> Not related to your employer’s line of work. Um, wait. What’s the definition of related? [...] I don’t know. It’s a big enough ambiguity that you could drive a truck through it.

No, it's not that ambiguous at all. The courts rarely side with the company, and only in cases where it's quite obvious the work was directly related. If your side project isn't directly related to the work you are doing, then you don't need to worry.

Don't let Joel or any other tech CEO scare you into not working on side-projects. Don't even tell your employer about side projects. Leave them out of the loop entirely.

I find this mindset totally disgusting, but I'm glad it's been summed up in such a concise way.

> Being an employee of a high tech company whose product is intellectual means that you have decided that you want to sell your intellectual output, and maybe that’s OK, and maybe it’s not, but it’s a free choice.

Let's clarify that phrase, "sell your intellectual output". Keep in mind that earlier in the article we discovered that "during work hours" or "related to your work" are not limits on its scope. What are the limits? The evident conclusion is that there are none. You are selling all of your intellectual output.

A situation where every idea you come up with, everything you think, every last shred of creativity is owned by someone else is one of the most profoundly dystopian things I can imagine. But this isn't a sci-fi story, this is standard business practice.

Selling all your intellectual output is selling yourself, and I think it's unconscionable. If you don't even own your own thoughts, what do you have left?

This is a good article, but the "let them eat cake"-iness of the last paragraph is pretty chilling.

> the only way to gain independence is to be independent. Being an employee of a high tech company whose product is intellectual means that you have decided that you want to sell your intellectual output, and maybe that’s OK, and maybe it’s not, but it’s a free choice.

I was hoping for a closing argument about how thoughtful employers could accommodate their legal requirements while also respecting independent employee creations.

Instead he seems to just be saying that employees that want to keep their side projects should just quit.

Reading that might give me pause about taking a position at Fog Creek.

> Your game designer works for a year and invents 7 games. At the end of the year, she sues you, claiming that she owns 4 of them, because those particular games were invented between 5pm and 9am, when she wasn’t on duty.

> ...

> So before you hire this developer, you agree, “hey listen, I know that inventing happens all the time, and it’s impossible to prove whether you invented something while you were sitting in the chair I supplied in the cubicle I supplied or not. I don’t just want to buy your 9:00-5:00 inventions. I want them all, and I’m going to pay you a nice salary to get them all,” and she agrees to that, so now you want to sign something that says that all her inventions belong to the company for as long as she is employed by the company.

Wait, what? Wouldn't the fix for this just to say, "You transfer the rights to any games you give us" (or whatever the legal wording for that is)?

It seems incredibly odd to go from "you gave us a game but kept the IP" to "we own all IP of games you make".

The hope that one of my side projects will some day succeed, and I can leave my 9-5 is the only thing that drives me. If I said, "welp, legal" i'd die inside. Some people have church, I have side projects.

Joel doesn't often miss things, but with respect I think he missed something here.

If you, the employee, are working for an employer you respect, and vice versa, YOU CAN HAVE A CONVERSATION!

If your day job is, say, maintaining high-capacity forum software in dotnet, and you have this hankering to develop, say, a WordPress plugin to show the time of sunrise, you can talk about it.

If you respect your boss and she respects you, the conversation will be fruitful. She may say, "please don't do that," and you'll understand why not. She may say "go ahead."

If you DON'T respect your boss, there's lots of advice here about how to proceed. But why not start out assuming mutual respect?

I've been a contractor and entrepreneur for many years. I do like the higher income that I can command as a contractor, but it's also a matter of principal that any work I do on my own for my own endeavors belong to me.

My current client and I have talked about going "full-time" and I've even discussed it with their legal department. The problem is they have a culture of standard employment contracts and are extremely uncomfortable with the idea of someone having a non-standard employment contract. They said it was "possible", but I'd have to list the projects to be excluded from their interests.

That precludes any opportunity to pursue any new ideas I would come up with.

That's just a flat out non-starter for me. I come up with new ideas all the time and I pursue or network those ideas all the time.

