
Dear tech giants, if you love someone set them free - polmolea
http://www.vladalexandruionescu.com/2015/09/dear-tech-giants-if-you-love-someone.html
======
caust1c
Since it's inevitably brought up every time this topic arises:

This is one of the reasons why California is still such a popular place to do
business because the law explicitly nullifies those provisions in contracts.

See California Labor Code Sec. 2870

[http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-
bin/displaycode?section=lab&gr...](http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-
bin/displaycode?section=lab&group=02001-03000&file=2870-2872)

~~~
pauldix
Despite the fact that California has this law, it doesn't matter in a
practical sense. A scenario I've seen play out multiple times:

1\. Employee creates side project

2\. Employee quits to pursue side project as a company

3\. Former employer decides to sue employee because they don't like it for
whatever reason (this need not have any legitimate chance of winning in court,
it could be entirely frivolous)

4\. Former employee then has to decide between spending hundreds of thousands
of dollars in legal fees fighting a lawsuit from the former employer or simply
giving up

We saw this just the other day on HN. I've seen it happen to friends and
colleagues.

Best thing to do: no side projects. If you have those ambitions, work as a
contractor. The legal agreements are much more rational. You get paid for the
hours you bill and are allowed to do any work you want outside of your
billable time.

~~~
johnny99
I presume you're referring to Smule suing Shred, which I think has gotten so
much attention (deservedly) because it's so rare. Off the top of my head I
can't think of another such example, but I can think of scores of side
projects turned into companies, including my own, without employer
interference.

You should take precautions of course--read inventions agreements very
carefully--but I wouldn't at all go so far as to only do contracting.
Especially if you live in California, as others have noted. Half the companies
in SV were started by people working at Google or Facebook.

~~~
pauldix
You're right, there are plenty of examples where that didn't happen. However,
I've seen enough examples where it has. Enough that I think it's a bad idea to
do side projects while you have full time employment. Unless those projects
are strictly volunteer efforts for which you have no intention of turning into
a commercial business.

------
thothamon
I wait until I have an offer, then I ask to see the company's non-compete.
Then, if the document says I can't contribute to other projects, I tell them I
contribute to a number of open-source and other projects, and I need anything
done on my own time to belong to me. I've done this two or three times, and
have always gotten the agreement to be amended.

Wait until you have an offer in hand. That is your moment of greatest
leverage, when they are most invested in having you on board.

------
Terr_
> But for the duration of your employment, all your ideas belong to them.

Only in certain states, and I only if you sign such a contract. Did the author
actually read his contract and say: "Please remove this part"?

I know California and Washington both have state laws limiting what companies
can do in terms of taking ownership of your "outside" work.

~~~
jofer
Good luck getting a company or "remove this part" of a contract. I've always
been told very clearly and angrily that that was not up for discussion.

My current employer technically forbids me from showing photographs of my dog
to my mom. Naturally, no one would ever care if I did, but my contract
explicitly considers any distribution of anything I produce that can be
copyrighted (at work or not) an act corporate espionage.

~~~
ska
I have had success redlining a contract with similar terms, it certainly isn't
unheard of.

~~~
jofer
To be fair, I've mostly worked for very large companies.

In large corporations, an exception to a blanket IP contract would require
approval by fairly high ranking people in both HR and Legal. When you have
>10,000 employees, individual exceptions simply don't happen for anyone under
any circumstances.

My experience is only reflective of very large companies. I doubt it's
representative of smaller employers.

~~~
nitrogen
Are you being paid well enough by this bigcorp that it's worth losing the
ability to comment on HN without violating the letter of your agreement (since
comments are copyrighted by their authors by default)?

------
ChuckMcM
I get the angst, and share it, on the other side of the table is a company
paying you for your "full time" employment, they want to believe they have
paid for all your time.

So the angst arises when you aren't really giving them all your time, you are
keeping some for yourself to do things that are of interest to you and not in
your employer's interest[1].

That is why they want you make a choice, either commit or don't, all in, or
not. If you want to parcel out your time, then contracting is a much better
way to do that, neither side feels like they are being taken advantage of.

Of course there are IP issues, and one which I hope will someday be
rationalized by a better IP policy and framework[2] but contracting helps
there too. You take ownership of your own "overhead" (benefits, vacation
plans, etc) and then you sell the time you have to work on things either to
someone else for direct payment, or to yourself as an investment in a future
revenue stream.

[1] They would argue that if you have time to work on that you could have used
that time to work further on your project they assigned you. Vacation and
leisure, keeps you balanced so is in the employers interest.

[2] And realize that currently 'time to exhausting all the hydrogen fuel in
the Sun' is looking like it will happen first.

~~~
joosters
The time I am committing to a company is in the hours per week that I am paid
to work. There's 168 hours in a week, if you're not paying me for all of them,
I can do what I like in the remaining time.

