This. If your jobs are in tech, you can’t do this without violating your employment contracts with both companies. You can just do it anyway, and that’s all well and good until your manager discovers that you have a second job and has to fire you (there are things good managers can and will look past, but that’s not one of them).
This just isn't true. If might be true for some companies, but this is a big part of why I pay close attention to the IP agreements involved when I hire onto a new company, and the wrong IP agreement is a deal-breaker for me. In my case it's side projects rather than a second employer, but the principal is the same.
My agreement with my current company explicitly spells out work not done on their equipment, their time, or related to their business as not theirs. I use this to work for my side projects, a co-worker uses it to moonlight (with our employers knowledge).
Sure Google is probably going to make you sign an IP agreement that makes this impossible, but not every tech job is FAANG.
If you work for HP designing printer software and make an iPhone game on the side, you are probably ok. If you are working for HP designing printer software, and Cisco designing VoIP phone software you stand to create a huge intellectual property risk for both companies as they both produce network switches. You can't reasonably demonstrate to either company that you aren't using their IP in the course of your work with the other.
> You can't reasonably demonstrate to either company that you aren't using their IP in the course of your work with the other.
As always, when in doubt consult a lawyer, but yes, yes you can. If you never contribute code to Cisco's switches, they can confidently say you haven't put HP's switch code into Cisco's switches.
Now neither of these is my area of expertise, but VoIP software and networking switch software sound uncomfortably close to me, and I'd be worried about causing problems there, but that has to do with the software having related needs, not the simple fact that both companies build switches. And as noted above that'd be verboten by my agreement, as it'd mean I'm working on software related to my employers business.
But even accepting your scenario as true at face value, it doesn't make it impossible to have two jobs in tech without causing conflicts. You specifically chose two tech companies with their fingers in a lot of pies. There are plenty of smaller companies that have no intersection.
Ultimately you are putting both employers in a situation where they have to choose between keeping you or potential litigation. HP has no idea what you do or do not have access to at Cisco, and doesn't want to know either. I've seen this play out multiple times in internal investigations and it is always ends up as a "fuck around and find out."
But absolutely do contact a lawyer before engaging in career ending behavior.
