5 ms·

I would disagree. What you do in your personal time is none of your employers business he is not paying for that time and he does not own whatever you create i

by Fuxy 13y ago

I would disagree. What you do in your personal time is none of your employers business he is not paying for that time and he does not own whatever you create in that time. Not unless you signed a ridiculous contract saying something like that which in my opinion should not be enforceable anyway. It's like a construction company saying it owns the house you built for your family just because you happen to work for them and you gained experience by working for them. They certainly didn't supply the raw material which in programming would be time and effort so they shouldn't have any claim on it.

deong 13y ago
> They certainly didn't supply the raw material which in programming would be time and effort so they shouldn't have any claim on it. It's this last point where you might well run into legitimate disagreement. What is the "raw material" for a piece of software? If it's the knowledge that goes into writing it, then arguably the employer did supply that. I can pretty much remember what code I wrote during a day. Not verbatim of course, but if I solved a problem at 10:00 AM, I'll be able to figure it out again at 6:00 PM. What is to prevent me from going to work for a small software company, working on their product during the day, cashing their paychecks, and duplicating my work at night? When I'm done, I just quit and sell my version as a competitor?
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- ufmace 13y ago
  If doing that is really practical, I would tend to wonder if the employer has a practical business plan. Shouldn't your employer be adding enough value to your code and work processes that you couldn't make the same product without them? At the job I currently work, our product is for a very specialized domain. I can remember the problems that I've solved, but there's no way I could build or sell a product in the same market without the domain expertise that my employer brings to the table. Maybe your employer is providing capital to fund the salaries of a team of developers to build a product that has no guarantee of any market success, saving you the trouble of risking that kind of money, or convincing somebody else to risk it for you. Maybe you don't like sales, and your employer is going out to potential customers and convincing them to use your product, so you can keep working on the stuff you're really good at. Point is, if you legitimately can't think of some value that your employer adds to your work, maybe you really should take off and do the same thing for yourself.
  - deong 13y ago
    That was more of a hypothetical scenario than my actual life -- I'm a researcher working in academia, so in my case, I pretty much do do all the work around what I produce (my university provides support in terms of office space, administrative staff, etc., of course, but the "product" is research papers that they don't have much of a hand in). But that aside, I'm not sure you got my point. Something doesn't have to be easy to do in order for it to be illegal. There are lots of reasons why a person might not want to do this -- you mention several of them. But that also doesn't mean that the employer shouldn't have the right to prevent them from doing it if they did want to. If your employer is paying for you to figure out how to solve a particular problem, generally the employer gets ownership of that work. If you then duplicate it on your own, it's a pretty gray area as to whether the employer gets some claim over it.
Xylakant 13y ago
I disagree. Your employer is sponsoring a lot of your learnings in a specific area, so he's entitled to all your ideas in that area, that's what your paid for. It would be extremely easy to just keep your best ideas for "your" project and not use them in your work project. The construction company would have a valid claim if you stole the blueprints at work.
- masklinn 13y ago
  > Your employer is sponsoring a lot of your learnings in a specific area, so he's entitled to all your ideas in that area No, he is not on either count. > that's what your paid for. I don't know you, but I'm paid for the work I produce, I'd be really happy if I could be paid for learning stuff and not doing shit. > The construction company would have a valid claim if you stole the blueprints at work. Yes. It would not have a valid claim if you built stuff on the side, even if it's better stuff. Your company does not own your knowledge, which is why non-compete agreements are invalid in just about all jurisdictions unless very heavily compensated (in Germany it's at least 50% of gross and no more than 2 years, and clauses can still be found unreasonable and invalidated).
  - stackcollision 13y ago
    When he says that the employer is sponsoring learning in that company's particular area, he is right. Learning is not just sitting down with a textbook and taking notes. In most jobs, especially computer science, you're learning every day. You're adapting new solutions to problems, and taking that experience with you. That knowledge can then be applied to future problems. His company is paying him to solve problems in a particular space. Once he solves them, he knows how to solve them in the future. When working on an OSS project in the same space, he can apply the techniques he learned at his job to that project.
  - Xylakant 13y ago
