Should I turn down a Amazon AWS job offer over this?

The moonlighting, on the other hand, where you make money on your side projects, is not protected by Washington state law (California is much more friendly to that). If what you're doing is not a conflict on interest, you'll still have to negotiate it. If it is a conflict of interest, forget it.

Finally, you're about to sign a contract for hundreds of thousands of dollars and a good chunk of your waking hours. Consulting an employment lawyer is relatively cheap by comparison. They'll be able to fill you in on your rights under the law, what's standard in the contract, what's not standard, what's just plain unenforceable, and what you'll have to negotiate to protect the side projects you care about.

Truth be told I'm really uncomfortable with the idea of having to get written permission to work on a weekend side project that makes money. I already have side projects that make money, and I have ideas for more.

That will have to stop, and if you don't want to stop it then you should try to negotiate an addendum to the agreement for you that allows it. If they refuse you have your answer.

An "assignment of invention" section has been in every employment agreement at every technology company I've ever worked at. It's about as boilerplate as it gets.

However, as noted in the language, it doesn't apply to anything you've worked on, on your own time, with your own equipment. The key here is that anything you want to claim as your own, you can't work on it in their offices or facilities, and you can't use their equipment. So use only your own personal computer to work on it, at home (or at least outside their offices), and never touch your work with any company-provided assets. This includes commenting on it, answering emails about it, etc.

As noted in there, they do give you the opportunity to list all the inventions you've worked on prior to employment, so they can't make a claim on them.

As for the other clause, about not carrying on any other work, I'd consult an attorney in your state. In California, for instance, they're almost totally unenforceable. Elsewhere, I'm not sure it's enforceable if your other work doesn't compete with that of your employer in any substantial way.

Courts care about facts. And cases don't get to court unless you've really angered your employer in some way, or you've made so much money with your side business that they have a financial reason to try to get a piece of it.

Finally, at a large company like Amazon, unless you're a C-level executive, they're not going to negotiate on employment terms. So you'll probably have to take it or leave it.

While the clauses are standard, it doesn't mean they're required. If you're passionate about something, push for a change. I've gotten the "no side gigs" clause changed a number of times.

Just a simple rephrasing of "will devote Employee’s entire productive time" to "will devote a substantial majority of Employee’s productive time" can give you flexibility.

When you work for Amazon, you can't contribute to open-source. Basically, you can't contribute anything unless it gives Amazon an advantage of some kind (fix a bug in the Linux kernel that's causing AWS issues, for example) or if it will somehow be impossible for the project to ever be used by a competitor to gain an advantage. There's lots of progress being made internally to try to open that up, but after 5 years I never met or heard of an employee who had been given permission to contribute to an open source project.

You also can't have personal projects if you ever plan to share them. I asked permission a couple times to do a side project on my own time, with my own hardware. The first time, legal flat out told me 'no' because Amazon also was involved in that industry- the industry in question being 'machine learning'. The second time, they wouldn't say 'yes' or 'no', they just directed me to the non-compete agreement and told me to 'follow whatever it says'. IE: do what you want, but we reserve the right to sue you.

I wound up doing some side projects that were purely Amazon-internal[0]. It got boring.

All that said, I loved my time at Amazon. I worked with great people, had some crazy times (Amazon Fulfillment is a crazy, fun business), and learned so damn much. If this start-up doesn't work out I may even try to go back. It's a place that has problems, but it's not a bad place- if you don't care about the non-compete stuff.

[0]If you work at Amazon, I wrote 'RediFork' over a couple of dull weekends when I was an SDE1.

This was a nice article about this topic posted here a few weeks ago

OK, so that sentence consists of two parts, connected by an "and".

1. You will devote your entire productive time to furthering Amazon's best interests, and

2. You will not (without prior written consent) carry on any gainful employment outside of Amazon.

If those are meant to be independent restrictions, then #1 is incredibly restrictive. Suppose you work a shift that gives you weekends off. If you were to spend a Saturday afternoon at home fixing a leaky faucet you could arguably be violating #1! Most people would say that was productive time, and it would be hard to argue that it was devoted to furthering Amazon's best interests [1].

I assume that Amazon does not actually intend to prohibit employees from fixing leaky faucets, mowing their lawn, cooking dinner, helping their children with homework, and so on. I would prefer, though, for it to be clear that this is the case, rather than having to guess Amazon's intent.

[1] ...unless you want to make the argument that an employee worrying about a leaky faucet at home will be distracted and not able to do their best work when at the office, so taking care of the faucet does further Amazon's interests.

For future projects, if they don't honor the verbal commitments they make during hiring, you can always quit if you are in CA. WA has non-compete agreements, so quitting there might be messy.

Note that you do not realistically have time/energy to work two jobs at once, and they are paying you to be full time. Look at your requests from that point of view before deciding you future employer is being unreasonable.

[edit: Also, demanding you put requests in writing is as much for your benefit as Amazon's. I bet at least one Amazon employee has been building drones as a hobby for years, and published code/plans online. Now Amazon is making drones. A "yes, you can play with drones on the weekend" letter from legal is now worth its weight in gold for that person.]

This kind of clause has been part of every offer letter I've ever received from a company with >100 employees

I'd say push back and bring up the fact that you have existing side projects. You could feasibly get an exception if Amazon is a decent company.

My employment agreement doesn't have this clause and my employer made it very clear what I do in personal time is also owned by the company even if it does not relate to the company's business :( so by that standard this is lenient.

I've been at this company years. In hindsight I wouldn't have signed it but I'm stuck in it now.

If nothing else, you can always come back with "I have outside projects and I'll need a blanket exemption for projects that I started on before working at Amazon."

If you have significant commercial interests that require time commitment aside from your day job, you should talk about them with your prospective employer beforehand.

Most companies rarely pursue this unless and only do it for very senior folks involved in ground breaking future strategy. As an example, Amazon didn't go after Instacart. Google hasn't gone after their self-driving folks that defected, and I bet they had similar agreements.

> "Any provision in this Agreement requiring Employee to assign rights in Inventions does not and will not apply to any Invention for which no equipment, supplies, facilities, or trade secret information of Employer was used and that was developed entirely on Employee’s own time, unless (a) the Invention relates (i) directly to the business of Employer, or (ii) to Employer’s actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development"

Note the operative phrase: _does not and will not apply to any Invention..._

Or

2) take Amazon gig and make your side projects free and just work on them for fun