This is definitely a problem with my client and other large corporations. They understand that entrepreneurship is a growing interest of my many technical people and it has become a barrier to attracting those types of people. Something every corporation needs...people who think outside the box.

Of course the primary issue is leverage. If you need the company/paycheck and don't have enough of a background to command a change in the standard employment contract, then you have to sign away all rights. Or you can just decide to be a contractor and explicitly state (where it's necessary), that the work you're assigning rights to is in some amendment and is listed in detail. All other creations/works are yours.

Or you have a strong background with proven results and the corporation is interested in your services enough so that they will work with you on a non-standard employment contract.

I was at a larger company and tried to play ball with their policies for personal work. My contract gave them "right of first refusal" and had a space for exclusions of things you were working on outside of work. Some friends weren't allowed to continue contributing to a few Open Source projects...which seemed excessive, but makes sense if they're overly cautious.

I mentioned I was helping a friend on a short film. I was just showing up on set and possibly doing technical stuff on editing and mixing. I asked, "It's not my project, I'm just helping out. What would you like to see from the project?" "Everything" "Really? We haven't started shooting. Does that mean the script? Raw footage? The final edit?" "Everything" I don't think they actually knew anything at all about what I was talking about (even though it was multi-gigabytes of information) and they handed it all over to a co-worker.

I think the lesson is to think about where they're coming from. The lawyer is paid to cover the company's ass and they may not even have the expertise to make the right call, so they'll error on the side of being safe.

You ALL need to read California Labor Code 2870!

Surprised nobody has mentioned the most essential thing to know about regarding this stuff in California. The site is down at the moment, but the link is: http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=lab&gr...

CA 2870 is attached to any such agreement you sign in California, and protects independent invention. You should read it. This law forms the legal basis for innovation in Silicon Valley.

Joel is both asserting that a particular state of affairs presently exists that quite likely doesn't--specifically that employers have a strong rather than tenuous legal claim to all side projects produced by their developers due to the vagueness of the relatedness clause of the California law and the contracts incorporating it--and also attempting to convince his readers, most of whom are developers, that this is entirely appropriate and that they should just accept it as a normal consequence of salaried employment.

This really does change my opinion of both Joel and FogCreek, and certainly for the worse. I wonder, did FogCreek actually prevent Ted Unangst from contributing to OpenBSD as a side project while he was with them? If so, that's horrible. And how much have FogCreek, StackOverflow, and other companies that seek to greedily arrogate the entire creative output of their employees benefited from open source software began and continued as the very side projects this blog post cautions against? Utterly hypocritical.

I second the call of another poster: we need a professional association (union) of the kind that lawyers, doctors, and dentists have. IEEE and ACM could easily function as such, and in fact, they already provide many of the same practice standardization and continuing education functions that other professional associations do. All that's missing is the rent-seeking behavior to ensure we earn what we're worth and keep employers like Joel honest.

I thought I recognized this article. Here is Joel's original answer (2011) on a Stack Exchange site with some comments: https://web.archive.org/web/20130329010105/http://answers.on...

Here is a previous discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2208056

When I ran my design studio at it's height of 80 people I would encourage everyone to have side projects. When you reach that size people coming and going starts to become the norm. Just as each employer is not going to be valued as when you are a much smaller company, neither should the employee be forced to some sort of fake commitment to a company who is no longer able to care for others as a small tight band of brothers might do. So it's better to have people be able to do whatever they like to do in life. It's up to you to capture as much value out of them as possible and it's often quite telling about the position they have whether they end up wanting to spend more time on sideprojects than their main one.

You have to expect people leaving you, because the reasons they join a bigger company is much different than a smaller one and it's quite shortsighted as a CEO of a company of the size of fog creek to think like that.

Luckily there are other companies doing great encouraging side projects too.

As a Canadian I don't even know what the requirements are, or protections if any. But I did notice one thing in particular: you need your own equipment (no company equipment) to qualify under the Californian protections.

