You Signed What?

On the first day of a new job — excited, eager to seem agreeable, surrounded by welcome swag — you signed a stack of documents at a pace of roughly one per minute. Somewhere in that stack: what happens to ideas you have in the shower, whether you can work for a competitor next year, what you can never tell anyone, and what rights you've agreed to resolve in private arbitration. The fine-print topic's rule said signatures belong to the actually-read tier; day-one paperwork is where that rule meets its hardest test, because the moment of maximum signing is the moment of minimum leverage-awareness. This topic is the translation layer for the stack — before, during, and after.

Sorting the stack: what binds and what doesn't

• The offer letter — usually not a contract in the full sense: it states terms (pay, title, start date) but typically preserves at-will status. It's still evidence: keep it, and if a promised term (the bonus, the remote arrangement) isn't in it, the job-offer topic already taught the fix — get it added before accepting.
• The real agreements — the documents with your signature and words like agreement in the title: confidentiality/NDA, invention assignment, non-compete/non-solicit, arbitration. These are contracts, they survive your employment, and they're the subject of Parts 2-4.
• The handbook — usually not a contract (most include an explicit disclaimer saying so), but its policies govern daily life and its acknowledgment page is what you sign. Skim for: PTO accrual and payout, remote/moonlighting policy, and the discipline process — Part 5's terrain.

At-will, in one honest paragraph

The background rule for most US employment: at-will means either side can end the relationship at any time, for any reason or none — with the crucial carve-out that illegal reasons (discrimination against protected classes, retaliation for protected activity) remain illegal, at-will or not. What modifies at-will: a genuine employment contract with a term or cause requirement (executives, some industries, union agreements), and certain implied exceptions varying by state. Why it matters here: at-will is the leverage backdrop for everything in this topic — the company's paperwork asks you for post-employment promises while promising you, in most cases, nothing about tomorrow. That asymmetry is precisely why the signing moment deserves the attention this topic gives it — and why the negotiable window (Part 3) sits before the signature, not after.

The one habit that starts today

Get copies of everything you sign, the day you sign it, into the documents topic's folder — including the handbook version in force when you joined. Companies mislay old agreements; leaving employees discover they can't recall what they promised in 2019, and the company's copy is the only text in the room. Your archive is your negotiating table years later. With the stack sorted, the parts ahead take the big four in turn: secrets (2), competition (3), ideas (4), the employed years' paper trail (5), and the exit documents (6).