    > I don't know you, but I'm paid for the work I produce, I'd be really happy if I could be paid for learning stuff and not doing shit. Your employer does not pay the time you spend on work-related research (or even general research)? Change job. It's part of what programmers do - find solutions to problems, and since most problems we're facing are variations of problems other people already solved research and learning about possible solutions are an important part of our work, I'd even say the most critical part. I'm happy to compensate my employees for that. > which is why non-compete agreements are invalid There's no noncompete clause being discussed here. It's basically a case of "I'm building the same product as at work, just for free" and the guy is making a direct competitor to his employer. Sorry, if one of my employees did build a competing product while being employed here without explicit permission, I'd fire him. If the guy build something mostly unrelated to his work, I'd totally agree with him, but the way this case looks like, no, I'm not.
JackFr 13y ago
Well, sometimes what you do in your personal time is your employers business. Would you feel the same way if rather than working on open source, he were doing the same work moonlighting for a competitor of his employer? Its fine to say that the technology stack is different, but certainly he carries with him, perhaps unwittingly, certain proprietary information including but not limited to feature lists, customers and leads, marketing strategy, performance characteristics, etc. I don't think this guy is a necessarily bad guy by any stretch, and I don't think he was intentionally trying to harm his former employer, but he's a little clueless.
- josh-wrale 13y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indentured_servant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indentured_servant > Penal sanctions, previously considered perfectly in line with free labor, became in the 19th century a way to transform ordinary labor into "contracts of slavery."
- the_ancient 13y ago
  Personal time, is personal time, and none of the employers business even if moonlighting for a competitor. If the employer has a say over your personal time then you have no personal time and the employer owns you.
  - Xylakant 13y ago
    >Personal time, is personal time, and none of the employers business even if moonlighting for a competitor. How are you proving that you did not use internal company knowledge to build the competing product? This is a legal nightmare, just do yourself a favor and don't do it. Or do you also think that NDA-clauses for employees are invalid?
    - the_ancient 13y ago
      I never said i did it or would do it... I like my employer and have no desire to moonlight at all. However they do not own me, which is what your implying with your statements. Any employer that needs to use legal threats and controls on my personal time to control me is probably not someone I would ever work for anyway
chaostheory 13y ago
> Not unless you signed a ridiculous contract saying something like that which in my opinion should not be enforceable anyway. The problem is that pretty much every employment contract for tech companies big and small in the US have this type of clause as standard even for non-techie employees. It's been this way for over a decade now. INAL but I've heard that the only "easy" way around it is to make a specific change to your employment contract that makes it less ridiculously broad and aggressive BEFORE you have any issues. You probably need a lawyer for that, and even if you do; your lawyer's work only helps if your employer, more specifically their legal team, actually agrees to it. My former coworker's wife is a employment contract lawyer so that helped him become aware of it and mitigate it. I don't feel that most people have this advantage.
- pjmlp 13y ago
  It depends on the country. I have never heard of such contracts either in Portugal or Germany.
  - Xylakant 13y ago
    It's a standard clause in Germany, and even if it's not in your contract, it's in the law. You even have to notify your employer if you make a discovery related to your job. [1] (patent, technical improvements or similar). As with a lot of laws it's not quite so simple to apply to IT jobs, but for anything that's patent worthy, it's pretty clear. [1] http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/arbnerfg/BJNR007560957.html#BJNR007560957BJNG000200306 http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/arbnerfg/BJNR007560957.htm...
    - chaostheory 13y ago
      Ah this is another case of people not reading long legal contracts that they sign. I would have been surprised if this wasn't standard in the EU as well as Asia .
    - pjmlp 13y ago
      Thanks for the hint, I'll have a look at it.
presootto 13y ago
That depends on your contract. And unfortunately those contracts are legal. I gave up working on open source projects as I'd rather that code didn't exist then having to surrender it to my company. My employer, Google, has the most expensive lawyers money can buy and they will not hesiste to ruin your life in order to defend the company's interests. Like the guy in the article I have a family to support and the pottential affect is just not worth the risk.
- cdibona 13y ago
  Damn shame, we have a huge number of developers committing code to OSS projects. I'd be surprised if you actually worked at Google, as anyone who made it past their first week is welcome to our training on how to release, patch and in fact navigate the borders between Google and personal copyright.
mwfunk 13y ago
You're talking about how you think it ought to be (which I agree with); the person you're disagreeing with was simply describing how it is. None of this is unusual in any way, unfortunately.

