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There is no way that it is unethical. According to who’s ethics? According to my ethics it’s unethical for a company to believe it has any say whatsoever about

There is no way that it is unethical. According to who’s ethics? According to my ethics it’s unethical for a company to believe it has any say whatsoever about what I author unless I give them specific assignment of what I create for specific compensation. Outside of that, they can go float a boat. They hired me for my talent; and will compensate me adequately or I will provide my services elsewhere; and it’s up to me to determine what that looks like when I signed a contract with them. It sounds like the corporate lawyers have succeeded in making you think they’re doing you all the favor when you create the value for them. There’s a reason the FTC ruled against non-competes. It’s “ethically un-American”.

bluGill 2y ago
The work related part makes it unethical. Unless they pay you to work weekends or otherwise compensate you (on my team when you work a weekends we expect you to take time off in the near future to compensate for that time) doing something that competes with the company you work for is not ethical.
- josephg 2y ago
  Ehhh this is way more complicated than you make it sound. For example, I've been in situations where I've successfully argued for some component of what we do at work to be opensourced. But I wasn't given any extra resources to opensource it. I was doing consulting work at the time and the company didn't have a culture of contributing to opensource. In that case, I spent a couple weekends cleaning up the code I'd opensourced & triaging github issues. I'm proud of my work, and I want to share it. In another company, we were running into some limitations of the database we were using. I spent a weekend writing up a super simple database prototype from scratch, mostly as a research project for myself. I don't think we ever used any of the code I wrote. I probably ended up throwing it on github and then forgot about it. That database prototype was clearly "work related". But it was also very clearly not part of my job. - Although, working on that database made me better at my job. It helped me understand the limitations of the database we were using, and gave me some ideas on how to work around them. How can you argue that it was unethical to do any of that work? Frankly, everyone benefited. I learned a lot. I got better at my job - (and more employable). And my company benefited directly (and immediately) from my work.
- crazydoggers 2y ago
  Are you perhaps not from the United States? Your take that it’s unethical seems to contradict with nearly 200 years of American IP law, or even further back to the 1400s in English common law where non competes were considered unjustifiable restraints on trade. In the United States IP rights go to the inventor and most must be explicitly transferred to an employer. The whole point of the patent office is to encourage inventors to invent and not allow corporations to own everything and prevent competition. Although some companies have attempted to rig the system to prevent competition, ultimately the law has come down to foster competition (see the recent defeats of patent trolls) And as the other commenter here points out, there are so many cases where someone working at a company discovers a way to improve business in the industry they are employed in, that could compete with their current employer, and that employer is unable or unwilling to devote resources or compensate for it. Huge swaths of US innovation or driven by such things. Probably the most iconic example is Steve Wozniak inventing the Apple I while he was working at HP, which HP refused to acquire and support causing Steve to resign and start Apple. I also write this as someone with a name on a patent I chose to transfer to a company I helped found for an invention I helped create while working there. But to be clear, that was my choice. Ultimately the law said it was my invention by default, and there was no legal, moral, ethical, or god given obligation preventing me from walking away with it.
  - KPGv2 2y ago
    > non competes were considered unjustifiable restraints on trad I'm sure you will find that non-competes are perfectly legal in the US.
    - bluGill 2y ago
      Maybe different states hav different laws. Even where they are legel courts look down on the idea that someone wouldn't be allowed to do there job. In all states there is some form of noncompete but generally for the most obvious cases - don't work for two companies doing the same thing with access to their private plans at the same time type of thing
    - crazydoggers 2y ago
- purple_turtle 2y ago
  > Unless they pay you to work weekends That is really different from "Don't write code related to work on the weekend. That is unethical no matter what the law says." I see no problem whatsoever with taking contract for emergency fixes done on weekend, billed appropriately. Or working flexible tine billed hourly. (unless it impacts your family badly or something, but it is far from blanket ban on working on weekends)

bluGill 2y ago

The work related part makes it unethical. Unless they pay you to work weekends or otherwise compensate you (on my team when you work a weekends we expect you to take time off in the near future to compensate for that time) doing something that competes with the company you work for is not ethical.

josephg 2y ago
Ehhh this is way more complicated than you make it sound. For example, I've been in situations where I've successfully argued for some component of what we do at work to be opensourced. But I wasn't given any extra resources to opensource it. I was doing consulting work at the time and the company didn't have a culture of contributing to opensource. In that case, I spent a couple weekends cleaning up the code I'd opensourced & triaging github issues. I'm proud of my work, and I want to share it. In another company, we were running into some limitations of the database we were using. I spent a weekend writing up a super simple database prototype from scratch, mostly as a research project for myself. I don't think we ever used any of the code I wrote. I probably ended up throwing it on github and then forgot about it. That database prototype was clearly "work related". But it was also very clearly not part of my job. - Although, working on that database made me better at my job. It helped me understand the limitations of the database we were using, and gave me some ideas on how to work around them. How can you argue that it was unethical to do any of that work? Frankly, everyone benefited. I learned a lot. I got better at my job - (and more employable). And my company benefited directly (and immediately) from my work.
crazydoggers 2y ago
Are you perhaps not from the United States? Your take that it’s unethical seems to contradict with nearly 200 years of American IP law, or even further back to the 1400s in English common law where non competes were considered unjustifiable restraints on trade. In the United States IP rights go to the inventor and most must be explicitly transferred to an employer. The whole point of the patent office is to encourage inventors to invent and not allow corporations to own everything and prevent competition. Although some companies have attempted to rig the system to prevent competition, ultimately the law has come down to foster competition (see the recent defeats of patent trolls) And as the other commenter here points out, there are so many cases where someone working at a company discovers a way to improve business in the industry they are employed in, that could compete with their current employer, and that employer is unable or unwilling to devote resources or compensate for it. Huge swaths of US innovation or driven by such things. Probably the most iconic example is Steve Wozniak inventing the Apple I while he was working at HP, which HP refused to acquire and support causing Steve to resign and start Apple. I also write this as someone with a name on a patent I chose to transfer to a company I helped found for an invention I helped create while working there. But to be clear, that was my choice. Ultimately the law said it was my invention by default, and there was no legal, moral, ethical, or god given obligation preventing me from walking away with it.
- KPGv2 2y ago
  > non competes were considered unjustifiable restraints on trad I'm sure you will find that non-competes are perfectly legal in the US.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    Maybe different states hav different laws. Even where they are legel courts look down on the idea that someone wouldn't be allowed to do there job. In all states there is some form of noncompete but generally for the most obvious cases - don't work for two companies doing the same thing with access to their private plans at the same time type of thing
  - crazydoggers 2y ago
purple_turtle 2y ago
> Unless they pay you to work weekends That is really different from "Don't write code related to work on the weekend. That is unethical no matter what the law says." I see no problem whatsoever with taking contract for emergency fixes done on weekend, billed appropriately. Or working flexible tine billed hourly. (unless it impacts your family badly or something, but it is far from blanket ban on working on weekends)