Comment by INTPenis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by INTPenis | Hacker News Reader

I'm an anonymous coward on here so I can give another perspective.

My employer struggles to find skilled people and when one guy on my team suddenly disappeared for 6 months it was definitely felt.

Before that I hadn't really grasped the idea yet. Even though I've lived in Sweden since I was a child. I just couldn't accept that you can duck out of your job for several months and then come back as if nothing happened.

I saw it as a sort of betrayal of your co-workers and duties.

And when your employer is already struggling, quietly, to find competent personnel, it really felt like a kick in the gut to lose one of the most competent resources in that team.

Of course that person came back and has always performed at a decent level.

Now I'm older and more mature, I have my own company, so I'm much more accepting of the privilege to take a break from my employer to develop my own business.

Unfortunately, and the article states this, there is an issue being in direct competition with your employer. Mine is a consultancy firm which means they do almost anything. They can purchase a solution from someone and re-sell it as their own. So it's very hard for me to start an IT business that does not compete with them.

It's a sword of damocles dangling over me right now, because I haven't revealed to my manager what I'm doing in my own free time yet. All I know for sure is that I haven't signed any contract preventing me from running my own business and there is a clause in the collective bargaining contract that states that I can't use any company resources, which is obvious.

To be fair, is this not at least partially the fault of the employer for not ensuring that they had adequate cover?

Not every small business has that luxury.

sure but what you’re effectively doing is making an employer hire more people than otherwise so they can have adequate cover. you may say this just the cost of doing business. But in the aggregate it results in X percent of companies that were previously neutral or making a profit into going out of business or being in the negative.

They need to have this anyway because they never know what might happen to that person. They could say tomorrow they have another job, or as my old boss used to say "got hit by a bus" and died. You'd have no recourse then, so you better have redundancy.

Of course, every job I've ever been in has been terrible about redundancy, and when people start leaving, usually it's the people with the most domain knowledge, and so you get a big gut punch right away, and then it snowballs as more work and responsibilities get put on other people and they end up leaving once they've had enough or found something better, and it just keeps increasing until you're basically totally screwed but hey, you're saving money by not having to pay all these employees anymore, and that's all your stockholders are going to see for the first year until your company completely falls apart.

No, you still need MORE redundancy. If 10 units is enough redundancy to deal with a failure rate of X, if X now increases then you will need more than 10 units for redundancy. The reasons don't matter at all. More chance of failure means more redundancy required.

I was being sarcastic near the end. That seems to be what the higher ups think. I definitely think there needs to be lots of redundancy, as someone who has been the recipient of a bunch of dumped on extra responsibility with little knowledge transfer as people have left.

Actually you might be in trouble and the longer you keep it secret the more trouble you will be in.

In Sweden you have a duty to be loyal to your employer, which means you are not allowed to plan and/or start a competing business during your employment. Your employer can sue you for violating your loyalty to your employer.

However this also means that you have to be able to define what your employers area of business is. Either you don't know it or they don't have one. Get their area of business defined.

>Get their area of business defined.

This is the hard part for me because they do anything from hosting private clouds to buying a digital signage solution and re-selling it as their own.

My business is just consulting and developing. So far my job has been to develop a digital signage solution. Which would be in direct competition with them but I'm not left many options.

They even have a developer department. So the very nature of my employer makes it almost impossible for me to start anything in IT.

If you are in IT in Sweden you might want legal advice to check this out. Anything that you build outside of work might be owned by your employer by default.

I thought that's for patentable stuff. Regular software should be owned by the creator if its created outside of work.

Law (1949:345) "rätten till arbetstagares uppfinningar"

It essentially specifies that the employer owns, but must pay a token cost for, "inventions" by an employee outside of his normal employment field and duties.

When you get hired you should _always_ make sure this is stricken by your contract.

> If I'm forced to sign it I will request a new contract without that section in it. Because even before I had my own business I was writing open source code for open source projects that we use and rely on. So it's impossible for my employer to own that code.

You need to _include_ a section that effectively negates 1949:345. Otherwise that law applies if nothing else is stated in the contract.

The employer in question rolled out a new contract a while back. Different from the one I had signed many years ago when I first started.

The new contract did have a section that stated essentially that anything an employee produces, on or off business hours, in or out of business locations, is owned by the employer.

I flat out refused to sign this and there was apparently no requirement for me to sign it. It was just presented to me digitally because a process had been started in their systems and signing that contract was part of the process.

If I'm forced to sign it I will request a new contract without that section in it. Because even before I had my own business I was writing open source code for open source projects that we use and rely on. So it's impossible for my employer to own that code.

I did this and the alternative was me quitting the job completely. I don't think that would have been much better for the company.

It would because it means that the company has a guarantee of freed up resources to hire somebody else without having to wait the six months or so.

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