by Fuxy 13y ago

deong 13y ago

> They certainly didn't supply the raw material which in programming would be time and effort so they shouldn't have any claim on it. It's this last point where you might well run into legitimate disagreement. What is the "raw material" for a piece of software? If it's the knowledge that goes into writing it, then arguably the employer did supply that. I can pretty much remember what code I wrote during a day. Not verbatim of course, but if I solved a problem at 10:00 AM, I'll be able to figure it out again at 6:00 PM. What is to prevent me from going to work for a small software company, working on their product during the day, cashing their paychecks, and duplicating my work at night? When I'm done, I just quit and sell my version as a competitor?

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
ufmace 13y ago
If doing that is really practical, I would tend to wonder if the employer has a practical business plan. Shouldn't your employer be adding enough value to your code and work processes that you couldn't make the same product without them? At the job I currently work, our product is for a very specialized domain. I can remember the problems that I've solved, but there's no way I could build or sell a product in the same market without the domain expertise that my employer brings to the table. Maybe your employer is providing capital to fund the salaries of a team of developers to build a product that has no guarantee of any market success, saving you the trouble of risking that kind of money, or convincing somebody else to risk it for you. Maybe you don't like sales, and your employer is going out to potential customers and convincing them to use your product, so you can keep working on the stuff you're really good at. Point is, if you legitimately can't think of some value that your employer adds to your work, maybe you really should take off and do the same thing for yourself.
- deong 13y ago
  That was more of a hypothetical scenario than my actual life -- I'm a researcher working in academia, so in my case, I pretty much do do all the work around what I produce (my university provides support in terms of office space, administrative staff, etc., of course, but the "product" is research papers that they don't have much of a hand in). But that aside, I'm not sure you got my point. Something doesn't have to be easy to do in order for it to be illegal. There are lots of reasons why a person might not want to do this -- you mention several of them. But that also doesn't mean that the employer shouldn't have the right to prevent them from doing it if they did want to. If your employer is paying for you to figure out how to solve a particular problem, generally the employer gets ownership of that work. If you then duplicate it on your own, it's a pretty gray area as to whether the employer gets some claim over it.

Xylakant 13y ago

I disagree. Your employer is sponsoring a lot of your learnings in a specific area, so he's entitled to all your ideas in that area, that's what your paid for. It would be extremely easy to just keep your best ideas for "your" project and not use them in your work project. The construction company would have a valid claim if you stole the blueprints at work.

masklinn 13y ago
> Your employer is sponsoring a lot of your learnings in a specific area, so he's entitled to all your ideas in that area No, he is not on either count. > that's what your paid for. I don't know you, but I'm paid for the work I produce, I'd be really happy if I could be paid for learning stuff and not doing shit. > The construction company would have a valid claim if you stole the blueprints at work. Yes. It would not have a valid claim if you built stuff on the side, even if it's better stuff. Your company does not own your knowledge, which is why non-compete agreements are invalid in just about all jurisdictions unless very heavily compensated (in Germany it's at least 50% of gross and no more than 2 years, and clauses can still be found unreasonable and invalidated).
- stackcollision 13y ago
  When he says that the employer is sponsoring learning in that company's particular area, he is right. Learning is not just sitting down with a textbook and taking notes. In most jobs, especially computer science, you're learning every day. You're adapting new solutions to problems, and taking that experience with you. That knowledge can then be applied to future problems. His company is paying him to solve problems in a particular space. Once he solves them, he knows how to solve them in the future. When working on an OSS project in the same space, he can apply the techniques he learned at his job to that project.
- Xylakant 13y ago
  > I don't know you, but I'm paid for the work I produce, I'd be really happy if I could be paid for learning stuff and not doing shit. Your employer does not pay the time you spend on work-related research (or even general research)? Change job. It's part of what programmers do - find solutions to problems, and since most problems we're facing are variations of problems other people already solved research and learning about possible solutions are an important part of our work, I'd even say the most critical part. I'm happy to compensate my employees for that. > which is why non-compete agreements are invalid There's no noncompete clause being discussed here. It's basically a case of "I'm building the same product as at work, just for free" and the guy is making a direct competitor to his employer. Sorry, if one of my employees did build a competing product while being employed here without explicit permission, I'd fire him. If the guy build something mostly unrelated to his work, I'd totally agree with him, but the way this case looks like, no, I'm not.

