121–130 of 484 posts
I'm not a developer but i do code in my free time, and used company resources. and always had to jump through hoops. (doing work on my lunch hour, down times, etc, and ever affecting our bottom dollar or performance of machines).
I even developed things for the company such as directories, signature generators etc.
This is a great step forward for everyone, and i hope more companies adopt it.
"But rather than negotiating a deal, Alcatel fired Brown and sued him for ownership of the idea. After a seven-year-long court battle, he lost and was forced to spend three months at the company’s offices, without pay, writing out the code to implement his solution." I deeply hate the judge who made this verdict. You must be truly devoid of human feeling and common sense to explain this as a reasonable application of…
After such an insane verdict I'd like to believe that Alcatel's top talent started jumping ship.
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> No employer has ever objected to this I've not had this luck, personally. They are always willing to forgo the job offer just to ensure that everyone has the same contracts. I'm guessing that it's going to be a size of business issue. And the IP assignment clauses are, for the most part, getting worse and worse; my current one extends the assignment to a year after termination, voluntary or not.
Wouldn't that keep you from being employed for a year after termination? If so, I hope a year's worth of severance is part of your contract.
or am I thinking of non competes?
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For real. I am an indie game dev who recently released his first big game on Steam. Just a week or two ago I had a prospective company tell me that, in order to hire me, I would need to sell them the entirety of my personally-developed IP and dissolve my interest in my own company. Needless to say, I decided against that job.
That's an absolutely absurd request. I can understand if they said that you wouldn't be able to work on your game during business hours, or on your company machine, but to request that you dissolve your company and sell them your IP? That's insane
We (developers) aren't like factory workers cranking out widgets by the hour. We're paid to think deeply about challenging problems. For me, that means chewing on a problem for a long time, often when I'm not at work. Honestly, when a problem is challenging, I can't get it out of my mind. I'm thinking about it, at least a little bit, on the weekends -- heck, maybe even while I'm sleeping. And those are the problems I enjoy the most.
When a savvy software company hires someone, they understand that this is how developers operate. They will offer handsome compensation because they expect this.
Ultimately, competition for your thinking time is a zero-sum game. If you're working on a hard problem at work, you might think about it at home. Similarly, if you're working on an interesting side project you might think about it at work. You can't help it.
That doesn't mean companies should never allow side projects at all. There should be room for negotiation. But if we don't acknowledge the basic facts of the situation, then we aren't negotiating in good faith.
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Employment is dead, contract is the way of the future. Do you really want to buy into a feudalistic legacy organizational model knowing that the odds of rising up in the pyramid are approximately zero? And they're going to downsize with no loyalty if needed to bump the stock price later on. Like a decapitated chicken the company will strut around a bit randomly canceling or creating projects so you have no control ov…
> Employment is dead, contract is the way of the future. I am pretty happy with my employment. Paid vacation, paid sick days, reasonable hours and all that good stuff.
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Wouldn't that keep you from being employed for a year after termination? If so, I hope a year's worth of severance is part of your contract.
It could, yes. And no, it wasn't. However, I was laid off at the time and needed the job, so my bargaining power was minimal.