11–20 of 25 posts
The law basically says that your employer can claim ownership over any work product you make while in their employ (i.e. in the workplace) or using their equipment. So cease immediately if you don't want to potentially forfeit your creation, and use solely your own equipment, outside the usual workplace, to develop it.
It's totally possible to code Erlang on a low-end netbook.
The cheap laptop I wrote early self-employed code on was under 20% the price of a cheap Mac and so badly made it was flexible.
The work I produced on it paid for the eventual upgrade.
Do. Not. Do. This. For elaboration, here's your risk/reward calculation. Reward: you save N days worth of your present salary which you should spend on a cheapo laptop. Risk: you are planting an unrecoverable flaw deep in the heart of your company. It only matters if your startup does well, but if it does, it suddenly matters a lot . If you are in talks for an acquisition or funding round five years from now and this…
If you do a reimplementation it will go much, much faster because you now know what you're doing.
Get a second hand laptop or a Chromebook or something. If you're able to get a job programming you should be able to afford something.
Note: I am not a lawyer.
"Related to" is a very loosely-defined term. Don't be so sure that your startup is not related to your work at your day job.
Maybe there are legal implications or company policies, but seriously, how would your employer ever even find out you were using that laptop? Just don't go around advertising it if you do use it, backup your data and wipe it before you return it, you'll be fine. Of course it might be nicer to have your own laptop that is setup just right for what you're building, but if money is scarce then i would just use the work…
The cost of a new laptop is fixed and small. The cost of a successful startup being destroyed is potentially massive.
Rule #1 -- don't be a cheapskate on things which matter.
In this case a used $100-$300 machine is probably the minimum necessary expenditure [as opposed to a new MacBook Pro or it's equivalent].
Implementing a sound backup strategy is more important than any gain in reliability between new and used hardware.
Maybe there are legal implications or company policies, but seriously, how would your employer ever even find out you were using that laptop? Just don't go around advertising it if you do use it, backup your data and wipe it before you return it, you'll be fine. Of course it might be nicer to have your own laptop that is setup just right for what you're building, but if money is scarce then i would just use the work…