Were those side projects done during work hours or using Google's equipment?
Most of the time, "equipment" seems to mean "laptop". IHMO when "equipment" is such a commodity as a laptop, this should never even be an issue.
That's like a newspaper that would claims the work of one of it's journalist who is writing books on his personal time on the basis that the book was written with a pencil he brought home from work.
One of the first pieces of advice I got when I joined a big tech company for the first time was to just put the work provided laptop back in it's original box and get my own.
This turns out to be pretty good from a number of angles-- you get an emergency spare plus any kind of crazy bloat ware your job needs you already have a sacrificial host to load it on.
Of course not, it does however eliminate a host of problems resulting from using company equipment including additional complications from efforts you would otherwise own except for using company equipment, or the extraordinarly reduced right to privacy you have on company equipment.
Using separate equipment is also good, but isn't always realistic particularly if your work requires frequent travel.
Obviously this only works out if your employer is okay with you using your own system for work. Years ago almost all were, and I believe today outside of few industries it's still commonly fine.
Don't do it. Also, dont use anything related to work for anything other than work.. It's a tool for the job. Leave it at that.
It's also extremely common. How many people these days carry separate work and personal phones, for example? (Some do, of course, but I'm pretty sure they're the exceptions.) And, especially anyone who travels a lot probably uses one laptop a lot of the time too.
Is this "best practice"? Probably not. But it's convenient and it's usually not an issue. (Though I fully agree that, if you know something is a potentially borderline issue, it makes sense to wall personal and work off more completely.)
Just keep it separate.
That said, if this sort of thing is a potential issue for you, you're probably better off using a purely personal laptop or desktop that isn't used for work purposes at all.
I got a similar clause, and this is indeed what I do. I think it's fair that they get copyright when they provide the software/hardware. It's also simple for me to avoid that, I just use my home computer with my own Windows license (or Linux) for any side projects.
I rejected the previous job offer due to a more general copyright claim to all my ideas ever. The current one only has the "using company equipment".
In that case, it makes a lot of sense just to keep the two domains separate. The flip side of a laptop being a relatively inexpensive piece of semi-commoditized gear if that, if there's a good reason to have a separate computer for personal projects, it's not really a big deal to do so.
But this is the way people think, and the way things are, so I assume that anything I make on company hardware or on company premises or while daydreaming about work or while wearing my company logo tshirt is the property of my employer, and I should probably consult them before selling or open-sourcing it...
>Like many Googlers, I had projects I worked on in my spare time. Some of those I carried over from before joining.
>When I joined, I submitted two projects that I was actively working on at the time, largely just maintaining: AsbestOS (yes, those were the PS3 Linux days) and usbmuxd (iPhone USB comms daemon, you probably have it if you have Ubuntu!).
Though, honestly, I doubt I really even agree on the equipment clause when it. When said equipment is a laptop and a phone, using their device would be more about not wanting to carry multiple devices than any interstice value gained by the equipment.
Once you test such software against company owned datasets, it's a different ballgame.