How does this factor into bring your own device (BYOD)? At what point is it your employers equipment, and at what point is it yours? I think BYOD is a terrible idea for several reasons (usually leveraged as a cost-saving measure, can't 100% verify that all company data is wiped at end of employment, etc), but this seems like it muddles the whole thing further. If you only own the devices that you use to work, does everything belong to your employer and how can you draw a line?

This article is FUD.

Employer contracts are concerned that you are attempting to take company proprietary information and repackage it on your own time for sale. This sort of behavior clearly falls into 'inventions'.

However, most of the contracts I've seen have a clause which states that the invention must be related to the business of the company. If you work in the games industry and make games on your own time for sale, your employer might take issue with that.

If you work at a games company and run a real estate business on the side, who cares? Similarly, if you work at a games company and write real estate software, they're still not likely to care.

The issue arises:

- where the customer you are getting money from is the same customer (potential customer) of your current employer.

- where the IP in your side project has potential business value to your current employer.

If in doubt, you simply tell your employer up front and get it in writing (email) that it's o.k. I've done this in the past, and the HR department usually will defer the decision to your Manager, who has to make a determination if the work you're doing has potential cross-cutting business concerns. The bigger issue (from an employer standpoint) is that you are not devoting 100% effort to your current employer.

So as long as:

- you make it clear that there are no customer overlaps

- there is no IP that the company would ever be interested in

- that this is done own your own time (and off-premises)

No one should care what you do in your own time.

I encountered such clause in my contracts twice, in France. I'm glad to finally know the reason why, it just looked suspicious to me (and when I asked about it, each time I was answered: "this is standard contracts").

The two times, I asked to change it. First time I asked to mention that I keep ownership of my opensource projects, since it was what I was doing mainly with my free time.

The second time was less obvious, because I was cofounder/CTO, and I didn't really have a distinction between my "work for company" time and "work outside" time. I also was working on a side project meant to become a business. I took it that they wanted me to transfer IP to the company, but didn't want to let the ownership of my other project go as well.

So what I asked was to change text to say that company had ownership for all my non opensource code that was effectively used by the company. This gave them ownership of everything I was writing for them while at home, while still securing my ownership on my totally unrelated project (without any ambiguity possible).

The conclusion of this article hinges on the vagueness of "related to your employer’s line of work". From that he concludes that all employee developers have effectively sold their total intellectual output. But that is bullshit. The vagueness doesn't make the law meaningless. He admits that a judge and jury would probably side with the employee but still picks the company's side for his conclusion (the sarcastic "big bad Google" gives away his mindset). It is true that a company will generally have more resources than you and can grind you down legally, but in general they don't because, besides the money, it's a time suck for everybody, potentially bad press, and really bad for morale

I am surprised nobody here has yet mentioned the real case of what happened to Evan Brown, the former president of the Dallas Ft Worth Unix Users Group who worked at a telephone switch company as a system administrator and had an idea for a generic code translator.

Maybe the New York Times tells it best:

http://www.nytimes.com/1997/09/08/business/an-idea-not-yet-b...

Where I work, there's a fairly streamlined process for getting waivers for side projects, including open source contributions. Fill out a page-long form broadly describing the intended side project and send it to Legal. If approved (and I've never had one rejected), a couple of weeks later they send back two copies of a document signed by them saying that the employee promises not to use company time or resources for that project and in return they agree to disavow any interest in it. Sign and date both copies, send one back, keep the other. Done. Everyone knows where they stand.

This presents a false dilemma. There are other options than "own everything" or "be negligent and get sued."

Contracts can say almost anything. You can agree to grant the company a liberal license to anything you deliver to the company or incorporate into any product of the company. You can make a similarly protective agreement on the patent front.

There, now you own what you do on your own time and the company isn't at risk of a lawsuit from you.

This is why programmers need unions! Or a guild. Or something! That employers totally dictate everything in a field that is in such high demand is absolutely unacceptable.

My experience with employment contracts has been that in addition to the "anything related to employer's business" clause, there will also usually be a schedule at the end of the contract where you can list specific side projects you're working on --- and that schedule can be amended (or extended with a clause like "anything agreed to in writing with your manager") later on.