Dedicating your whole waking life to a company is plain stupid.

~~~
btilly
There are different classes of employee.

Your attitude is appropriate if you clock in, clock out, and are paid
different amounts in different weeks if you show up for different lengths of
time.

However I'm guessing that you are paid a fixed salary and aren't clocked. And
you aren't a contractor. In that case you're a professional employee. You
legally have a working relationship with them 24x7. Which is why you're not
paid overtime to take clients out to dinner, or answer a page in the middle of
the night.

But if that relationship always exists, who owns the intellectual property
that you create away from the office? This is up to a combination of the
contract you signed, and local laws.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Exactly this. If you are a professional, and in the US, this also called an
"exempt" employee, you are paid a fixed salary (nominally higher than an
hourly employee makes) and you don't "clock in" and "clock out", you are
always on the clock. That is the nature of the employment relationship you
have with your employer.

Contrast that with say Lawyers or contractors, or checkout clerks at the
market who sell an hour's worth of work for $x.

This is really important to understand and internalize as an engineer. It is
important because it is the way employment law looks at the relationship and
that is the law which you are compelled to obey if you want to continue
working/living where you are.

~~~
thothamon
I'm an exempt employee, but my time certainly does not all belong to my
employer. I realize there are some who do, but I do not check email at
midnight. My phone has a do-not-disturb setting that goes from 10 pm to 6 am.
If I was asked to forego seeing my family for an extended period of time so I
could, say, work on a report until 10 pm every night -- although I would try
to help, any more than a small amount of this would be abusive, and I would
decline to do it. If this was a real problem, I'd find another job.

Being exempt does not make me a slave. It does not mean all my creative power
is used only for my employer. If I were to accept those conditions, I would
have to be paid five or ten times more salary -- not even a linear increase,
because the time is non-linearly more valuable to me.

I've been at a company that behaves like this. It was completely abusive of
the meaning of exempt. I have nothing but contempt for companies like this.

Simple solution, at least for me: don't sign a contract that suggests that
everything you think belongs to your employer; or at the very least, take your
pound of flesh when you do sign something like that.

Incidentally, even the awful company above changed their contract for me when
I refused to sign the over-the-top original document.

------
anonymaux
I plan to leave my job in a few months because I want to work on an open
source project unrelated to my job but possibly subject to the "land grab" IP
contract I signed as other divisions in the company work on software in that
genre. I live in California, but even if the provision is unenforceable I
don't have the resources to fight a megacorp and I want to make a clean break.
(This also isn't the only reason I'm leaving.)

Looking for a new job is tricky. Being able to work on this and other open
source projects is a non-negotiable requirement for me. Similarly, I want to
work fewer hours and would be satisfied accepting proportionately lower
compensation. How do I make those conditions clear and avoid wasting
everyone's time?

I have a very strong open source resume and finding a ordinary job is no
problem. You want me on your team.

I'm tempted to just quit outright then start the job search by putting out a
full resume along with my conditions. Is that wise?

~~~
matwood
Just state your requirements in a reasonable way. You'll quickly filter out
non-OSS friendly companies, which given your post here looks like you would
not want to work for anyway.

The less work for less compensation is a harder nut to crack. From a companies
standpoint it is hard enough to find people and if the people they do find are
good, but only want to work 1/2 time then the company must find 2x as many.

------
btilly
The truth of this post strongly depends on both where you live, and who you
work for.

If you live in New York, what this post says is absolutely true. Anything you
do, on your own time, on your own equipment, belongs to your employer. And it
sucks. I believe that this is a hidden drag on startups there. And it is one
of the reasons why I do not want to live in New York any more.

If you live in California, this post is mostly wrong on IP ownership. The
exception is that if you're doing something that relates to your employer's
business, then you've got a problem. Even if you didn't know it related. Which
is a problem if your employer has a lot of irons in a lot of fires like
Google, Amazon, Yahoo, and so on do. However it isn't a problem if you work
for a small company.

~~~
cortesoft
Well, this post was specifically complaining about working for large tech
companies. I mean, it is right there in the headline of the post.

~~~
btilly
In that case the tech companies are hardly at fault for California law.

Push comes to shove they don't generally assert their theoretical rights too
aggressively in my experience. However their lawyers don't want to abandon any
rights that they have without examining them on a case by case basis. The ones
that I have see balance that out pretty well and do have a release process
where they approve personal projects.

If that balance doesn't appeal to you, then you can solve the problem by
working for a smaller company where it is less of an issue.

------
tlrobinson
Also, if a company does threaten and/or actually sue a former employee (or
worse, make statements like "If we're wrong, we'll win" [1]), they're going to
permanently be on a lot of potential employees' shit list.

[1] [http://www.businessinsider.com/smule-ceo-shred-video-
lawsuit...](http://www.businessinsider.com/smule-ceo-shred-video-
lawsuit-2015-9)

------
codingdave
If you sign a contract that makes all your ideas the property of the company
you work for, that is a problem. But I suggest pushing back on that contract -
ask them to take out those clauses. If they say no, you then get to decide if
it is a deal-breaker for you or not. But I suspect most of the time, they will
work with you.

