131–140 of 411 posts
The hope that one of my side projects will some day succeed, and I can leave my 9-5 is the only thing that drives me. If I said, "welp, legal" i'd die inside. Some people have church, I have side projects.
I was checking out your side project but couldn't figure out what it was/did?
> 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 nee…
I had a colleague who worked on a side project that was no where close to the main business of the company but was related to a "hackathon" type project at the company that he was uninvolved in. His side project took off and he quit to work on it. The company successfully sued him for millions of dollars. This was in the US but not in California.
I mean, imagine for instance that you simply had a band and tried to sell a few songs. And that you were an engineer. At some point in history, it would have made perfect sense to do this at Apple, with no overlap at all. Heck, I remember the ongoing lawsuits over the years from Apple Music just because of the name of Apple Computer at the time, and I think at one point they reached an agreement simply because Apple Computer was not going to be in the music business. And at the time, this seemed like a no-brainer, crazy to imagine Apple doing anything in music. And then, oops. So no, on a company-wide basis, no side project is really “safe”; companies can and do enter new lines of business, even things that seemed implausible at some point in the past.
You have to expect people leaving you, because the reasons they join a bigger company is much different than a smaller one and it's quite shortsighted as a CEO of a company of the size of fog creek to think like that.
Luckily there are other companies doing great encouraging side projects too.
What if the company does work out of San Francisco California, is incorporated in Delaware, but I live in North Carolina? Am I still protected?
I work remote for a large SF Bay Area firm from NC.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the first point, big companies clearly feel that they can claim any project that is related to the company's lines of work, not yours. Companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have arms for hardware design, video game development, web development, close-to-the-metal graphical programming, embedded systems, retail...that's not just big enough to drive a truck through, it's big enough for that platform they truc…
Specifically at Google, you must submit work-unrelated open source submissions through Google legal; though they seem to be fairly quick with it.
> 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 nee…
You don't quite understand Joel's point. Regardless of whether you are legally right, a larger company could sue you for the sake of suing, and make your life very miserable. And if the fight continues and you run out of money, what then? I had exactly that thing. I was being bought-out and a small client decided (against the contract that they had signed) that the changes we had made to our mortgage broker commissio…
This is great advice
> 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 nee…
On this, my last company had a similar clause, but you could just run a project by the HR team and they would clear any ownership of it. I worked at a media company and I was working on a media-related side project (so definitely "related to your employer’s line of work") and they 'released' any rights to it.
Joel doesn't often miss things, but with respect I think he missed something here. If you, the employee, are working for an employer you respect, and vice versa, YOU CAN HAVE A CONVERSATION! If your day job is, say, maintaining high-capacity forum software in dotnet, and you have this hankering to develop, say, a WordPress plugin to show the time of sunrise, you can talk about it. If you respect your boss and she res…
I'll be damned if I'm going to let my boss tell me if I can write a WordPress plugin on my own time.
Hey boss, I'm going to write this wordpress plugin as a side project. I'll be doing on my own time and with my own equipment. I'd like the company to disclaim any right to the code.
9 times out of 10 they will do so. If they don't then you know it's time to polish the resume. As tptacek says elsewhere here. It's too good a job market to risk the legal hassle of working someplace like that.