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It's absurd for any company to say they're going to attract passionate programmers, and then expect them to just roll over and give up projects that were starte

It's absurd for any company to say they're going to attract passionate programmers, and then expect them to just roll over and give up projects that were started before they even joined at the company. If you're Google, you can get away with this because you just throw so much money at people that they're willing to temporarily put their life on hold for 3-4 years. But for any other company, people who are genuinely passionate about something are not going to let you dictate their entire involvement or own everything they produce. My current employer doesn't own "everything" that I produce, only projects that would present a clear conflict of interest. I don't have to be secretive, they know what I'm working on outside of my job -- not even just Open Source stuff, but even closed-source projects that I'm looking to monetize. I would never, ever join a company that didn't (in writing) allow me to retain ownership of my side projects. That's the tradeoff. You want your programmers to take initiative, stay up to date in the field, stay creative? You want them to be able to propose novel solutions to your problems, and think outside of the box? You have to let them go outside of the box, and do the things outside of work that keep them in that frame of mind. If your programmers are scared to experiment outside of work, because they have to run a calculus of whether or not an idea is worth putting on hold until they can actually own it -- well then, surprise, they're not going to experiment outside of work, and your software quality will suffer for it. People like tytso, who are effectively being sponsored by Google to work on their side projects, might be an exception. Most of your programmers will not be an exception.