JackFr 13y ago

Well, sometimes what you do in your personal time is your employers business. Would you feel the same way if rather than working on open source, he were doing the same work moonlighting for a competitor of his employer? Its fine to say that the technology stack is different, but certainly he carries with him, perhaps unwittingly, certain proprietary information including but not limited to feature lists, customers and leads, marketing strategy, performance characteristics, etc. I don't think this guy is a necessarily bad guy by any stretch, and I don't think he was intentionally trying to harm his former employer, but he's a little clueless.

josh-wrale 13y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indentured_servant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indentured_servant > Penal sanctions, previously considered perfectly in line with free labor, became in the 19th century a way to transform ordinary labor into "contracts of slavery."
the_ancient 13y ago
Personal time, is personal time, and none of the employers business even if moonlighting for a competitor. If the employer has a say over your personal time then you have no personal time and the employer owns you.
- Xylakant 13y ago
  >Personal time, is personal time, and none of the employers business even if moonlighting for a competitor. How are you proving that you did not use internal company knowledge to build the competing product? This is a legal nightmare, just do yourself a favor and don't do it. Or do you also think that NDA-clauses for employees are invalid?
  - the_ancient 13y ago
    I never said i did it or would do it... I like my employer and have no desire to moonlight at all. However they do not own me, which is what your implying with your statements. Any employer that needs to use legal threats and controls on my personal time to control me is probably not someone I would ever work for anyway

chaostheory 13y ago

> Not unless you signed a ridiculous contract saying something like that which in my opinion should not be enforceable anyway. The problem is that pretty much every employment contract for tech companies big and small in the US have this type of clause as standard even for non-techie employees. It's been this way for over a decade now. INAL but I've heard that the only "easy" way around it is to make a specific change to your employment contract that makes it less ridiculously broad and aggressive BEFORE you have any issues. You probably need a lawyer for that, and even if you do; your lawyer's work only helps if your employer, more specifically their legal team, actually agrees to it. My former coworker's wife is a employment contract lawyer so that helped him become aware of it and mitigate it. I don't feel that most people have this advantage.

pjmlp 13y ago
It depends on the country. I have never heard of such contracts either in Portugal or Germany.
- Xylakant 13y ago
  It's a standard clause in Germany, and even if it's not in your contract, it's in the law. You even have to notify your employer if you make a discovery related to your job. [1] (patent, technical improvements or similar). As with a lot of laws it's not quite so simple to apply to IT jobs, but for anything that's patent worthy, it's pretty clear. [1] http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/arbnerfg/BJNR007560957.html#BJNR007560957BJNG000200306 http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/arbnerfg/BJNR007560957.htm...
  - chaostheory 13y ago
    Ah this is another case of people not reading long legal contracts that they sign. I would have been surprised if this wasn't standard in the EU as well as Asia .
  - pjmlp 13y ago
    Thanks for the hint, I'll have a look at it.

presootto 13y ago

That depends on your contract. And unfortunately those contracts are legal. I gave up working on open source projects as I'd rather that code didn't exist then having to surrender it to my company. My employer, Google, has the most expensive lawyers money can buy and they will not hesiste to ruin your life in order to defend the company's interests. Like the guy in the article I have a family to support and the pottential affect is just not worth the risk.

cdibona 13y ago
Damn shame, we have a huge number of developers committing code to OSS projects. I'd be surprised if you actually worked at Google, as anyone who made it past their first week is welcome to our training on how to release, patch and in fact navigate the borders between Google and personal copyright.

mwfunk 13y ago

You're talking about how you think it ought to be (which I agree with); the person you're disagreeing with was simply describing how it is. None of this is unusual in any way, unfortunately.