after i figured that he is CEO and cofounder of many famous startups, I feel bias in this article and I will make sure I will not work him in the future for sure :-)
Developers’ side projects
61–70 of 411 posts
Re: Developers’ side projects
#62You ALL need to read California Labor Code 2870!
Surprised nobody has mentioned the most essential thing to know about regarding this stuff in California. The site is down at the moment, but the link is: http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=lab&gr...
CA 2870 is attached to any such agreement you sign in California, and protects independent invention. You should read it. This law forms the legal basis for innovation in Silicon Valley.
Re: Developers’ side projects
#63> Your game designer works for a year and invents 7 games. At the end of the year, she sues you, claiming that she owns 4 of them, because those particular games were invented between 5pm and 9am, when she wasn’t on duty.
> ...
> So before you hire this developer, you agree, “hey listen, I know that inventing happens all the time, and it’s impossible to prove whether you invented something while you were sitting in the chair I supplied in the cubicle I supplied or not. I don’t just want to buy your 9:00-5:00 inventions. I want them all, and I’m going to pay you a nice salary to get them all,” and she agrees to that, so now you want to sign something that says that all her inventions belong to the company for as long as she is employed by the company.
Wait, what? Wouldn't the fix for this just to say, "You transfer the rights to any games you give us" (or whatever the legal wording for that is)?
It seems incredibly odd to go from "you gave us a game but kept the IP" to "we own all IP of games you make".
Re: Developers’ side projects
#64[deleted]
Re: Developers’ side projects
#65> Not related to your employer’s line of work. Um, wait. What’s the definition of related? [...] I don’t know. It’s a big enough ambiguity that you could drive a truck through it.
No, it's not that ambiguous at all. The courts rarely side with the company, and only in cases where it's quite obvious the work was directly related. If your side project isn't directly related to the work you are doing, then you don't need to worry.
Don't let Joel or any other tech CEO scare you into not working on side-projects. Don't even tell your employer about side projects. Leave them out of the loop entirely.
Re: Developers’ side projects
#66This is a good article, but the "let them eat cake"-iness of the last paragraph is pretty chilling. > the only way to gain independence is to be independent. Being an employee of a high tech company whose product is intellectual means that you have decided that you want to sell your intellectual output, and maybe that’s OK, and maybe it’s not, but it’s a free choice. I was hoping for a closing argument about how thou…
Be a little careful, because I think you're reading a Stack Overflow question recast as a blog post (Spolsky just moved his blog from CityDesk --- can you believe he was still using CityDesk? --- to WordPress, and so I guess we'll be seeing some more stuff like this on it). People are less careful capturing all angles of an issue on forums than they are in blog posts. I assume Stack Overflow is just like most big sof…
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Re: Developers’ side projects
#67This is why programmers need unions! Or a guild. Or something! That employers totally dictate everything in a field that is in such high demand is absolutely unacceptable.
Also, I feel most managers & non-tech people take advantage of programmers. You want to build a business out of an app with good programmers but you don't want you chicken to go & lay egg in your neighbor's house.
Re: Developers’ side projects
#68This topic is very interesting to me. With that said, which employer wants their employee watching TV and not breathing software 24/7? I really struggle to imagine the risk here is greater than the reward.
Those who don't want their employees to burn out?
Re: Developers’ side projects
#69This gets super muddied when you consider doing FOSS contributions as part of your work. Sure you can sign a contributor agreement, but its not yours to give away. The employer owns the code you contributed to a FOSS project. The project got the signature from the wrong entity.
> The employer owns the code you contributed to a FOSS project. I think this is a pretty US-only type thing; at least it's not very common in Europe. Usually (in Europe) ownership of code depends entirely on when you did the coding -- if it's on your own time you own the code. If it's when you're at work then obviously it's the company's code. Of course there are the usual caveats about "is it too closely related to…
Usually (in Europe) ownership of code depends entirely on when you did the coding -- if it's on your own time you own the code
Despite all the paranoia that would suggest otherwise, that's quite often the case in the US as well. Regardless of what your employment agreement says, it can't trump state law, and many (hell, maybe most) states have laws that clarify that work you do on your own time, on your own equipment, that isn't in the course of your employer's business, belongs to you. Of course IANAL, but I did a lot of research on this topic a while back, since I have been in the position of working on a side project while maintaining full-time employment elsewhere.
You can ever be sure what a given court will decide on a given day, if it comes to it, but I think a lot of people overstate the extent to which your employer "owns your brain".
That said, plenty of employers do at least try to "own your brain" and I think the reasonable response to that is to demand they pay you commensurately - including opportunity cost. If someone wants to "own your brain" they need to be paying on the order of millions of dollars per year, IMO.
Re: Developers’ side projects
#70This is why programmers need unions! Or a guild. Or something! That employers totally dictate everything in a field that is in such high demand is absolutely unacceptable.
Most professionals have some kind of trade organization that sets standard. Doctors, laywers, many types of engineers.
The problem is that programming is so attractive because the barrier for entry is so low that anybody can get into it without problems.