Posts by bobobobobobobo

'Best tech employer of the year' threatened trainee with £15k penalty fee for quitting to look after his sick mum

Re: Restriction of Trade

Assuming you're a sole proprietor, as you say, wouldn't last ten seconds in any English court. The more relevant problem is that the intermediary would have had a contract with whoever you were working for which would almost certainly have contained a non-solicitation clause. These are very definitely enforceable. I've hired a few people from from consultancies that were doing work for my company and it's always a difficult negotiation to balance their legitimate concern that we were about to poach an entire team and their other concern of not wanting to alienate an important client. Broadly, if you're one of a hundred people working for a long-term client, you'll likely be able to make the switch, if you're the lone contractor for a low-value account, you won't. A bit like, if you owe the bank $1000 and can't pay, you have a problem but, if you owe them $1,000,000 then they're the ones with the issue.

Re: I'm sure these Best awards are paid for

It's also my experience that there is a strong correlation between being a ghastly place to work and having one of these awards. I expect getting one is often an HR or recruiting initiated exercise in response to the difficulty of hiring into such places once word gets out.