

Ask HN: Can I work on my side project while working for your company? - joinforloop

Borrowing from this post &quot;Ask HN: Are side projects allowed at IBM?&quot; news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9820993,  I too have several side projects I want to work on.  They range from making my own game to making my own niche search engine.<p>Of course, all projects are going to be limited in scope to what one person, me, can do on a part time basis.<p>For example, let&#x27;s say I want to work for Google.  I also want to create my own niche search engine for myself and anyone else who cares to use it.  It will probably run on three or four servers on a SQL or an easy to maintain NoSQL backend.  Compare this to Google&#x27;s gigantic ultra scalable Spanner database system which requires hordes of people to just maintain.  Technology wise, it&#x27;s night and day.  Can I work for Google while keeping ownership of my engine?  If not, why not?<p>I don&#x27;t want to go beyond what I as an individual but I still want to work in whatever side project I feel like doing without the hassle of doing things like getting &quot;approval&quot; for every idea I come up with since they can change at any time.
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kelukelugames
I'm not a lawyer but here is what I know.

These clauses are for the company to cover their ass. Let's say you make
Flappy Bird at Google and they try to claim it. The bad publicity will not be
worth it.

Working on a side project that competes with their core business is different.
But if it's a pet project with 100 users then Google will be seen as the bad
guy again. How about 1 million users? Then you've created a competitor and
less people will sympathize with it being shut down.

I hope that made sense.

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joinforloop
It does make some sense.

How about creating Flappy Birds while being glue coder #1,341 for EA's next
big budget NFL next gen console game? Would the same idea apply? Would the
idea be different for EA vs Amazon or Microsoft?

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clintolibre
A lot of this will come down to splitting hairs. If you do it on your own
computer at home with your own resources, its almost certain you will be fine.
If you do it during company time using software they paid for and getting your
coworkers to help on company time, they will probably be entitled to some part
of the proceeds.

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quesera
That is a good description of the Californian situation, but does not
necessarily apply everywhere.

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facetube
Everywhere I've worked has had an IP policy that was agreed/signed at the same
time as all of the new-hire paperwork. The ones I've signed essentially said
"if you develop it on your own time and equipment and it's not based/dependent
on our code, it's yours; if you develop it on our time or equipment or
codebase, it's ours". The others I did not sign. Anecdotal experience,
probably not reflective of everyone's hiring practices, et cetera.

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yzzxy
There's a lot of law in California related to this specific IP topic, but
IANAL so maybe someone with legal experience could chime in.

