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> Industrious developers can even work for a big company or an app development team as a day job and then moonlight as an independent developer with a few of hi

> Industrious developers can even work for a big company or an app development team as a day job and then moonlight as an independent developer with a few of his or her own apps that can potentially generate residual income. If your side project ever gets big enough, your company could easily sue for partial ownership. How? By invoking 'discovery' to get access to your private GMail to prove you sent emails about your side project during work hours. Unless, of course, you manage to completely firewall all side project work from your day job hours. More likely, your side project never becomes so lucrative that a company will sue you for ownership and risk being skewered online with a "Big Bad Company X is suing little Indie Me" http://blog.asmartbear.com/working-startup.html http://blog.asmartbear.com/working-startup.html

Silhouette 16y ago
1. Never work on your personal project on your employer's time. They're paying for that time, and probably the resources you're using during that time as well, so they have a legitimate claim on anything you do at work. 2. Never sign an employment contract that gives any rights to stuff you do away from work to your employer, or that gives your employer any right to control what you may do out of hours as long as it doesn't affect your ability to do your job properly when you're at work. In short, you should completely firewall any side project from work. If your contract doesn't allow for this and your employer won't give you a clear, specific exception, then you have to decide whether to keep the employer or the side project, but you can't do both.
- wallflower 16y ago
  When I was more naive than I am now, I signed the yeah-all-your-IP-belongs-to-us employment agreement as a condition of employment. This was many years ago and I am still at the same company. To counteract this, I only do contract work and work on fairly large team collaborations. My thinking is if I don't own it but the client does (since they are paying me to work on it after hours) - the day job company won't have much to go on because I didn't own the code in the first place. For the second - since I don't have full ownership/sole contributor - maybe that will make them less likely to go after me than a clean cut single owner situation. All of these projects are done on non-company time, network, and hardware. I don't usually bring my MacBook in but when I have a client deadline, I will work on my train commute and not even charge the MacBook using (company) power - I tote around a second battery.

Silhouette 16y ago

1. Never work on your personal project on your employer's time. They're paying for that time, and probably the resources you're using during that time as well, so they have a legitimate claim on anything you do at work. 2. Never sign an employment contract that gives any rights to stuff you do away from work to your employer, or that gives your employer any right to control what you may do out of hours as long as it doesn't affect your ability to do your job properly when you're at work. In short, you should completely firewall any side project from work. If your contract doesn't allow for this and your employer won't give you a clear, specific exception, then you have to decide whether to keep the employer or the side project, but you can't do both.

wallflower 16y ago
When I was more naive than I am now, I signed the yeah-all-your-IP-belongs-to-us employment agreement as a condition of employment. This was many years ago and I am still at the same company. To counteract this, I only do contract work and work on fairly large team collaborations. My thinking is if I don't own it but the client does (since they are paying me to work on it after hours) - the day job company won't have much to go on because I didn't own the code in the first place. For the second - since I don't have full ownership/sole contributor - maybe that will make them less likely to go after me than a clean cut single owner situation. All of these projects are done on non-company time, network, and hardware. I don't usually bring my MacBook in but when I have a client deadline, I will work on my train commute and not even charge the MacBook using (company) power - I tote around a second battery.