381–390 of 411 posts
And THAT'S the place to leave truck-sized holes to drive through, especially if you have a good idea of what your side project interests are at that point.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't even tell your employer about side projects. Leave them out of the loop entirely. This depends heavily on the employer. Google, for instance, is extremely friendly towards both side projects (done entirely on your own time and with your own equipment) and open source contributions done either on or off company time. I wish more employers had the same level of transparency.
I still don't know how it can hurt to keep it a secret. Any assistance you could get taints the project's ownership, so it seems like you have nothing to gain by sharing and a lot to lose.
The article alludes to that, albeit from the company's point of view. The same principle applies to you.
If you ever want to sell your side project in the future, the buyer will put you through the wringer called "due diligence." If you were employed at XYZ Co. at the time you developed the IP being sold, part of the due-diligence process may require you to prove that XYZ Co. doesn't own the rights to it. If you kept it secret from XYZ, you won't have a signed waiver from them, so you won't be able to do that. Instead, you'll have to go back to XYZ Co., hat in hand, and ask them for a waiver now.
That will be an awkward conversation.
I am surprised nobody here has yet mentioned the real case of what happened to Evan Brown, the former president of the Dallas Ft Worth Unix Users Group who worked at a telephone switch company as a system administrator and had an idea for a generic code translator. Maybe the New York Times tells it best: http://www.nytimes.com/1997/09/08/business/an-idea-not-yet-b...
interesting case. the everything2 writeup seems better than the nyt one: http://everything2.com/title/The+Thoughts+of+Evan+Brown
I am surprised nobody here has yet mentioned the real case of what happened to Evan Brown, the former president of the Dallas Ft Worth Unix Users Group who worked at a telephone switch company as a system administrator and had an idea for a generic code translator. Maybe the New York Times tells it best: http://www.nytimes.com/1997/09/08/business/an-idea-not-yet-b...
interesting case. the everything2 writeup seems better than the nyt one: http://everything2.com/title/The+Thoughts+of+Evan+Brown
In Sweden, you cannot force a worker to only have one job for example because that is illegal.
I am surprised nobody here has yet mentioned the real case of what happened to Evan Brown, the former president of the Dallas Ft Worth Unix Users Group who worked at a telephone switch company as a system administrator and had an idea for a generic code translator. Maybe the New York Times tells it best: http://www.nytimes.com/1997/09/08/business/an-idea-not-yet-b...
That and the e2 article both don't mention what actually happened in the end, does anyone know? Presumably Mr. Brown liquidated everything, ran out of money and died a beggar on the streets.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That gives a larger/richer entity the power to use litigation as threat/bullying only by having deeper pockets. It means there is a legal advantage of having more money. That's insane. As I usually say re the US "How is THIS not an issue in the election?" If I was reasonably sure I had the law on my side I'd dare go to court against an entity of any size, relying on the convention that the loser pays, and the rulings…
If you have 95% chance of winning a lawsuit, and if the company you sue can afford to spend $10M on it, loser-pays-all means you have 5% chance of going bankrupt (unless you have >$10M in your account). I don't think it's any more fair than the current US system.
I'd most likely face a less than 1% risk of paying less than $100k, even if the other party is a global mega corp. Also, the tech workers union I'm in can step in to back legal fees.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Regardless of whether you are legally right, a larger company could sue you for the sake of suing, and make your life very miserable A company with resources could sue you for a number of bogus reasons if they wanted to be dicks.
Let's make sure we unite to make these companies known yah?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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? Don't work for companies that are dicks. If there's crap about them wanting to own you or your thoughts, don't sign it and get a different job elsewhere. Remember when little kids…
A tangent, but http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandcon...
There's a Primark on every high street in the UK. Someone you've seen today is probably wearing an item of clothing made in those conditions.
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…
If the author states like this, I would think that he's going to pay me salary based on 24*7 rather than just 40 hours per week.