> discovering late in the interview process that Apple has a blanket ban on all programming related hobby projects
O_o There must be more to it then that. What the hell does anyone do in their spare time at home for fun then?
O_o There must be more to it then that. What the hell does anyone do in their spare time at home for fun then?
One thing I've really appreciated is the Github wiki pages for individual shellcheck errors. Without those pages I wouldn't have learnt so much more about shell and the shellcheck tool would be more difficult for people to use :)
You can't compete with Apple, which is fair. However, you're also not privy to what Apple is or isn't working on at any given time.
If Apple gave you permission to work on something, you could infer that they're not working on it, so it's not allowed.
The statement reads simply as: apple works on many things, and doesn't want you working on things outside of apple that may compete with current r&d or future r&d.
We can disagree with them on if it seems appropriate, but it doesn't seem to be about their software quality at all.
And yet Apple is totally fine with benefiting from the open source work of others...
And? Every other person benefits the same with the code contributed under the licenses in play. I fail to see the issue. With llvm for example they seem to be upstreaming a lot of their xcode backend stuff as they get time. So that statement of many copyleft proponents that only copyleft encourages upstreaming rings hollow to me.
Hell go talk to people from Redhat about custom gcc forks that target chips that aren't upstreamed to gcc. Just because you're using gcc and modifying it doesn't mean you'll actually be contributing the code if its all internal.
It seems to me that they are afraid (or at least unwilling) to compete on even grounds, despite likely having more budget than a single random employee competing in their free time.
The vast majority of Software Engineers I’ve come across don’t write OSS code, don’t write blogs, maybe read Hacker News. For most of them this is sort of a non issue.
It might be a non-issue as in "I probably wouldn't have exercised that right anyway", but that doesn't mean that one feel the restriction is acceptable, fair, or justified.
I would not. Regardless of whether I had any intention to do it or not.
More realistically... most engineers don't code as a hobby. HN, /r/programming, and other software dev hangouts are small echo chambers.
This sounds unnecessarily dismissive to me and also unsubstantiated. It removes the focus from the more important fact that this is a foul encroachment of personal freedom regardless of how many professional coders like coding as a hobby.
Anecdotally, the programmers I work with don't seem to read anything outside of StackOverflow or contribute to any OSS projects. Albeit, what OSS projects we contribute to or what communities we participate in isn't usually a topic of conversation among my coworkers.
> It removes the focus from the more important fact that this is a foul encroachment
I agree that this is an encroachment on personal freedom and I doubt this clause is legally sound (in California at least). I am quite surprised that Apple has such a policy. But I am even more surprised that they are able to find programmers who agree to it.
Is there a lawyer with experience in the field reading this?
In summary. They are allowed to some extent, but if a court would consider a non competition paragraph as being too broad, the paragraph becomes void in its entirety, as if it was never entered into the contract at all.
For non management employees the exclusivity must be quite specific, and unless the law has changed recently without my knowledge, and entire industry, or a broadly specified skill would fail the test in any case I can think of.
Applying the most basic levels of those principles, I would assume that attempting to limit a programmers ability to engage in programming in general would lead to nothing but a complete dismissal of any claims related to the non-compete clause if someone brought it to court.
Effectively, if you try to prevent someone to apply their trades and/or talents to broadly, they could essentially moonlight for your worst competition without much of a risk as long as they don't convey what is clearly trade secrets as they are differently protected.
Suffice to say that companies with decent legal departments tend to write specific non competition clauses especially outside of the realm of management positions, as they get no value at all from too broad non competition clauses.