Depending on your state, laws will work more/less in your favor. California law makes it hard for a company to sue you unless you explicitly steal IP and/or are a founder. Even non-competes don't hold up as well. If you work as a contractor attempt to get your contracts to be governed by CA law.
Ask HN: How can I work towards building a company while employed?
111–120 of 193 posts
Re: Ask HN: How can I work towards building a company while employed?
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know if you mean logging of traffic on the company network or all network traffic on the laptop itself. The latter is definitely not happening here.
How do you know it's not happening?
Because I installed it myself and nobody else touched it.
If you suspect your employer to secretly keep logs of your internet traffic to one-day claim your IP rights you seriously need to search for a new employer.
Re: Ask HN: How can I work towards building a company while employed?
#113> a bunch of contract clauses that basically lets the company own all IP while employed. Probably the most practical solution here is to simply disregard this clause in the contract. Breaching such a clause would be a civil, not a criminal offense, and it is unlikely that a civil complaint would be even considered unless there was a lot of money at stake, and it was easy/cheap to prove/uphold. In order for it to be u…
this is very dangerous advice. If it is in your clause,then it's easy to come after you for it. Just don't do it on company dime and company time. This is what weekends are for, and it'd be up to the company to prove otherwise.
You are giving the same advice as the commenter you are replying to.
Re: Ask HN: How can I work towards building a company while employed?
#114Depending on your state, laws will work more/less in your favor. California law makes it hard for a company to sue you unless you explicitly steal IP and/or are a founder. Even non-competes don't hold up as well. If you work as a contractor attempt to get your contracts to be governed by CA law.
That is dramatically incorrect.
A company (and person!) can sue whoever they want, whenever they want, for whatever reason they want. The claim doesn't need to be truthful. Frivolousness of the claims doesn't mean it's free for you to defend against. See "nuisance lawsuit." Several companies in SV are known for applying them to ex-employees that didn't breech any legal or contractual obligations.
IANAL. THIS DOES NOT CONSTITUTE LEGAL ADVICE.
Re: Ask HN: How can I work towards building a company while employed?
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
In many countries if you have a company laptop then everything on that laptop or done on that laptop belong to the company. They are unlikely to be spying on your directly, but they will often have administrative access, will perform backups to ensure continuity of business data you are working on etc. If you leave and start a competing company someone in IT is going to get a call asking them to check your archived d…
I appreciate your concern, but in this case, there is really nothing going on this laptop that I am not aware of. Company e-mail is archived somewhere in Google but I obviously don't use my company e-mail for personal use. I am a bit surprised that multiple people here are living in such a permanent state of paranoia.
Most companies in the US monitor everything. And you probably wouldn't know, things like intercepting DNS are not obvious from users end. Many monitoring tools hide themselves like malware.
Re: Ask HN: How can I work towards building a company while employed?
#116You can work for Postman, they are currently hiring in Bengaluru, Karnataka - India. They have a very open culture and even the company itself was a side tool developed while Abhinav Asthana worked in Yahoo!
Re: Ask HN: How can I work towards building a company while employed?
#1171. Be fair to your company. They are paying you to make their product succeed. Imagine a future situation where you are running a succesful company. Would you want your employees taking your money while working on their own pet projects? 2. An hour or two every day and code marathons on weekends can get your a basic version of product out in a few months. 3. Never give in to temptation to steal office hours to work o…
1. Why would the company care what he does in his free time? Assuming he is not using company IP or working on company time, it should be completely up to him. Sure, the company will not want him to suddenly leave to launch his company, but the way to combat that is by making the position more attractive, and screening for it when hiring. The American view on labour seems quite similar to slavery.
The simple answer is that the employer needs a clear picture of what they own.
Let’s say you’re a scientist. Your employer sets you up in a lab (that you could never afford on your own) and gives you the task of solving a problem that, if solved, would be worth millions to the company. One night you go home thinking about the tough problem. The next morning at home you have a shower and suddenly you realize the solution!
Who owns the solution? Did you solve it by yourself? Can you now take the solution and launch your own company? If the company puts itself up for sale can they claim ownership of the solution?
This is why in the U.S. these “the company owns everything while you’re our employee” clauses exist. Consider them legal laziness: It’s easier to declare ownership of everything than it is to negotiate with every employee over who owns what under what circumstance.
Edit: These clauses are enough to take to trial. At the very least a deep-pocketed employer can scare off investors from investing in the employee.
Re: Ask HN: How can I work towards building a company while employed?
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s what I think. I have mainly worked at non-profits (gov, inc, edu), and even these own all your work. The only way is to develop your idea, which has to be unrelated enough to your work, at a different location, on you own time, with your own money.
> The only way is to develop your idea, which has to be unrelated enough to your work, at a different location, on you own time, with your own money. To be clear, many (if not most) of the IP clauses discussed here would still claim to own your personal IP produced while employed EVEN given all those conditions. As an aside, workers in California have much better protections from this kind of IP overreach by employer…
I agree fully.
The absurdism only becomes visible to some if you were to turn it around.
Retroactively disqualify code at previous jobs, because you garnered the skill at a different location on your own time with your own money.
suddenly its ridiculous.
Re: Ask HN: How can I work towards building a company while employed?
#119The clauses I have seen attempt to claim all intellectual work regardless of when it was done or whether it was related to the job. To me, this is an indication that we truly have not progressed beyond wage slavery. I believe such clauses should be illegal. I think one thing we might be able to do is to create a list of companies that have blanket clauses like this and then some people (not most) will have the luxury…
I'm kind of mind-blown reading this thread. Right now I'm working on a product of my own, and I'm currently employed. The product has absolutely-zero-nada-nothing to do with what my company does, I do it on my own time, with my own money, with my own machine.
Are you saying that I still may not be legally in the clear? If so, that is incredibly insane, and I can't believe clauses like that actually exist.
Not sure how I made it this far without knowing this was a thing, but goddamn that's infuriating.
edit: brb gonna go sift through all the shit I signed when I joined
Re: Ask HN: How can I work towards building a company while employed?
#120> a bunch of contract clauses that basically lets the company own all IP while employed. This is default here as well (Germany), but I only interpret this as stuff done during work time. So the stuff I come up with and the code I write at the office on my workstation is automatically owned by my employee. That's fine, because if it wasn't, that would cause all kinds of legal trouble should I ever leave the company. B…
> This is default here as well (Germany), but I only interpret this as stuff done during work time. This is a very dangerous attitude. I'm from The Netherlands, consulted a lawyer on this matter, and she confirmed it was definitely an issue. I proceeded to make it explicit in the contract that it only covers IP created during work time and/or on company hardware. What you're saying is definitely understandable, but i…
I'm also from the Netherlands.
Can you give examples of cases or precedent because all Dutch lawyers I know think of this law as a joke because it is almost unprovable in court.