Ask HN: How can I work towards building a company while employed?

These days it is super common. It used to be the domain of only fairly large organizations, but now even smallish to medium sized companies have easily available options to do it.

If you have an IT department (or person) who pushes updates or otherwise controls (or can control) software configuration on your machine, there is at least a decent chance they are also doing at least some of:

- logging all traffic on company network (+ VPNs, of course)

- MITM all SSL traffic on this network (and do filtered logging based on deep packet inspection and/or endpoints)

- above including personal devices connected to that network

- logging all software configuration changes on your machine

- logging all network requests on your machine (regardless of network)

- logging all crash logs and/or other OS level interactions

- timetracking app usage

- logging all communication layer traffic (i.e. mic usage, camera usage, endpoints)

less likely: keylogging or other direct monitoring.

In my limited experience all of this stuff is too logistically complex for small companies, but as soon as you start centralizing IT servicing at all, you will be offered products with some of these capabilities along with more standard virus scan etc.

Optimize for getting a job with lots of paid time off and which doesn't require more than 40 hours per week (Government jobs are good for this) then use the time and energy you have left over to explore your ideas and business opportunities. Use this period to save up some money and quit when you feel you can't go further without quitting (and have some money saved up) or you are seeing significant traction. Also make sure that your IP is in a good place given your employment contract and be sure to document that work you have done outside work was in fact done outside work and to never use any company resources or tools to do work you don't want them to own.

Expired cert and HTTP 503?

You're right. Anyone who doesn't have a corporate network likely isn't going to have a security team or even an IT department. But considering I explicitly mentioned the corporate network and the security department, you obviously knew what I was talking about and just wanted some reason to disagree with me.

Companies without an IT department are extremely unlikely to let their developers take a company-owned laptop home, for the sole reason that they don't have developers or company-owned laptops.

[Part 1]

Sadly, it sucks even more than some people imagine. So while I'm also not a lawyer, I will gladly play the Devil's advocate here.

If you have a salary, you are actually paid for the work product of the whole month. (As opposed to a wage for time worked.) Well, actually you are paid for honestly trying, but your contract transfers usage rights related to your work, so this has nothing to do with hours worked. They would also have to pay your salary, if they say you can stay at home and do nothing, because nothing to do.

Having your work time limited to 40h a week has nothing to do with transfer of rights, as it is a different realm of law. This is just to protect you (or your employer) from you being overworked. (Cynics might say: this was invented by politicians/unions to get votes, or by employers that don't want their human resources damaged.) Anyway: this has nothing to do with your pay and the rights you sell. It might even work against you, as you have to use your "free time", to get fit for work again. (Yes, yes!) While secondary employment is not generally forbidden in Germany (and contract clauses which say so don't last in court), except for competition, your employer of course needs to know, because he also has a say in whether or not your other activities are against their legitimate interest: e.g. if it is indeed to be deemed competion or you are overworking yourself this way and having this drain your energy away from your employers work might be a valid reason to stop it. (Of course: in the end, the court may decide if one side sues, hopefully in a commensurate way.) But you may say: but this is like overtime (it is not: you did it voluntarily and overtime is ordered), and overtime has to be paid even for salaried employees in certain cases (again: different laws, has nothing to with the rights you sell as part of your employment and only with protection from overworking and your compensation for time because of the imbalance between stipulatory and accomplished hours -- hint: if your employer or a labour court thinks your employer owes you (as a salaried employee) overtime compensation, it is because you are still way below a decent salary ... but this is getting off topic).

So while it is true you cannot transfer your Urheberrecht in Germany, as pizzapill wrote, (because it is connected to you as a person, with one exception: it is transfered to your heirs after your dead, but if you're dead, you rights are very limited anyway) you transfer the Nutzungsrechte (usage rights) as part of your contract. And here the employers try to get as much as possible. Not only because of greed (but we would not rule that out, would we?), but simply for legal safety: you cannot easily disentangle one work from another if it is basically the same in the law (like "computer program" -- if the creation of these type of work is your job). Sure you and I can easily see, this program has nothing to do with your dayjob, but can your employer? In a tiny shop, maybe. In a big corporation: not so much. A big software company has so many fields of business, products and services, your manager and their manager and their manager cannot possibly know if your free time project goes against the business interest of the company if you do it independently of the company, so the contracts generally assume it does. (And it probably actually does: given a big enough company you will most certainly have teams in other divisions building similar things as you do in your free time, even if it is only in some tiny research departement on the other side of the world. And I mean plural "teams": they often don't know from each other. Think your boring business software employer does not do cool IoT stuff in some unknown lab? Think again, you haven't networked enough and don't know your company.) And for the work time + work equipment / free time + private equipment argument: yeah, I would also say so, I am paid for this, but not for that ... but this is a very weak argument. Not only for the obvious reason that it would be very problematic if some employee chooses to do the work for this employer in his free time on his equipment and thus trying to circumvent the usage rights transfer, but also (and maybe more importantly) because this is all in your head and how do you prove it, that e.g. your private work and employer ordered work did not influence earch other. And what about employer-relevant work you were not ordered to do? Say e.g. something you think could be useful at work: this could easily go against your employers interest (if you try to sell it to them or the competition or even if you wrote it and they don't get it), which is at odds with your duty of loyality.

That being said, I doubt contract clauses which automatically transfer exclusive usage rights of your free time works to your employer without extra compensation are enforcable to the full extent in Germany for "everything copyrightable you might create regardless what". (Speaking of contracts, I don't think I have seen it in this form yet, the sane companies write it more like this: if you create some work out of your area of duty, you have to offer exclusive rights to us, like you do for on-duty work, except if it is obvious, we cannot use this in the company.)

So with a dayjob as programmer and writing poems / painting pictures in the evening, you can savely say: this has nothing to do with each other and therefore it is not the business of my employer.