reroute1 7y ago
> I would never, ever join a company that didn't (in writing) allow me to retain ownership of my side projects. OK that's fine, but doesn't everyone have this choice? Apparently google attracts thousands of top engineers with this clause. Lots of people agree to it, just because you won't doesn't mean it's absurd. Maybe you are absurd for calling google and their ideas absurd.
- danShumway 7y ago
  Companies like Google are an exception; they pay their engineers so ridiculously much that people are willing to ignore the clause under the assumption that they'll work 2-3 years and quit. Google is also broad enough that they can basically hire passion project employees -- people like tytso who are being paid to spend upwards of 50% of their time working on a side project like the Linux kernel. If you're a startup or a small company, you do not have enough money to do what Google is doing. You'll attract talent, but you won't attract industry veterans or people who have very wide skill sets, because what your company is doing is not interesting or broad enough to hold their entire attention -- and you're demanding their entire attention, both in and out of work. You're also not in a position to offer anyone like tytso their dream job, because you have a minimum viable product to build with specific requirements. So the industry talent you do have will leave quickly, because in order to do interesting things they'll have to. I regularly see articles about how to hire good people and keep them, and a lot of them waste time talking about stuff like snacks in the office, or the company culture, or whatever. Very few of them acknowledge that good programmers are good because they like programming, and if you put them in an environment where they can't program without your permission, they'll leave because regardless of how many free sodas you're giving them, they'll still feel smothered. Similarly, the employees that stay will progressively have a harder and harder time keeping up with the industry, because there's no reason at all to explore new technologies when you can't do anything with them. Take whatever position on the ethics you want, it's absurd to assume that you're going to hire someone who's genuinely passionate, and keep that person around for 10 (or even just 5) years if your company has policies like this. You have to give those people the ability to breathe, or they'll go somewhere else where they feel less strangled. People look at Google and say, "it's fine, because it works for them." 99% of companies in the world aren't Google, and will not be able to pull this off without suppressing their hire quality and retention.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - testingitout56 7y ago
    OK, so the policy isn't actually absurd at Google, just other places that try to copy them? The parent didn't mention anything about other companies. You said Google was absurd and you wouldn't work there, Parent said great then don't apply there they have plenty of qualified applicants. Doesn't sound absurd to me.
  - reroute1 7y ago
    > People look at Google and say, "it's fine, because it works for them." 99% of companies in the world aren't Google, and will not be able to pull this off without suppressing their hire quality and retention. Do they really? Who cares? If some startup adopts the policies of one of the largest most successful companies in the world, then that is stupid and on them, they deserve to fail. At this point it doesn't even have anything to do with Google. You said you won't apply to Google because of their policy, I said fine they don't need you they have plenty of qualified applicants. Now you're saying the problem is all these copycats. OK, whatever. Let them do what they want, and let people sign agreements they want. You just keep saying that it's absurd, but that doesn't make it so. That is entirely your opinion and the fact that thousands of engineers CHOOSE to work there is supporting that it's not absurd. If this is all about Google and you don't care and would never work there then why do you care so much about the people that do? Are you concerned they're being oppressed in some way? Have they been mislead? Isn't it possible they just disagree with you? I never said anything about trying this policy out at your local startup or anything about what's best for you as a programmer in general. No kidding people like freedom? People lash out at Google and then turn it into something completely different halfway through the conversation.
tikiman163 7y ago
I think your reaction here is similar to how people reacted to the headline that a woman sued her 5 year old nephew for accidentally breaking her arm. She was actually suing the parent's home owners insurance policy because the policy is supposed to cover these kinds of accidents. The insurance company didn't want to pay out though, so they spun the story to a news broadcaster in an effort to shame her into dropping the claim. Most cases where an employer claims ownership of something an engineer did on their own time, it's because the engineer decided to create a competing product and used information or other ip they only had access to as an employee. The guy trying to sell his competing product doesn't want to acknowledge that they've violated a non-compete or NDA they signed, so they publicly claim their employer is just being a bunch of greedy bastards. When you dig into known cases of employers claiming ownership of an employees outside work there are cases where they worked on it before they joined, but those are outliers, and having initial work from before joining doesn't mean that later work hasn't infringed on the employers existing IP. This topic is often complicated, but the realistic answer is that you should always tell your employer that you've started working on something and have it acknowledged as yours way before any valuable IP is created. Not doing so isn't just irresponsible, it's a known business pattern that results in failure. You should ideally tell them before you've even answered the question of how you intend to do it. Nobody is going to steal a vague idea, so this just eliminates the possible argument later. A lack of ability to trust is a strong indicator of eventual failure of the project anyway, so there simply isn't a reason to avoid doing it.
- AgentME 7y ago