It's not ideal from an employee's perspective, but it's at least less unpredictable.

Is Joel a supervillain? Why is Joel writing this and, given his obvious conflict of interest, addressing it to developers as if it were friendly advice, when it is not?

I advise people not to work for Joel or his companies. This is developer-hostile advice from someone who should know better. You don't want to work for a guy like this or his companies.

I just started at Google this week, and this is something I'm terrified of. Side projects are vital to my personal identity and development, and knowing that I own them is vital to my motivation. The thought that my employer might try to claim ownership of work I've done all on my own fills me with apprehension and I still haven't figured out what I will do about it.

My old employer was one I felt that I could trust to not abuse its power.

This gets super muddied when you consider doing FOSS contributions as part of your work. Sure you can sign a contributor agreement, but its not yours to give away. The employer owns the code you contributed to a FOSS project. The project got the signature from the wrong entity.

Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer.

In some countries, it's quite different. In Russia, you own anything you made as long as

* you don't touch it while you're on duty

* you don't use the employer's equipment

Obviously, you still can't use any information classified as 'trade secrets' at your current job because it's covered under another law.

You can even work in a directly competing company (or start one) WHILE being employed because job contract can't legally regulate your off-duty time and you can have unlimited number of side-jobs, as long as it's under 20-hours-a-week, in addition to your current full-time job. You don't even have to notify your full-time employer about it. The 'non compete clause' doesn't work. And your full-time employer can't even fire you (legally) just because you work in/own a competing company, as long as you follow all the regulations.

Even the 'I don’t just want to buy your 9:00-5:00 inventions. I want them all' in the job contract can't work if I understand the Russian laws correctly.

As an engineer at a defense contractor, I recently had to go through the process of having my company waive my 100% IP ownership clause so that I could work with a startup on my own time without fear of putting them in jeopardy. It took about 3 weeks to process the paperwork, and answer a lot of questions, but eventually the paperwork was signed. It only allows me to work freely with the one startup.

However, the important issue here is the opportunity companies are missing by not offering any significant profit sharing from disclosed inventions. If I submit IP to my company and it gets patented, I get a $500 check. That's idiitic because it dissincentivises significant innovation, but it's unfortunately commonplace.

To solve the dilema, companies simply need to get their greedy heads out of their rears and offer inventors a profit share percentage such as 10%. If they don't accept, the inventor should be able to do with the invention as they please, which includes selling or licensing.

I got a little confused of this article. Firstly, the author try to say that side projects are belong to the company hires you as full time employee, and, then throw the game designer example, but it sounds to me like the game designer is contractor not a full-time employee, so, it follows the default copyright, I am ok with that, and then, the author start using this case to approve the relationship between your side project and your employer as you are a full time employee. Am I missed some info?

I remember that in Canada, the full time employee contract mentions something like, 40 hours per week, and also explicitly mention if you use company's property or equipments to produce some, or you produce some at company venue, then all copyright belongs to the company.

It's disappointing that there are no conventions or legislation to rectify this situation. I have several side projects going right now, and it gets frustrating going to interviews and being asked to give up all of it just for the supposed "privilege" of being able to write code for a larger company. The solution I've found is freelancing, but this has the problem of not really providing steady work.

I want to ask the author, Joel, what is their stance on the matter at StackOverflow and Fog Creek?

I'm fortunate enough to have a friend who is an employment lawyer and as a favor will read through any new employment contract before I sign it.

She'll point out any clauses (not just IP clauses) designed or phrased in such a way as to be unfair in the employer's favor, and will suggest alternative language that protects both them and me.

I have yet to encounter an employer who wouldn't accept a few small changes to an overly broad IP clause, and print and sign a fresh copy of the contract with the changes incorporated.

My current employer took very little convincing to accept the idea that they only wanted the IP created for them, not all IP created during the period of my employment.

