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Comment by throwaway-1209 | Hacker News Reader

From someone who's been there done that: former Googler, now running engineering at a startup. It doesn't get any easier to come up with a startup idea once you leave mothership. I know it seems counterintuitive, since once you leave you have nothing else to do but come up with ideas, but you could find that after 6-9 months you still don't have anything you really believe in. That's what happened to me circa 2008. In the end I just joined Google back then. So your mentor seems to be right, even though what he's suggesting is not 100% ethical: if you read your contract you'll see that all of your software related ideas are property of Google. But they can't read your mind (yet) so there's no way for them to enforce this, unless you tell them about it or do something stupid, like using company laptop (or Borg, or Google3 code) to work on it.

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> So your mentor seems to be right, even though what he's suggesting is not 100% ethical: if you read your contract you'll see that all of your software related ideas are property of Google.

It is most definitely not unethical to not comply with a bullshit authoritarian contract like that.

Wouldn't that ethically be wage theft? The employer is claiming ownership of your ideas when your off the clock, thus they should be paying you overtime if they want ownership of those ideas.

Nevermind the salary/overtime exempt scam that has been popular as of late, which is also wage theft.

I agree with you in principle, but I've seen shit you wouldn't believe when there's a few million dollars at stake: otherwise fine, ethical, upstanding human beings can turn into the worst weasels you can imagine if you don't hold the sword of legal retribution over their heads to assure their good faith. You won't quite understand that until you actually work on something you have a vested interest in succeeding, as in, a substantial financial stake, not some bullshit koolaid they feed you as you're slaving away on an irrelevant product #24554 at a Megacorp Inc.

Are they being properly compensated for their time? By that, I mean is the employee being directly compensated for all of the non-work hours the company is claiming ownership of ideas over?

Otherwise, if its a classic "Here is a salary and package, we own all your relevant ideas from here on" deal, I'd say that is highly unethical behavior on the company's part, and is a case of wage theft.

Should the employee be barred from moonlighting too? Not unless the company is willing to pay for said time.

If you don't like compensation the door is open, you can leave. Look, I agree with you in principle, but I'm now a large shareholder in a business, so I see the other side of the argument too. The goal isn't really to stop anyone from pursuing something unrelated, an idea that's mostly theirs. The goal is to avoid Levandovsky-style backstabbing. Especially for small companies, this can be fatal.

So you agree with me in principle, but when it comes to action you feel we should fuck over the worker in the name of profit?

To quote Martin Luther King Jr.:

"I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom;"

https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham....

It's the same bootlicking mentality behind both of these problems.

Pretty much, I'd much rather talk with a MAGA than a liberal, despite the similarity in views I may share with said liberal.

The former I can often have a sensical conversation with and perhaps change their mind on some issues, the latter feeling an outright opposition to taking action or altering their views.

It's fuck or get fucked. I'd rather not get fucked, same as you. It's just that now I'm on the other end.

Yeah but in this fucked up battle, you are the bad guy and the employee is not.

The problem is the employee can't really leave, because everyone else users a similar contact. But what exactly is the other side of the argument? The one that says "we don't really want to stop you from pursuing something unrelated, but we are going to make you sign it over to us anyways "

This links sums up nicely why that's the only practical way for software companies: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/09/developers-side-pr...

> 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.

> Ooops. That’s not what you meant. You wanted to pay her for all the games that she invents, and you recognize that the actual process of invention for which you are paying her may happen at any time… on weekdays, weekends, in the office, in the cubicle, at home, in the shower, climbing a mountain on vacation.

> 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.

> This is where we are by default. This is the standard employment contract for developers, inventors, and researchers.

On top of that, Google doesn't give a damn if you're spending some of your 9-5 hours walking around the buildings, surfing the web (or the infamous memegen), hanging out with coworkers at the microkitchen, or working out at the gym. Do you also consider these as unethical behavior by employees? By signing the employment contract, both parties are agreeing that they don't really care about 9-5 and work hours. They want all your brain's output, and they're going to pay for it. If you don't like it, you are free to walk away, but that doesn't make the contract "bullshit authoritarian".

I feel bad for people with this bootlicker mindset...

