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Comment by ahh | Hacker News Reader

This system is interesting but has a crucial flaw: I legally can't take part. I have a job now, which claims ownership over any tech-related IP I create. There are processes for getting exceptions, but a) you won't get them for actual job-related things b) I'm not asking Google for an exception so I can interview somewhere else.

This is true for nearly anyone with a standard SV job. So if you're willing to restrict your pool to the currently unemployed, this can work, but I think you'd rather not do that.

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>This system is interesting but has a crucial flaw: I legally can't take part. I have a job now, which claims ownership over any tech-related IP I create.

By that interpretation, you can never legally take part in a whiteboard coding session during an interview either since the code you whiteboarded also belongs to your current employer.

There is such a thing as being too literal.

Anti-moonlighting agreements, where they are legal, are common and definetly apply in this situation without requiring extra literal interpretation.

    > and definetly apply in this situation

Are you a lawyer?

No, if you need an actual legal opinion specific to your situation you should consult a lawyer.

I have received legal advice in my jurisdiction on this specific issue such that I was part of a team that decided not to offer pay in situations due to this advice.

The problem would be the payment. That turns it into a paid gig and leaves a paper trail. A solution might be to allow the candidate to forgo payment in lieu of the interviewer making a donation (in the interviewer's name) to a charity of the candidate's choosing, so the candidate never sees any compensation.

IANAL, but actually the issue would be if the company were getting value out the developed solution.

In this case, the hiring company just seems to want to say "This isn't an actual problem we have, but we use it as a problem set, and you should be paid for your time" because this goes above and beyond an in-person interview.

Your (existing) employer (in California) wouldn't begrudge you for taking part in a user-research survey that resulted in a $100 Amazon gift card. This could be done the same way, the difference is that you're writing code (which is what you do for a living).

Again, I am not a lawyer ;).

Playing devil's advocate here: how will this come back to bite you if you do it on your own time and equipment? How would the current employer know to care? Not saying you should require your candidates to break the law. Also, though IANAL, California does have laws that give employees the right to their own IP on their own time/equipment when it doesn't use work IP https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2208056)

Yeah, this. A little discretion goes a long way.

"I legally can't take part" is overstating the problem. It's not illegal for you to take part. What do you care if Google can claim ownership over the IP you create? And why would Google care to do so? The IP is for a throwaway problem; it's worthless.

(xoogler, with some knowledge of this area)

[Ask HN] Does my company have IP rights to the stuff I do in my spare time?

> California ... has a law on the books that generally prohibits employers, on public policy grounds, from making claims to IP generated by employees working on their own time and using their own resources.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2208056

If you're being sued by your employer for breaching a moonlighting agreement, you've already lost. It doesn't matter whether you win or not.

Do you think Google would sue you over 2 hours of coding? Technically, they might be able to, but anyone can sue you for anything.

If you think they would, you're probably overvaluing what you can accomplish in 2 hours, and you're underestimating the cost of a lawsuit to them. I can't imagine a situation in which they would actually pay any of their legal staff to even look at something like this, given all the rest of the things the lawyers have to do there.

I worked for Google for 11 years and wouldn't have hesitated to take a paid interview as long as it was all done in good faith (i.e. for the purposes of getting another job).

Google is trying to hire good engineers and retain them with interesting work and good compensation/perks, not shackle them there by legal means.

I dunno about Google, but I've got a friend who's legal advice was "Stop working on your phd immediately" when his lawyer read the new employment contract we was being asked to sign when his company got acquired by Oracle. It took months for him to get an extremely limited exemption to the standard contract to be allowed to publish his thesis according to his phd requirements...

That's just one more reason to not work at someplace as notoriously 'litigious' as Oracle.

You have no control if your awesome company gets sold to giant multinational.

Close... but the problem is not Oracle, it's the USA.

In the country I come from, the master/PhD students working at a company are under a special set of contracts & laws (slightly different from the usual employment rules). Legally speaking, the company cannot forbid them to perform what is mandated for their school & necessary for their grade.

    > I legally can't take part. I have a job now, which
    > claims ownership over any tech-related IP I create
    > ... This is true for nearly anyone with a standard
    > SV job.