After all, as I pointed out, they have no more interest in owning the code or design of my block association's website than I have in giving it to them. And it's unreasonable to expect me to cease to be its maintainer just because of a job switch from a fashion startup to an entertainment industry startup. As long as I don't work on it during work hours or using a work computer/internet/etc, why should they care what I do with my evenings and weekends?

So they accepted a modification. Of course, we might have trouble if I tried to compete with them in some way. But even if in my spare time I create a tool or library that eventually ends up being useful in building their own software, I retain the IP to that library. I might not get away with licensing something like that to them for a fee (good faith cuts both ways), but if it's already BSD licensed anyway, they can add it as a dependency and everyone's happy.

And if I want to be paid for contract work for an unrelated startup on weekends, well, that wasn't the use case I used to convince them. But the contract modifications give me the right to do so without turning the IP over to them. And again, if it's not competing, why should they care?

TLDR: Read and understand contracts before you sign them. Get help understanding if you need it. Don't sign something you don't want to be held to the letter of. Sometimes employers are flexible.

What would people think of a website that collates instances of companies taking legal action against employees regarding side projects and then ranks them with respect to 'side-project' friendliness? Would a bad rating for a company impact your decision to take a job there?

Also, it would be cool if there was some widely available standard 'developer friendly' contract (or even addendum to a contract) that software engineers could table when negotiating a new job. It should be fair to the employer too of course, but it would give less experienced developers or those in a weaker negotiating position for whatever reason something well thought out to use.

And of course, nothing stops an employer from harassing you legally.

I was working on a personal project once and it seemed to make sense to join it with another product from another company. We collaborated on the combination design, but never moved forward with it. I never joined the company and I was never compensated in any way. No joint product or code or anything was ever produced.

However, the CEO of that company threatened me with legal action when I joined a different company to implement what I was working on. He sent a cease and desist to me and the company. I had to retain a lawyer to fend that off. Luckily, the accusations were so ridiculous it wasn't hard.

Another key thing here, it doesn't matter if your boss says "sure, go ahead and do it!"

That is NOT protection.

Odds are your boss isn't authorized to say that. And further, it's not in writing so it's your word against theirs.

I'm in this exact situation right now where I worked as a developer for a small company. I did a side project, and they demanded I hand over the project so they benefit from it. I refused, and we are deep in a costly legal battle. But it is a matter of principal that I won't let those a*holes benefit from something I did at home, on my equipment, without any of their IP, and unrelated to the work I did. I can tell you I've learnt a valuable lesson and will never sign an generic software development employment contract like that again.

I've had to reject an offer I wanted because the IP terms were draconian (even beyond what I consider standard) and the company wouldn't badge on it. Other companies did agree to make changes to get an otherwise unacceptable contract bearable.

This situation has taught me 2 things: 1 - most developers don't care, those that do know about it, don't think it's a big deal. 2 - because it has basically become industry standard developers assume it's OK and that no one would sue them.

One idea for tackling this is for the employer to say to the employee "We own everything you do 365 X 24, but we will give you exclusions for pretty much anything as long as you identify the side project name and description in writing."

This means that just about all side projects are permitted, but must be identified in writing in advance, and gives the employer the chance to decline to approve, and in that circumstance then the employee can leave if they want.

It's just so wrong on so many levels to deny anyone their shot at independence.

Companies taking advantage of ambiguities in the law or making employees live in fear of innovating on their own terms is wage slavery in its illest form.

this is an absurd agreement, i have never heard of something like this in germany. Is this common in other countries?

Well, why not just go development and collaborative way of doing things and not make a gist/repo with a list of companies friendly to side projects, and unfriendly? Like Glassdoor it will add more clarity and competition to those companies, since people would know what they're signing for _before_ sending CV, going to interview or signing the offer.

No topic for a side project is really “safe”, which is why I hope most laws focus on what you do for a company and not what your company might ever do.

