Ask HN: Sharing side project w Boss
I wrote some apps that improve workflow at work. I wrote these in my own time. How should I share these with my company? Should I ask for compensation at some point?
A lot of people say it's better to ask for forgiveness than for permission, but to me that's an utterly weak stance and will only lead to stress now and hassle down the road. For me, for each side project I determine could likely be profitable in some way, I simply send my supervisor (division manager in my case) an email stating as much about the effort as I can without disclosing the actual magic sauce. If it's IP (rather than a extracurricular business relationship), then I give them the opportunity to buy it outright or fund development with profit share (they never take that option). I give them 2 week turn around. He runs it through legal, and they quickly assess it for major conflicts of interest.
This works because leadership are rarely people so insecure that they want to control every aspect of your life - if they are then you should probably go work somewhere else. If you are a valued contributer, the last thing someone wants to do is be responsible for losing a valuable employee simply because they neglected to respect your work-life balance and personal growth. If they do, then they are a poor manager, and that will be apparent to their peers and superiors. This is harder at a very small company, because some (not all) leaders are naively too inexperienced and insecure to be concerned about their professional reputation. However, I've worked with great startup leaders who respect my professional partitions.
Caveat: if you're working on something very directly related to the work they're paying you to do as part of your contract (job description), then that's a conflict of interest and they should own that IP you create outside of normal operating hours. After all, put yourself in their shoes: you pay someone $2000 a week to design and build an augmented reality application to help grocery shoppers look up product information, then that person asks you if they can sell an AR application they built in their own time to let people find directions inside of a store. If it were me, I'd scratch my head and say: "wait a minute, good idea but I'm paying you to design this grocery store app. If you had such a great improvement, why didn't you bring it up so that we could role it into the development plan. I'll take that, thank you."
I've never had my employer deny a waiver request. That includes patents issued, payment and equity agreements with other companies. However, if they ever did, depending on the potential value, I am always prepared to leave.
It's an amazing feeling to watch people get passionate about an idea you created, but the reward to you can still be significant in terms of the visibility/credit you'll get from leadership, which could well translate into salary and position increase. Since adoption, I've had the ear and consult of our talented leadership team, who have given me access to their powerful professional networks to boost support for the project.
Again, put yourself in their shoes. If you were paying somebody a salary, and they brought you an idea that they cultivated on their own time and with their own resources, would you not view them as one of the most valuable member of your staff, in awe that someone has that much pride in the mission of the company to go that far above and beyond the call of duty, and do everything in your power to not only pump the idea up, but also make sure the person is comfortable and stays with the company rather than leaving to empower a competitor.
Business is a very personal thing. Have confidence in yourself and what you bring to the table, find great people to work with, keep pushing, and good things will happen.
This is not your last great idea.