  The cases that make it to court are often the ones where the employee was in the wrong, but cases that make it to court aren't the only thing to judge these policies by. If the policies cause a chilling effect where people who join give up on contributing to outside projects (as the OP twitter thread and multiple others from the author talk about), then it's valid to criticize the policy for that. The cases that make it to court are more likely to have the employee be in the wrong because they're selected from the subgroup of cases where the employee went against the policy instead of quitting outside contributions.
- danShumway 7y ago
hysan 7y ago
> It's absurd for any company to say they're going to attract passionate programmers, and then expect them to just roll over and give up projects that were started before they even joined at the company. What I find more absurd are companies that want to hire employees that are passionate and work on side projects but also require employees to sign extremely broad “we own your IP” contracts. It’s like they are saying, “We want to hire the most passionate! But we also want to own all the work they do outside of work. Free labor!” It seems like the industry as a whole is moving towards standardizing around such a double requirement in hiring, and I do not like that trend.
- edw 7y ago
  The industry isn't moving towards this. The IP agreements I signed at start-ups in 1994, 1998, 1999, and so on all had functionally identical terms. And more, like the duty to in good faith pursue patents whenever merited and assist IP attorneys with the creation of filings and sign over patent rights for nominal sums. [Edit formatting and typos.]
  - hysan 7y ago
    I wasn’t referring to the IP clauses when I said moving towards. I meant it in the context of employers glorifying passion and moving the baseline job requirements towards having projects outside of work.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  First time I heard that companies hire employees for free.
tytso 7y ago
> It's absurd for any company to say they're going to attract passionate programmers, and then expect them to just roll over and give up projects that were started before they even joined at the company. This is not necessarily "give up". You still own the code that was written before you joined the company. If it is an open source project, your code contributions after you start work will still be open source. They will just be owned by the company, so the resulting code will have some code owned by you, and some code owned by the company. If this is a healthy open source project (such as, say, e2fsprogs), it already has some code owned by Red Hat, some code owned by SuSE, some code by IBM, etc. So the fact that there will be some code written by you, but actually owned by Google, is (everyone repeat after me) No Big Deal. Now, it's different if your "side project" is under a proprietary license, and you hope to make $$$ some day. In that case, companies like IBM, Google, VA Linux Systems, which have a "all your IP belong to us" will be problematic for you. You can choose not to work for such a company, or you can choose to try to negotiate with the company. But for a side project which is an open source project, in general there won't be a problem. Now, if said open source project directly competes with a proprietary product sold by that company --- you had better disclose it up front during the hiring negotiations, and have a negotiation about how it should be handled. The fact of the matter is, the company doesn't have a right to your services, and you don't have a right to a job at that company. You negotiate it, just like you negotiate cash salary and equity compensation. And if you can't come to a negotiated outcome that both sides are happy with, neither side is evil; they just couldn't come to an agreement.
- danShumway 7y ago
  > This is not necessarily "give up". "Giving up" is an ambiguous term here and I should have tried to be more specific. But I wasn't just referring to ownership. If I'm working on a project, and joining Google means I need to stop working on it for 3-4 years, then I've effectively given up that project, in the sense that it's no longer going to be maintained or stay relevant. I'm unlikely to go back to a 3-4 year old project and pick it up again later. Most of those projects are dead. > So the fact that there will be some code written by you, but actually owned by Google, is (everyone repeat after me) No Big Deal. Sure, unless your company is Oracle and they decide X years later to say, "actually we own the code and we didn't authorize it to be Open Sourced, and that means the entire project is infringing." People are so ready to say that terms like this are no big deal. If it really doesn't matter who owns the code that gets contributed to an Open Source project, then why is it important that Google own it? If Google isn't going to exploit that code in any way, then they shouldn't have a problem with their employees retaining ownership, right? > Now, it's different if your "side project" is under a proprietary license I think it's unrealistic and unreasonable to assume that every time an employee enriches themselves outside of work, they'll be doing it in relation to an Open Source project. It's also ignores the fact that a nontrivial portion of Silicon Valley was built on top of people who didn't accept those terms. We can say this stuff is standard and it all comes down to individual choice, but we have pretty decent data that universally getting rid of noncompetes was good for the software industry. We have reasonably decent data that allowing employees to work on commercial side projects outside of work would similarly be good for the industry. Labor laws just haven't caught up yet to that point. > Neither side is evil; they just couldn't come to an agreement. I do think that these policies are unethical, that they amount to a kind of attempted takeover of employee autonomy on a level that a business owner shouldn't even be trying to restrict. However, that wasn't the argument I was making when I said this was absurd. I was just making the observation that most businesses don't have as much money as Google to throw at people or to offer them dream jobs. So most businesses who attempt this are giving up any chance of hiring the best developers, because on average the best developers won't tolerate those terms unless they come attached to Google money and a dream job. Obviously, direct competition or conflicts of interest are another story, but nobody is debating them. It's a mistake to start from, "direct conflicts of interest should be avoided", and then immediately extrapolate from there to "a business should own everything that comes out of an employee, anywhere."

