
Ask HN: Companies friendly to side projects? - mr_puzzled
Is there a list of companies that don&#x27;t restrict their employees from working on side projects like amazon does? Bonus points if the company is remote.<p>Note : I&#x27;m not in california.
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itamarst
Companies don't inherently restrict you. They will however, make you sign a
non-compete and intellectual property ownership thing.

What matters is the legal documents you sign.

In Amazon's case, they do SO MANY THINGS that even what would be a very
lenient non-compete for a small company is basically "no side projects for
you." (Don't know the specific language, it's just the nature of what they
are.)

In practice, a reasonable non-compete in a company that doesn't do more than
one thing can be very unrestricted. E.g. you work for biotech company, non-
compete/IP is about "related to company's business": you can do whatever you
want in your free time, so long as it's unrelated to biotech area you're in,
or maybe biotech in general.

Sometimes the legal document is not reasonable, e.g. they claim ownership of
anything related to customers' and vendors' business, and they use GMail so
it's anything related to google's business! But you can negotiate the legal
agreements, especially with small companies (hiring a lawyer for a couple of
hours makes this easier.)

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icedchai
The best policy is don't task, don't tell.

