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Ask HN: My company wants my side project. What can I do?

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Re: Ask HN: My company wants my side project. What can I do?

#131

Post by dave333 »

thayne wrote: post #72
batoure wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Always always always talk to a lawyer. If your dog walker (at the peak of their career) friend was like “I need a website” you wouldn’t be like “learn JavaScript” you would say find a programmer. If I had 10 dollars for every time I had to spend weeks convincing an engineer friend to talk to an attorney and then when they finally did it got dealt with in 30 minutes... Lawyers are just “full stack law architects” do y…

I find kneejerk advice to consult lawyers for anything that concerns the law frustrating for two reasons: 1. It never seems to be accompanied with advice on how to find the appropriate kind of lawyer. 2. It almost always seems to ignore the fact that lawyers are expensive. Sure, there are times when that cost is warranted, but I don't think it is right to ignore it. For example, in this case, it is probably only wort…

If a lawyer is too expensive then just read up on your local law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire

Re: Ask HN: My company wants my side project. What can I do?

#132

Post by gbin »

relaunched wrote: post #23

Find a lawyer, ASAP, that specializes in employment and / or IP. This is a legal issue and you need to solve it with people that know the law. Talking, signing, admitting things, etc, only hurt you. Depending on your country and state, as well as your employment agreement, there are a lot of impactful variables. Intuition and personal relationships are not going to help you solve this issue, especially, absent knowin…

Blindly going to a lawyer can also be a bad advice. From my experience it opens a huge can of worms: first the situation may switch to a full on conflict for years. Your lawyer is incentivized to make you angry and fight to death, open other fronts etc... Another aspect some people might not understand too especially in low litigation countries is that "legal" and "fair" are different concepts. Reserve this kind of misery for when the outcome is actually life defining for you.

Re: Ask HN: My company wants my side project. What can I do?

#133

Post by chadcmulligan »

varispeed wrote: post #126

Get a lawyer ASAP! When you are an employee, the employer owns all your time. There is no such thing as "spare time" or "side project on my own". That's why employer can tell you that you have to be there and then, can call you at any time and can drug test your to ensure you are 100% committed to the company. It's just modern slavery. Sure you can negotiate such clauses out, but it would be still difficult to claim…

> When you are an employee, the employer owns all your time

Is this true in the US? Its not in Australia, its actually the reverse here as I understand it. Though making a competing or related product to your employers is sticky ground.

Re: Ask HN: My company wants my side project. What can I do?

#134

Post by chadcmulligan »

yolo42 wrote: post #22
masukomi wrote: post #18

> I created product on the side as a side project in my own time and it has become a huge hit in the community to a point where my employers wants me to transfer the code-base over. The company does OSS and my side-project is also Open-Source. Let me restate this: You had an idea you were so interested in you created it in your off time. You made it open source. Your company likes it so much they want to contribute t…

It is not that they want me to spend work time on it. They want me to transfer ownership of the project to them. That's the part that I do not wish to do. The way things work at this place, I'll probably end up maintaining the product until I leave my job. The reason for not transferring over is that once I do that, they will essentially not let me create features that I think can be done better using my product, bec…

Why not negotiate a VP or Product Manager position out of it and a nice pay rise, maybe even a share of the profits. Let them market it and take the risk, you become the man.

Re: Ask HN: My company wants my side project. What can I do?

#135

Post by jacquesm »

austhrow743 wrote: post #130
jacquesm wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with all that, the question is whether or not you want to get your way or roll over. If you want to roll over you can do so without consulting anybody, if you want to get your way you will need to figure out what your options are going forward and that will include talking to a lawyer.

Roll over isn't the only alternative to lawyer. OP could always just say "no" and see what happens. Maybe lawyers come in to play eventually, maybe they don't.

See that's why you talk to a lawyer first. They could let you know what the possible forks of 'see what happens' are. There might be angles there that are detrimental to the OP and it would be good to be aware of those up front before doing things that can't be undone, such as saying 'no'.

Re: Ask HN: My company wants my side project. What can I do?

#136

Post by OJFord »

relaunched wrote: post #23

Find a lawyer, ASAP, that specializes in employment and / or IP. This is a legal issue and you need to solve it with people that know the law. Talking, signing, admitting things, etc, only hurt you. Depending on your country and state, as well as your employment agreement, there are a lot of impactful variables. Intuition and personal relationships are not going to help you solve this issue, especially, absent knowin…

Unless not in the US, in which case suddenly turning up with a lawyer might be like bringing a gun to an amicable discussion.

Re: Ask HN: My company wants my side project. What can I do?

#137

Post by peignoir »

I would go for a friendly resolution, just say hey some of that was done on my free time it represents that much hours of work, I’m fine transferring it in exchange for $ to cover the extra work / equity if it’s a startup. Also negotiate some power if you can like having your own team to help you with it etc... everyone wins : you and your Corp

Re: Ask HN: My company wants my side project. What can I do?

#138

Post by lukevdp »

prox wrote: post #103
fsloth wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't go to the lawyer to sue your employer. You go there to understand your legal position. This gives you leverage in negotiations. The way you use that leverage is then explain why you feel something is not fair. In a professional context, you can explain your position in legal terms when you take a compassionate, kind stance, smile and analytically explain the situation from both sides. It's no more different…

I wholeheartedly agree with your comment. The core is that OP created something of value, in his own time. So there should be a value exchange of some sort.

Depends entirely on the employment agreement. Many will automatically assign ownership of any code written to the employer.

Re: Ask HN: My company wants my side project. What can I do?

#139

Post by mdni007 »

ThePhysicist wrote: post #118

It’s not really possible to give specific advice without knowing which jurisdiction you’re in. In most European countries there are laws that govern employee inventions and grant a share of the profits of an invention to the employee (in Germany e.g. the Mitarbeitererfindungsgesetz). Besides advising you to talk to a lawyer - which people already did here - there’s really little to say without knowing more details. I…

Did you type out that entire German word without referring to Google?
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