~~~
iraphael
>they will work with you

Not so sure about that... Tech giants have the advantage of being able to pick
from the best applicants out there. In the same way you could say "having
these clauses is a deal breaker for me", it's very easy for them to say "NOT
having them is a deal breaker for US".

The difference is that if you refuse the offer, you still have to find a jobs
elsewhere (and I suspect that most giants will have the same clauses by
default). But if they refuse the offer, there is already someone being
interviewed that will accept the clauses.

Maybe I'm being pessimistic, but I think that unless these clauses are deal
breakers for _most_ developers out there, then this practice will continue to
be done.

~~~
calpaterson
> But if they refuse the offer, there is already someone being interviewed
> that will accept the clauses.

I bet most companies wish that was so. Probably it isn't, especially if you
follow fashion and reject anyone who doesn't know how to invert a binary tree
;).

If you turn down a job because of a bad contract term the company is probably
not going to have someone else waiting to jump on! This is one of those cases
where market forces would probably indicate that it's worth negotiating but in
practice companies will be reluctant for reasons of bureaucracy

~~~
ryandrake
Probably not one, but ten people being interviewed that will accept the
clauses. These days people are lined up for blocks for work.

~~~
morgante
> These days people are lined up for blocks for work.

There are lines of developers waiting for work?

Please let me know where I can find such lines. I could earn some hefty
referral fees from the dozens of hiring managers I know who are desperate to
find good developers.

------
rm_-rf_slash
This model works perfectly fine in higher education, as does the idea that if
you treat employees as people to be invested in and cut some slack when their
life doesn't align perfectly with your plans, they reward you with creativity,
energy, and loyalty. I like Elon Musk and the work that he does, but chewing
out an employee for skipping out on work to witness their child's birth is
more than enough reason to never work for a person like that.

~~~
aianus
FWIW he explicitly claims he never did this (while admitting to other extreme
behavior towards his employees):
[https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/598065854736044032](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/598065854736044032)

Frankly, I'm inclined to believe him given that he has five children of his
own.

------
lighthawk
I thought that the way you solve this in the states is by setting up an LLC
and copyrighting under your LLC all of the code you write during hours you are
not working for the other company. Doesn't that provide adequate additional
protection? The strict IP agreements I've signed usually exclude work done for
other companies.

~~~
jfim
Some contracts have a clause where you work exclusively for this employer.

~~~
binarycrusader
Often referred to as a 'moonlighting' clause and by lawyers as 'duty of
loyalty'.

~~~
JustSomeNobody
Love how loyalty only works one way.

~~~
savanaly
When you sign up to work for the company, you agree to do X and they agree to
pay you Y. You are disloyal to them if you don't do all or part of X (for
instance, if X includes thinking up ideas for them, taking your really
valuable ideas that you thought up while working for them and leaving and
using them yourself), and they are disloyal if they don't pay you Y. Those are
the terms, after all! So I don't see how loyalty only goes one way...

~~~
Karunamon
If I'm at home, on my own computer, on my own time, I am not "working for
them".

------
zyxley
This kind of thing is what unions are for.

~~~
fapjacks
Exactly! And every day it surprises me more and more that one such union
doesn't exist for developers. I understand 100% the implied anti-authoritarian
nature "a lot" of the members of this demographic exhibit, but I also think "a
lot" of this demographic is smart enough to see past that to the benefits of
unionizing. It's just crazy to me there isn't a Guild Of Function Writers And
Machine Tenders.

------
angersock
Hear hear!

I'm currently trying to fix this culture at my current startup, and frankly
it's rolling a boulder uphill. I'm not going to be here much longer, I don't
think.

Folks, don't don't _don 't_ sign these contracts if you actually care--they
won't be easy to fix later.

------
CurtMonash
When I had a startup, I put a "We own your brain" clause in the employment
agreement. However, I also called it to the attention of everybody I hired,
and encouraged them to carve out any exception they wanted. Every hire except
a couple of pure secretary/office manager types had a carve-out.

That said, I suspect that that's not a common way of doing things. About 30
years ago, I came up with it for a friend who was joining McKinsey, but had
published a book based on her PhD thesis. They claimed to have never gotten
that request before. But they also didn't object to granting it.

------
kylnew
Employers are, by default, going to look out for themselves.

I'd argue that the onus is on the developer to understand and fight for better
contracts. If more developers were taking these matters seriously then
companies would have to respond. However, I doubt they'll be making the first
move.

In the meantime nothing stops you from finding jobs that better suit your
needs. "No thanks" is an acceptable answer to an employment opportunity.

------
lechevalierd3on
Ironically my company block that DNS.

