"That's why this is evil on Skype's part (or Silver Lake, or whoever); engineers - the "best and brightest" want to do engineering, and trust the business people to do business."
If the parties involved really trusted each other, there'd be no need for a contract.
When there's serious money at stake you'd be naive (to put it in the kindest possible terms) to sign a contract that you didn't fully understand.
I can think of kinder possible terms: inexperienced, young, needing health insurance, broke, out-of-your-legal-depth, suggestible, susceptible to Kool-Aid.
There's a huge power disparity between a company and an individual. I suspect that there are many many cases where the individual got screwed for different reasons than naiveté.
Yes. Exactly. Naive in precisely the way that good technical people tend to be. Which is why it's just such a lucrative business model to screw them five ways from Sunday.
More specifically, I think it's probably more in the nature of technical people to imagine that if any screwing is going to happen, that the screwing will be to the benefit of the company, and thus to their own benefit as well. Whereas I think the business mentality can much more easily gloss over details like division of labor and cut straight to "make more money for me".
If the parties involved really trusted each other, there'd be no need for a contract.
When there's serious money at stake you'd be naive (to put it in the kindest possible terms) to sign a contract that you didn't fully understand.