> 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

> 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.