reroute1 7y ago

> I would never, ever join a company that didn't (in writing) allow me to retain ownership of my side projects. OK that's fine, but doesn't everyone have this choice? Apparently google attracts thousands of top engineers with this clause. Lots of people agree to it, just because you won't doesn't mean it's absurd. Maybe you are absurd for calling google and their ideas absurd.

danShumway 7y ago
Companies like Google are an exception; they pay their engineers so ridiculously much that people are willing to ignore the clause under the assumption that they'll work 2-3 years and quit. Google is also broad enough that they can basically hire passion project employees -- people like tytso who are being paid to spend upwards of 50% of their time working on a side project like the Linux kernel. If you're a startup or a small company, you do not have enough money to do what Google is doing. You'll attract talent, but you won't attract industry veterans or people who have very wide skill sets, because what your company is doing is not interesting or broad enough to hold their entire attention -- and you're demanding their entire attention, both in and out of work. You're also not in a position to offer anyone like tytso their dream job, because you have a minimum viable product to build with specific requirements. So the industry talent you do have will leave quickly, because in order to do interesting things they'll have to. I regularly see articles about how to hire good people and keep them, and a lot of them waste time talking about stuff like snacks in the office, or the company culture, or whatever. Very few of them acknowledge that good programmers are good because they like programming, and if you put them in an environment where they can't program without your permission, they'll leave because regardless of how many free sodas you're giving them, they'll still feel smothered. Similarly, the employees that stay will progressively have a harder and harder time keeping up with the industry, because there's no reason at all to explore new technologies when you can't do anything with them. Take whatever position on the ethics you want, it's absurd to assume that you're going to hire someone who's genuinely passionate, and keep that person around for 10 (or even just 5) years if your company has policies like this. You have to give those people the ability to breathe, or they'll go somewhere else where they feel less strangled. People look at Google and say, "it's fine, because it works for them." 99% of companies in the world aren't Google, and will not be able to pull this off without suppressing their hire quality and retention.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- testingitout56 7y ago
  OK, so the policy isn't actually absurd at Google, just other places that try to copy them? The parent didn't mention anything about other companies. You said Google was absurd and you wouldn't work there, Parent said great then don't apply there they have plenty of qualified applicants. Doesn't sound absurd to me.
- reroute1 7y ago
  > People look at Google and say, "it's fine, because it works for them." 99% of companies in the world aren't Google, and will not be able to pull this off without suppressing their hire quality and retention. Do they really? Who cares? If some startup adopts the policies of one of the largest most successful companies in the world, then that is stupid and on them, they deserve to fail. At this point it doesn't even have anything to do with Google. You said you won't apply to Google because of their policy, I said fine they don't need you they have plenty of qualified applicants. Now you're saying the problem is all these copycats. OK, whatever. Let them do what they want, and let people sign agreements they want. You just keep saying that it's absurd, but that doesn't make it so. That is entirely your opinion and the fact that thousands of engineers CHOOSE to work there is supporting that it's not absurd. If this is all about Google and you don't care and would never work there then why do you care so much about the people that do? Are you concerned they're being oppressed in some way? Have they been mislead? Isn't it possible they just disagree with you? I never said anything about trying this policy out at your local startup or anything about what's best for you as a programmer in general. No kidding people like freedom? People lash out at Google and then turn it into something completely different halfway through the conversation.

tikiman163 7y ago

I think your reaction here is similar to how people reacted to the headline that a woman sued her 5 year old nephew for accidentally breaking her arm. She was actually suing the parent's home owners insurance policy because the policy is supposed to cover these kinds of accidents. The insurance company didn't want to pay out though, so they spun the story to a news broadcaster in an effort to shame her into dropping the claim. Most cases where an employer claims ownership of something an engineer did on their own time, it's because the engineer decided to create a competing product and used information or other ip they only had access to as an employee. The guy trying to sell his competing product doesn't want to acknowledge that they've violated a non-compete or NDA they signed, so they publicly claim their employer is just being a bunch of greedy bastards. When you dig into known cases of employers claiming ownership of an employees outside work there are cases where they worked on it before they joined, but those are outliers, and having initial work from before joining doesn't mean that later work hasn't infringed on the employers existing IP. This topic is often complicated, but the realistic answer is that you should always tell your employer that you've started working on something and have it acknowledged as yours way before any valuable IP is created. Not doing so isn't just irresponsible, it's a known business pattern that results in failure. You should ideally tell them before you've even answered the question of how you intend to do it. Nobody is going to steal a vague idea, so this just eliminates the possible argument later. A lack of ability to trust is a strong indicator of eventual failure of the project anyway, so there simply isn't a reason to avoid doing it.

AgentME 7y ago
The cases that make it to court are often the ones where the employee was in the wrong, but cases that make it to court aren't the only thing to judge these policies by. If the policies cause a chilling effect where people who join give up on contributing to outside projects (as the OP twitter thread and multiple others from the author talk about), then it's valid to criticize the policy for that. The cases that make it to court are more likely to have the employee be in the wrong because they're selected from the subgroup of cases where the employee went against the policy instead of quitting outside contributions.
danShumway 7y ago

hysan 7y ago

> It's absurd for any company to say they're going to attract passionate programmers, and then expect them to just roll over and give up projects that were started before they even joined at the company. What I find more absurd are companies that want to hire employees that are passionate and work on side projects but also require employees to sign extremely broad “we own your IP” contracts. It’s like they are saying, “We want to hire the most passionate! But we also want to own all the work they do outside of work. Free labor!” It seems like the industry as a whole is moving towards standardizing around such a double requirement in hiring, and I do not like that trend.

