331–340 of 411 posts
This 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.
Chris Hawkes
Where I work, there's a fairly streamlined process for getting waivers for side projects, including open source contributions. Fill out a page-long form broadly describing the intended side project and send it to Legal. If approved (and I've never had one rejected), a couple of weeks later they send back two copies of a document signed by them saying that the employee promises not to use company time or resources for…
> 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…
> Not related to your employer’s line of work.
there's something like "Not a project started at the job"?
i'm just curious if there are precedents where someone's side project, completely unrelated to their company's product/market/customer base, but it ended up being lucrative and the company negotiated some shares/ownership of the side project become startup.
The ball shouldn't just be in the employers court for all intellectual property created while employed. Joel is just another uber rich techie doing what he can to make sure nobody under his staff is able to build the next big thing.
I'm boycotting StackOverflow & all of StackExchange as well.
Employer contracts are concerned that you are attempting to take company proprietary information and repackage it on your own time for sale. This sort of behavior clearly falls into 'inventions'.
However, most of the contracts I've seen have a clause which states that the invention must be related to the business of the company. If you work in the games industry and make games on your own time for sale, your employer might take issue with that.
If you work at a games company and run a real estate business on the side, who cares? Similarly, if you work at a games company and write real estate software, they're still not likely to care.
The issue arises:
- where the customer you are getting money from is the same customer (potential customer) of your current employer.
- where the IP in your side project has potential business value to your current employer.
If in doubt, you simply tell your employer up front and get it in writing (email) that it's o.k. I've done this in the past, and the HR department usually will defer the decision to your Manager, who has to make a determination if the work you're doing has potential cross-cutting business concerns. The bigger issue (from an employer standpoint) is that you are not devoting 100% effort to your current employer.
So as long as:
- you make it clear that there are no customer overlaps
- there is no IP that the company would ever be interested in
- that this is done own your own time (and off-premises)
No one should care what you do in your own time.
As an engineer at a defense contractor, I recently had to go through the process of having my company waive my 100% IP ownership clause so that I could work with a startup on my own time without fear of putting them in jeopardy. It took about 3 weeks to process the paperwork, and answer a lot of questions, but eventually the paperwork was signed. It only allows me to work freely with the one startup. However, the imp…
> offer inventors a profit share percentage such as 10% Hmm. Good idea, but don't focus exclusively on profits. Many innovations aren't profitable sources of new revenue per-se, but cost reducers (which can then make other previously-ignored sources of revenue viable).
I agree and I like your idea of also covering cost reduction efforts in profit sharing models. It is undoubtedly easier for companies to swallow a significant cash payout to an employee when they are receiving a large corresponding cash infusion resulting from sales of a developed idea. Following implementation of an efficiency improvement, understandably, as time passes companies tend to only see the current bottom line as the norm vice seeing "what could have been". You can project a companie's profitability over time and use this as a basis for a cost savings award. However, increased uncertainty with time makes it difficult to validate the truth behind estimated savings calcs (i.e. what is vs. what could have been).
For example, if I intoduce a cost savings initiative instructing my customer to switch from diesel to LNG fuel based on the price of the fuels today, then next year diesel prices unexpectedly plummit, at the one year mark the initiative actually became a cost increaser. Thus, any award based on annual projected savings will also need to factor in the diminished value as a result of uncertainty. Cost savings projections are non-deterministic.
I guess my point is that I think cost savings sharing is much more complex than a profit sharing, in which you simply take a cut of any profits (albeit a significantly smaller portion since the company is assuming the development/commercialization risk) that roll through the door.
That said, I could see cost savings awards as a one-time award based on the agreed upon value at a given time, rather than an ongoing profit sharing program that pays out until the product is no longer profitable.
I find this mindset totally disgusting, but I'm glad it's been summed up in such a concise way. > 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. Let's clarify that phrase, "sell your intellectual output". Keep in mind that earlier in the article we discov…
This article is FUD. Employer contracts are concerned that you are attempting to take company proprietary information and repackage it on your own time for sale. This sort of behavior clearly falls into 'inventions'. However, most of the contracts I've seen have a clause which states that the invention must be related to the business of the company. If you work in the games industry and make games on your own time fo…
Doesn't this mean I can host my side project on company infrastructure? Commit it to company repositories? Submit it for code review which will probably be done on company time?