Tempting job offer from competitor
By: Ch Ray
Tags: Competition, Startup, Jobs

If one day you were to receive a highly tempting job offer from a competitor of your current employer, you’d be able to accept it, right?

TL;DR Being honest to yourself and respects the secrets of current employer. Poaching customers or any kind of trade secrets is illegal. Let’s be humans.

In a traditional companies the interns are incubated and trained with tools, which usually takes more than 3 months.

Most of the employees know their real value once they start visiting job portals or get job offers from competitors.

You don’t usually leave the organization until you have an problem with present organization or benefit by joining other organization.

Let’s focus on issues.

Key reasons of leaving organization, question to ask:

You aren’t being listened – Did you try to say? How many time? Don’t find any purpose of working in present organization – From when? Did you try to work on another project? Nothing new to learn – Why? Where is your time being sucked each day? Failed to work as a team, lost trust, no support or help from anyone. – Did you find the root cause? If you were CEO how could you rectify it?

How can the present organization change itself so it can be better than the competitors?

If you live for salary, you don’t find happiness in any organization. That void of lack of salary is always in your mind.

If you have found the reason, and your present organization is impossible to change. That’s when you leave organization, the obvious alternative opportunity you get to join are competitors.

Should you join?

History

Research scientist named Donald Wohlgemuth has setup the precedent that allows you to do as you please.

In 1962, Wohlgemuth managed the space suit engineering department of the aerospace company B.F. Goodrich Company. The market for space-related products was growing fast during the race for the moon, and Goodrich was the market leader in space suits.

At the time, though, the company had just lost the contract for the now famous Apollo project to its main competitor International Latex. So when Wohlgemuth received an offer from International Latex to work on the prestigious Apollo project with more responsibility and a larger salary, he accepted without delay.

But when Wohlgemuth told his superiors at B.F. Goodrich that he was leaving, they feared that he would divulge the secrets he had learned about space suit production. Due to this fear and the fact that Wohlgemuth had originally signed a confidentiality agreement, B.F. Goodrich then sued Wohlgemuth.

When the controversial matter went to court, two key questions of near-philosophical nature arose:

If someone hasn’t ever broken an agreement or shown the intention of doing so, can action be taken against them on the assumption that they will?

Should someone be prohibited from pursuing a position that would tempt them to commit a crime?

In a groundbreaking decision, the judge ruled that while Wohlgemuth clearly was in a position to harm Goodrich by sharing what he knew, he could not be found guilty of it preemptively, and so was free to enter into employment with International Latex.

This decision formed the precedent for similar rulings, making it a great victory for employee rights.

Ethics

It’s more about ethics, than legality. If you trade all the secrets of the previous company you are a traitor. What makes you think new company will you hold you longer, as there is high chances of you trading their secrets to some other company.