I left Amazon a couple weeks ago to join a start-up. One of the reasons I did so was because I was tired of being tied down by Amazon's non-compete agreement.

I left Amazon a couple weeks ago to join a start-up. One of the reasons I did so was because I was tired of being tied down by Amazon's non-compete agreement. When you work for Amazon, you can't contribute to open-source. Basically, you can't contribute anything unless it gives Amazon an advantage of some kind (fix a bug in the Linux kernel that's causing AWS issues, for example) or if it will somehow be impossible for the project to ever be used by a competitor to gain an advantage. There's lots of progress being made internally to try to open that up, but after 5 years I never met or heard of an employee who had been given permission to contribute to an open source project. You also can't have personal projects if you ever plan to share them. I asked permission a couple times to do a side project on my own time, with my own hardware. The first time, legal flat out told me 'no' because Amazon also was involved in that industry- the industry in question being 'machine learning'. The second time, they wouldn't say 'yes' or 'no', they just directed me to the non-compete agreement and told me to 'follow whatever it says'. IE: do what you want, but we reserve the right to sue you. I wound up doing some side projects that were purely Amazon-internal[0]. It got boring. All that said, I loved my time at Amazon. I worked with great people, had some crazy times (Amazon Fulfillment is a crazy, fun business), and learned so damn much. If this start-up doesn't work out I may even try to go back. It's a place that has problems, but it's not a bad place- if you don't care about the non-compete stuff. [0]If you work at Amazon, I wrote 'RediFork' over a couple of dull weekends when I was an SDE1.