Ask HN: Companies friendly to side projects?
Is there a list of companies that don't restrict their employees from working on side projects like amazon does? Bonus points if the company is remote.
Note : I'm not in california.
Note : I'm not in california.
What matters is the legal documents you sign.
In Amazon's case, they do SO MANY THINGS that even what would be a very lenient non-compete for a small company is basically "no side projects for you." (Don't know the specific language, it's just the nature of what they are.)
In practice, a reasonable non-compete in a company that doesn't do more than one thing can be very unrestricted. E.g. you work for biotech company, non-compete/IP is about "related to company's business": you can do whatever you want in your free time, so long as it's unrelated to biotech area you're in, or maybe biotech in general.
Sometimes the legal document is not reasonable, e.g. they claim ownership of anything related to customers' and vendors' business, and they use GMail so it's anything related to google's business! But you can negotiate the legal agreements, especially with small companies (hiring a lawyer for a couple of hours makes this easier.)