For the majority of (admittedly non-SV) employment contracts I've read, most will limit it to work that is linked to your employment only. In the few cases as a developer and recruiter where that's not been the case, I've had no trouble at all getting the company to sign-off on a clause that limits it to that. Legal is much much much more worried that you'll rip off actual company IP or technologies that you've built in the workplace than that you'll discover cold fusion in your garage and they won't get their cut.

Are we reading the same article? The one I read said:

> DON’T use a real problem because of tribe knowledge needed to fix.

I do not see how this is different from a whiteboard problem, literally speaking. It's a "problem", not a "product", and presumably the solution is throw-away, or at least not used for commercial purposes.

If the author was talking about tasking potential hires with a small, real consulting task, then that would be an issue, whether it was paid or unpaid (and by industry norms, using applicants to do unpaid work is extremely unprofessional, though not unheard of).

Are clauses like that common in the US? Do they hold up in court?

Pretty sure it's not legal in California: http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=lab&gr...

non-competes are common - but often can't be enforced by employers (and in some states are just ignored/illegal). blanket ip ownership not so common - but big shops sometimes require them, when they can get away with them.

Some people negotiate over such things or have them struck out from whatever HR paperwork. Consultants definitely have such crap taken out from contracts and replace with more straight forward and standard non-disclosure agreements (or charge a lot more - clients will pay if that stuff is important).

In other words, employer/client can put whatever crap they want and you need to always read and understand contracts you sign, as an employee or contractor.

> blanket ip ownership not so common

Really? I've found blanket IP ownership to be more common than noncompetes, at least in US outside CA. My experience, is that noncompetes are more likely to be limited to key personnel, whereas the company IP is sacred and must not be tainted, and the employee is not to be trusted to come up with their own material on their own time, at least not without sign-off.

Blanket IP is really back-door antimoonlighting anyway. You can't very well moonlight as a software developer if your employer is encumbering your IP.

I'm sure the California startup world is different from my experience.

Interesting. I probably could not work in Google then if this is something that is not negotiable to a reasonable level before signing the contract. I consider myself a free man.

But I am afraid that they just slipped it in and you were too worried to ask it taken out. This is definitely something one should look in the contracts and ask to be redacted (IANAL).

Or the pool of people who will say to hell with it and just do the thing anyway.

I'm probably in that pool. Really, I'm not creating anything of massive value by doing a little example project. If my employer wants to sue me over it they can go ahead. I will probably lose, but they will have a rep for suing people for taking interviews.

Look, every time you do something that may piss of someone, like having a job and also applying to other jobs, you need to bend one law or the other. Like you are probably not allowed to take sick days for a job application appointment at another company, but you can't take all your holidays either.

There are laws that are really there to be followed correctly, like the ones about theft, murder, etc. But there are laws that basically just enable people who you piss off to get back at you. And the latter ones are a risk you must take when you want to improve your life.

>> I have a job now, which claims ownership over any tech-related IP I create.

Is there an omitted qualifier to this, e.g. ...while on company time; for IP with sufficient correlation to your primary role?

I'm having a difficult time swallowing the legal enforceability of "all-day-everyday-any-tech-related-IP" outside of military personnel subject to the UCMJ. Would that suggest that you technically couldn't contribute to an open source project?

Yes.

Yes but can you afford the legal representation to prove it is not related.

I have to get exemptions for any open source contributions or personal projects. My employer gives those out readily, but I'm expected to follow the process.

If your current employer wants to take ownership of that micro project let them have it. Why do you even care?

Just do it (but not on their time or hardware lol); their process for finding these things out is REALLY slow unless your thing goes really public

Also, fuck Google and their ridiculously limiting anti-entrepreneurial IP agreement

The IP stuff is a red herring. Anti-moonlighting agreements are more likely to bite you here.

Then people should start crossing that crap out in contracts before they sign up.

A standard SV job .... in CALIFORNIA .... must restrict those agreements to things done on company time, on company equipment or suffer the whole employment agreement being invalid, severance clause or not!

Use that paid time off, or "flex" hours.

And regarding the paper trail, payments under $600 need not be reported to the IRS. 1099's only get filed after you have been paid over $600. Ask for cash.

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