I mean, imagine for instance that you simply had a band and tried to sell a few songs. And that you were an engineer. At some point in history, it would have made perfect sense to do this at Apple, with no overlap at all. Heck, I remember the ongoing lawsuits over the years from Apple Music just because of the name of Apple Computer at the time, and I think at one point they reached an agreement simply because Apple Computer was not going to be in the music business. And at the time, this seemed like a no-brainer, crazy to imagine Apple doing anything in music. And then, oops. So no, on a company-wide basis, no side project is really “safe”; companies can and do enter new lines of business, even things that seemed implausible at some point in the past.

Joel's exposure and 100 million dollar mindset is frustrating. I created a video response expressing my distaste for such contracts Joel feels should be the status quo and really feel we need to come together to make sure laws are passed to protect the creative freedoms of all developers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6ypPpk9ymg

The ball shouldn't just be in the employers court for all intellectual property created while employed. Joel is just another uber rich techie doing what he can to make sure nobody under his staff is able to build the next big thing.

I'm boycotting StackOverflow & all of StackExchange as well.

I haven't heard about many disputed cases. I'd hope that if Google went around suing for possession of unrelated side projects, we'd hear about it.

Maybe the possibility of being publicly shamed is a deterrent from pursing ownership.

At my last job working for a small software company, I was able to get my boss to modify the employment contract such that a specific list of other projects (attached as an appendix to the contract) was excluded from the work product & IP ownership clauses. The idea was that if I wanted to work on a side project, I would clear it with him first, and then we would sign a quick amending agreement to the original contract which added the new side project to the list.

Major caveats: I haven't ever tested this method in an actual legal dispute. Also, the negotiation involved a shouting match in a crowded bar. YMMV.

I've had three companies rewrite or append something about past IP or even current IP on the weekends unrelated to the company, the company's hardware, or the company's time.

If you approach it right (sometimes I show them how this limits our ability to work with OpenSource software) you can often swing it. Admittedly, the larger companies are less likely to entertain the request of some new hire.

I think more people should bring this up in the hiring process (you don't have to push it), but lets teach companies that it's not just vacation that maters to us.

What happens if you and a few friends work on a side project and then your employer tries to claim ownership?

Do your friends get to remove their contributions while you turn over a gutted and completely broken project?

What about a situation when you develop something in a company, then company doesn't show interest in it and effectively shelve it, and then you leave the company and want to come back to developing it? Be it in another company, which is yours or not?

Technically it's a property of the previous company. However if you later enhanced and expanded it further, you ought to have a share. And in practice, don't we have some good examples of startups which were built on ideas initially rejected?

Reminds me of something I read awhile back.

(Companies, not employees, to get credit for inventions if merit system in place)

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/10/10/national/compani...

Isn't there a relatively easy way to solve this problem?

As an employer, when you decide to hire someone to produce software for you, you assign them a private key tied to a certificate issued by the employer's certificate authority. The employer then has tooling which requires all commits to the employer's repositories to be signed with a certificate issued by the employer's certificate authority.

Then it's very simple: any code which has been signed by those certificates unambiguously belongs to the employer. Any code which has not been signed by those certificates does not belong to the employer.

Employers can demand that employees sign their work with these certificates in order to consider the work done, so employees who refuse to sign the work with those certificates risk giving up their salary for breach of contract. Employees are then free to sign whichever code they want on their free time, and assert ownership by virtue of it not being signed with their employer's certificate.

If you read the fine print, software can't fall under the 'work for hire' provisions. At all. People think so, but just saying 'work-for-hire' in a contract isn't valid (enough). There has to be a explicit copyright transfer process backed up by paperwork.

I ran into this myself, but decided not to get in a tussle with this client who turned out to be ripping off customers, not paying me, etc. etc. Things had been progressing along under the assumption the company owned the copyright, or I was implicitly transferring copyright, and to go and try claw back everything I'd written would have been perhaps futile (the courts would not have thought much of my change of mind) and a very big time and money black hole.

I thoroughly pay attention to contract matters now. I never had a bad client before and none of the stuff I'd developed before either seemed valuable enough. But writing _all_ the code for a startup that ... oh, I don't want to take about it :)

It seems completely alien to me that a third party could claim ownership of something I've built because I'm using a craft / skill that they pay me to use too. I live in the U.K. And work as a contractor. I've seen odd looking IP clauses in contracts but have amended them or felt confident I can sign them irrespective.

