The IT community on LinkedIn has noticed a very relevant topic: recently, more and more candidates have been posting their experience in companies with NDAs.
And, as the first noticed QA-Evangelist Oleksa Mashyts, this is mostly about juniors.
«Sometimes you can see on LinkedIn profiles that the place of work is listed as NDA. Interestingly, the maximum number of such cases is observed among newcomers, where the first job is listed as NDA, and sometimes even several. Needless to say, this is suspicious, to say the least. Of course, everything is possible, and this approach is based on the principle of “maybe”. But…», — Mashchyts wrote on his LinkedIn.
Sometimes, even the company prohibits the name of the company.
«Another issue is when it comes to specific projects or technologies, they are often under NDAs, so everything is logical. But what is this invasion of companies that forbid newcomers to indicate the name of the company? Is it a trend of hiring people with no experience by secret organizations of the Ministry of Defense or intelligence?” the IT expert asks.
Highload has collected various explanations for the situation that came to the minds of IT professionals.
How do you explain this?
Minimizing reputational risks
It’s simple — an employee who has signed a non-disclosure agreement will not be able to make public claims against the company’s management. The company, on the other hand, gains a certain amount of power.
Employees want to build up their own experience
«I think there are cases when it’s not the company that prohibits it, but the employee who doesn’t want to disclose the company. But they want to show their work experience, so they hide behind an NDA. Or if they didn’t part ways on a good note, so they can’t ask for references from their previous job. But this is just a guess,» says designer Olga Lipetskaya.
Problems with legislation
In many cases, companies want to avoid possible problems with the law. This can be related to both the scope of the company’s activities (detachment, gambling, etc.) and the official nature (such as «Sharashkin’s office»).
Some developers even told us that until 2014, there were a lot of red-haired IT gurus in Ukraine «. And you may be dealing with one of them.
«We don’t want another mask show»
«I don’t know about newcomers, but I have a story about «You are individual entrepreneurs, not employees, we don’t want another mask show, so don’t mention your name.» Well, we also told stories about the fact that competitors can lure us away to make our case», — shared her experience of Manual QA Anna Maiseyenko.
«However, these circumstances are difficult to prove. In this case, the evidence may include information about the termination of a commercial agreement, the fact that the owner of the information was fined, etc. In addition, it must be proved that such circumstances occurred as a result of the disclosure of», — lawyers explain.