edw 7y ago
The industry isn't moving towards this. The IP agreements I signed at start-ups in 1994, 1998, 1999, and so on all had functionally identical terms. And more, like the duty to in good faith pursue patents whenever merited and assist IP attorneys with the creation of filings and sign over patent rights for nominal sums. [Edit formatting and typos.]
- hysan 7y ago
  I wasn’t referring to the IP clauses when I said moving towards. I meant it in the context of employers glorifying passion and moving the baseline job requirements towards having projects outside of work.
lonelappde 7y ago
First time I heard that companies hire employees for free.

tytso 7y ago

> It's absurd for any company to say they're going to attract passionate programmers, and then expect them to just roll over and give up projects that were started before they even joined at the company. This is not necessarily "give up". You still own the code that was written before you joined the company. If it is an open source project, your code contributions after you start work will still be open source. They will just be owned by the company, so the resulting code will have some code owned by you, and some code owned by the company. If this is a healthy open source project (such as, say, e2fsprogs), it already has some code owned by Red Hat, some code owned by SuSE, some code by IBM, etc. So the fact that there will be some code written by you, but actually owned by Google, is (everyone repeat after me) No Big Deal. Now, it's different if your "side project" is under a proprietary license, and you hope to make $$$ some day. In that case, companies like IBM, Google, VA Linux Systems, which have a "all your IP belong to us" will be problematic for you. You can choose not to work for such a company, or you can choose to try to negotiate with the company. But for a side project which is an open source project, in general there won't be a problem. Now, if said open source project directly competes with a proprietary product sold by that company --- you had better disclose it up front during the hiring negotiations, and have a negotiation about how it should be handled. The fact of the matter is, the company doesn't have a right to your services, and you don't have a right to a job at that company. You negotiate it, just like you negotiate cash salary and equity compensation. And if you can't come to a negotiated outcome that both sides are happy with, neither side is evil; they just couldn't come to an agreement.

danShumway 7y ago
> This is not necessarily "give up". "Giving up" is an ambiguous term here and I should have tried to be more specific. But I wasn't just referring to ownership. If I'm working on a project, and joining Google means I need to stop working on it for 3-4 years, then I've effectively given up that project, in the sense that it's no longer going to be maintained or stay relevant. I'm unlikely to go back to a 3-4 year old project and pick it up again later. Most of those projects are dead. > So the fact that there will be some code written by you, but actually owned by Google, is (everyone repeat after me) No Big Deal. Sure, unless your company is Oracle and they decide X years later to say, "actually we own the code and we didn't authorize it to be Open Sourced, and that means the entire project is infringing." People are so ready to say that terms like this are no big deal. If it really doesn't matter who owns the code that gets contributed to an Open Source project, then why is it important that Google own it? If Google isn't going to exploit that code in any way, then they shouldn't have a problem with their employees retaining ownership, right? > Now, it's different if your "side project" is under a proprietary license I think it's unrealistic and unreasonable to assume that every time an employee enriches themselves outside of work, they'll be doing it in relation to an Open Source project. It's also ignores the fact that a nontrivial portion of Silicon Valley was built on top of people who didn't accept those terms. We can say this stuff is standard and it all comes down to individual choice, but we have pretty decent data that universally getting rid of noncompetes was good for the software industry. We have reasonably decent data that allowing employees to work on commercial side projects outside of work would similarly be good for the industry. Labor laws just haven't caught up yet to that point. > Neither side is evil; they just couldn't come to an agreement. I do think that these policies are unethical, that they amount to a kind of attempted takeover of employee autonomy on a level that a business owner shouldn't even be trying to restrict. However, that wasn't the argument I was making when I said this was absurd. I was just making the observation that most businesses don't have as much money as Google to throw at people or to offer them dream jobs. So most businesses who attempt this are giving up any chance of hiring the best developers, because on average the best developers won't tolerate those terms unless they come attached to Google money and a dream job. Obviously, direct competition or conflicts of interest are another story, but nobody is debating them. It's a mistake to start from, "direct conflicts of interest should be avoided", and then immediately extrapolate from there to "a business should own everything that comes out of an employee, anywhere."