"Most developers think that the work they do at work belongs to their employer, but anything they work on at home or on their own time is theirs."

NOT ME.

I dread the time when in order to pay my bills I had to sign a contract...

Released all my ideas to the public domain: https://github.com/genesisdotre/wiki/wiki/Ideas-released-to-...

"original matter, work or creation" - on my occasions I wanted to ask how about: 1) cake recipes 2) gardening 3) drawing with my kids 4) urine and excrements 5) photography

(if I was to create YouTube channel talking about philosophy that would inevitably belong to them as well)

Can we please introduce employment contracts that are fair to both sides?

I'd love to see some clear legal advice from YC on this; my guess would be if you are taking a first employee the idea that they would have any time to do anything other than the startup means they were the wrong first, second or even twentieth employee.

After that YC what is the score?

I'm not familiar with the US legal system but this sounds to me like solving the wrong problem. Take the example of the game developer - why can't you create a contract that says you pay her for 6 game ideas, including the IP to these games?

It shouldn't matter if she comes up with those ideas during 9-5 or any other time. It shouldn't matter if she comes up with another 4 ideas of her own on the side, or even works part-time for someone else too. You're paying for an outcome, 6 games including all associated IP because that's what you're going to sell on to the public.

Why not just ask for a permission from the management? Drop 'em an email, explain what kind of side projects you plan and that the work will be done strictly in your free time and not interfere with you work for them. It's 99% that they'll answer it's OK, it's at that early point insignificant issue for them, and later that email response is legally binding as much as any contract. Of course, it's a smart move that you get a legal advice how to phrase the question to cover your ass properly for your state/country laws.

This was totally biased bs. Not all companies try to own all your intellectual work and if they do then look for a new employer. And in 99.9% of cases it's super easy to understand what is related work and what is not. If your company builds an online casino and you write code for a slot from 9-5 then the next social network, airbnb or uber you do at home is completely unrelated. Only a total jerk would try to claim the right on such a side project and only an even greater jerk would try to justify it with a biased blog post.

There's a loophole in most of these draconian contracts: they might own the copyright of what you do in your spare time, but they don't get to decide the license you use for your software (at least I've never seen any clause about this, ever). Then the solution is to use a liberal opensource license (MIT), and publish it somewhere. If you decide to reuse that code in the future for your own venture, you can just use it, the license allows you to do so even if the copyright is owned by your previous employer.

My three colleagues and I just took a look at our contracts after reading this. We are contractors, not employees. We saw this interesting phrase:

"Contractor may provide services to third parties so long as Contractor does not provide any software development services to other entities. "

"Other entities" is an interesting term. Since the contractor is explicitly mentioned in the text separate from these third parties or other entities, it would seem the contract does not prohibit the contractor doing work for himself.

He doesn't mention that many companies who want to be friendly to their creative tech employees' habits have a legal/approval process for carving out specific side projects.

Usually when you sign that inventions assignment agreement (the dreaded PIAA), there is a place where it says, now list on Appendix A all the inventions you previously created PRIOR to coming to work here.

And THAT'S the place to leave truck-sized holes to drive through, especially if you have a good idea of what your side project interests are at that point.

it seems to me if the technology is unrelated, for example, if you work for an enterprise software company and you created a web app for consumers regarding your hobby of sports. i think what joel's saying is if that they're sick enough and the employer wants to sue you, they definitely can, they have the legal ballast to take you to town. but would they? i guess that question depends on a couple things, one if they have some personal vendetta against you, they want nothing more than to make your life miserable. or two, they think what you've built is lucrative and they want a piece of it.

i'm just curious if there are precedents where someone's side project, completely unrelated to their company's product/market/customer base, but it ended up being lucrative and the company negotiated some shares/ownership of the side project become startup.

