Comments for Jeb Stone > Analytics PhD

Comment on How Non-Compete Agreements Really Work by jebstone

jebstone — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 06:28:54 +0000

I just saw a great keyword referral and wanted to take the opportunity to address it.

The keyword is:
can a temp agency hold me to a non compete contract if i never signed it

Answers:
1) If you signed a confidentiality agreement or NDA, then probably (see the full post above.)
2) If you signed paperwork acknowledging that you were responsible for it (remember those one-pagers saying you received each of these documents?) then again, they can probably hold you to it even if you didn’t sign the non-compete itself. Why? Because this is a document — signed by you — that says you signed the non-compete. There’s no arguing with that.
3) In general, individual contributors stand a decent chance of winning a non-compete lawsuit. The question is, do you have that kind of money?

Comment on How Non-Compete Agreements Really Work by jebstone

jebstone — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 18:04:13 +0000

Hey Mike, great to hear from you!

I wish I’d spoken with you before I posted. Your stories are great and bring out a couple of points I should have addressed.

As your old President said, non-competes often aren’t enforced by the courts — however, they don’t always make it to court. In many cases the employee can’t afford to fight the lawsuit. Asking you to sign a non-compete after leaving is fantastic! Interestingly, at least in Texas, that wouldn’t be enforceable at all because the employee has to receive something in exchange — typically an offer of employment, or in this case, maybe a sucker

I don’t know what to think about the second story… it takes all kinds, doesn’t it?

-Jeb

Comment on How Non-Compete Agreements Really Work by Mike Pritchard

Mike Pritchard — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 01:27:26 +0000

Hi Jeb – remember me from when you were at Match.com and I was with comScore?

Nice post. It reminds me of two laughable stories from my past – both market research companies.

When I joined the first company the President told he didn’t believe in non-competes because they weren’t enforceable. After I left a couple of years later (on good terms, just moving to a different city for family reasons) my boss – somewhat embarrassed – asked if I’d be willing to sign a non-compete! This was after I’d left. I just ignored the request.

The other company was somewhere I didn’t want to work – and I’m very glad because they have a terrible reputation (both for market research and for poor treatment of employees). In our initial discussions, the President told me that I would need to sign a non-compete, but I shouldn’t worry about it because he (the owner) had also signed one. What a laugh.

Take care,
Mike

Comment on Omniture SiteCatalyst Variables 101 by jebstone

jebstone — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 14:41:10 +0000

Just a note: Since sProps are page-level dimensions and success events are session-level measures, you can’t break down your success events by sProp. That’s what Conversion eVars are for — and that’s why your list of sProps and eVars should usually be very similar: you want to be able to break down visits/page views and your key success events by the same variables.

Comment on How to identify real trends in user behavior by zyxo

zyxo — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 19:39:46 +0000

The biggest variation in the day-to-day chart are the differences between the weekdays and the weekends.
So the first thing to do if you want to look at longer-term trends is making a week-to-week chart in order to gid rid of this oscillating pattern. If by then the trend still is not clear, only then you should move on to more sophisticated methods.
Try explaining your EMA to a HiPPO !