Leave the state for two weeks, do not go to work for the new company immediately, see what happens.
In some States, the bully company has tried to prove that negotiating the "New Company pays clause", is an admission of intent, this has now been knocked down into settled law.
Do not leave unless you have this protection, some competing companies just like to poach talented employees, just to make the Bully have to spend money and be nervous, 'As in, your best talent knows this ship is sinking", and they cast you off as too expensive.
Lastly, you are already gone, think about moving to a "Free State", labor laws there are built around the point that "Serfdom" was outlawed a long time ago.
Read your employment contract.
In the event that you don't have one, to be safe wipe your laptop clean before the day you resign because they can ask you to immediately leave.
@1fxa I don't think so.
Are you obligated to say where you‘re going before they decide to enforce it or not?
It depends a lot on the type of role and what level of propietary information you had access to while at Nike. Anything around shoe designs and shoe technology is probably going to trigger action on a non-compete but something like office software support or HR type of work for example are of a lesser concern and less likely to be flagged. It's been a while since I read up on this but I believe Nike agrees to pay a percentage of your salary for a period of time if they actually block you from an offered role at another company (you won't be employed by Nike at that point of course). I don't think anyone will be able to give you a truly specific and hard answer on this... Best you'll get is probabilities since enforcement is a case by case basis and not a blanket formula.