If I get sued for violating the contract well that sucks for me but I'm certainly not going to feel bad for it.

Words of a man with not much to lose. Once your net worth is in multiple millions, the calculation will change quite a bit. You will most definitely not want to lose your life's savings on a moral crusade.

Yeah of course, I'm not saying the contract wouldn't have an influence on my actions, just that I don't (and you shouldn't) feel a moral/ethical obligation to follow it.

And that's exactly what those contracts are aiming for: not to control your mind, but to establish a deterrent from much more nefarious shenanigans, if thoughts of such shenanigans arise. Some of the top Silicon Valley companies (dating all the way back to the 70's) would simply not exist if those contracts were followed to the letter.

Bootlicker? If you sign a contract, you are saying you're alright with it.

You're saying you're happy to reneg on contractual terms. Good luck in life but those of us who stand by our word want nothing to do with you.

> If you sign a contract, you are saying you're alright with it.

No, you are saying you don't want to be unemployed and starve on the streets.

> Good luck in life but those of us who stand by our word want nothing to do with you.

Standing by your word to other human beings is of course a commendable quality, standing by your word to corporations, not so much.

No one in our industry will "starve on the streets" in the foreseeable future. They may have to take a smaller paycheck with a contract that doesn't have the clauses they don't like, but let's not engage in histrionics here. And I agree with the parent, your choice of language is inappropriate and tiresome. You're posting to a forum read by literally thousands of people you're calling "bootlickers". Not smart.

As I said, signing such a contract doesn't make you a bootlicker. (I have signed such a contract myself.) But I can't for the life of me understand why people are feeling bad for working on side projects and not wanting to have the rights signed over to their corporate overlords. That's just a depressing ethical framework to live your life by. (Obviously I'm not talking about the Lewandowski espionage type case.)

Sorry, this isn't the only practical way for software companies. There are three main approaches: no mention at all (vague and bad for all parties), ownership of all related ideas developed on company time/company equipment [this is the only type of contract I will sign], and the company owns everything you do at any time.

Since both #2 and #3 have been used by companies, clearly #3 can't be the "only practical way".

> > 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.

This is a terrible example. If the game designer delivers you 7 games during the year, that's a pretty clear indication that they are for you and are works for hire under the contract.

Also, if you are hiring her for game design, then off hours, she can't design games, because that is directly competitive. She can, however, design software that manages greenhouses. And that is as it should be.

If there are any games she designed on her own time that she doesn't want to be yours, she wouldn't have given them to you. If she kept one, launched it herself, and made a ton of money, you would probably have a claim. But she has no claim to games she gave you.

[Could she still sue? Sure, every example can be made into some court case with a possible terrible outcome -- that's called life. But this is not a realistic problem.]

> Also, if you are hiring her for game design, then off hours, she can't design games, because that is directly competitive.

Isn't that basically the same as saying that all games she design belongs to the company?

Yes, and it fits into option #2. It is work directly related to the company. And?

"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."

She wasn't paid for ideas, she was paid for intellectual property: code.

"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."

You don't need to prove whether something was invented while sitting on the chair. There's a pretty simple explicit transferral of intellectual property - you pushed it to the company github.

"that ONE GUY from 1998 who didn’t sign the agreement is going to be a real jerk about signing it now, because he knows that he’s personally holding up a $350,000,000 acquisition and he can demand a lot of money to sign."

Which happened when, exactly?

I've been involved in two diligence exercises (on the buy side), where not having IP assignment was an issue for the selling company.

I wasn't close enough on the selling side to figure out what concessions they needed to make to make the problem go away, but it absolutely can and does hold up acquisitions.

"not having IP assignment"

Was this specifically about a clause in an employees contract that allowed for side projects?

Or was it, say, about a software license purchased from another company? (which probably does happen, yes)

It's been a few years, but as I recall, both were early figures (unclear if employees or contractors) that had no signed IP assignment contract on file.

It really does. Especially when your options for "walking away" have similar bullshit authoritarian contracts.

Also, considering how much money megacorps can make of employees' ideas, I'd say that many aren't fairly compensated at all.

Doesn't the "we own all your output" line also sway employees against pursuing their own potentially world-changing ideas as well? Is that good for everyone?

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