At the moment I am not working at any side project, but occasionally I have idea or two, and I was just waiting for a right time to start working on them.

Reading this was quite devastating, not even started, and I feel like I already lost, even though my side project has next to nothing to do with my current industry.

IIRC california if you don't use company assets, side projects are yours.

Speaking of, I'd like some collaborators to help with my side project "Terra Plant": https://baqqer.com/collaborate

In the country I live in (Sweden), such contracts are very rare and I don't even think they would be valid in court here. What you do in your spare time is your own shit.

In Sweden, you cannot force a worker to only have one job for example because that is illegal.

Does NOLO nontract in

    "...this particular clause is built into the standard Nolo contract and most..."

...refer to the website nolo.com (which seems to be about legal stuff like contracts), or is it an acronym for something else?

It seems to me that the right to work on side projects that aren't in direct competition to the work you were hired to do for a company is the sort of thing that unions might advocate for, if tech workers had unions.

We share a lot in my company - I don't mind if the devs want to use some of the stuff we make and in turn they offer stuff they make to me. Works well and there's a lot of trust. we cover it legally too.

Plausible for those who can https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_outside_the_box

Do companies really want this?

Doesn't this mean I can host my side project on company infrastructure? Commit it to company repositories? Submit it for code review which will probably be done on company time?

A good write definitely and I have been cautious on those, i.e. if I want to make some real products I do not work for anyone in-between to stay clean. Side-project is too tricky for both sides.

This topic is very interesting to me.

With that said, which employer wants their employee watching TV and not breathing software 24/7? I really struggle to imagine the risk here is greater than the reward.

after i figured that he is CEO and cofounder of many famous startups, I feel bias in this article and I will make sure I will not work him in the future for sure :-)

Great, more reasons to procrastinate on our side projects :(

I negotiated IP assignment out of my employment contract before taking my job. I wouldn't take a job that tried to lay claim to my work outside of work.

What if the company does work out of San Francisco California, is incorporated in Delaware, but I live in North Carolina? Am I still protected?

How does it affect the side projects(open/closed source) that you were already working on before taking up the new job?

WOW! I like the new layout! :)

Briefly: consult a lawyer.

I feel like this article grossly exaggerated the nature of the laws and relationship between you and the employer. I think it's a good thing that Joel isn't a lawyer because anyone following his advice will lead to implosion.

First, there is a very high bar for what is regarded the property of the company vs your own work. Even if you created your own open source project website and pushed code on your own github account using their laptop, as long as it doesn't directly compete or use portions of proprietary code, there is zero chance it will stand in court. Non compete clauses are next to impossible to uphold unless they literally sold trade secrets or company's code directly for profit. Even if they made a near identical version, it would be a tough uphill climb if you didn't copy & paste their code directly in your own source code.

Of course, the Goldman Sachs vs open source dev was a very interesting and a rare case. I don't have more insight into that case but if somebody could that 'd be great.

But for the most part, Joel's piece is spreading FUD into innocent developer's dreams and projects, and you don't need to heed attention.

For the truly paranoid and follower of Joel's flawed legal analysis which looks at syntax than the semantics or spirit behind the written law which almost always the overwhelming use:

1) Incorporate your own company

2) Purchase laptop under your new corp

3) Do your work on there.

Disclaimer: This is not a legal advice. I'm not a lawyer. I could be wrong. Check with a real lawyer and do your own due diligence.

I have to say, I'm really, really sick of the entitled mentality that companies take towards those that actually do the work keeping their business afloat.

I always thought of Joel as one of important Excel authors. I was very much surprised to see he is CEO of Stack Overflow now. Giving context of the article, I am going to re-read carefully Stack Overflow ToS.

SFC is working on a project called ContractPatch to show that it is possible to (re-)negotiate your employment agreements so that you own copyright on your work and to help developers go through that process. Some information about ContractPatch is in this recent podcast episode and the show notes:

http://faif.us/cast/2016/nov/01/0x5E/

Off topic, but I was surprised at the end of the article to realize this was Joel Spolsky's blog! I like the new design.