Wow, that seems petty. And it enrages me enough that if I worked for Apple I'd immediately start looking elsewhere for a job. I can do whatever I darn well please in my personal time and any employer that says otherwise is being overbearing.
The only OSS projects that get approved to contribute to are ones where they’ve already hired most of the people that work on it. Cassandra, Mesos, and some other infra stuff come to mine. And occasionally they just buy a whole OSS company for their own use (FoundationDB).
Submitting a patch to a small library you use? A multi-month process to be told no in the end 90% of the time or more. Have your own OSS projects? Not any more you don’t.
In my exit interview I made my reasoning clear, and pointed out that as they move more into services and away from pure hardware as revenue, it’s going to be a bigger issue. Whether they agree or will work to fix it, only time will tell.
Secret hiring blacklists don’t exist. And if they did, I wouldn’t want to work at a company that uses them anyways.
Maybe I'm wrong and I'll be unemployed forever now that I had the apparent audacity to say this, but... yeah, I doubt it.
1: https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-google-others-settle-anti-po...
I haven't heard of them sharing the lists with other companies.
Apple and other companies have also had do-not-hire agreements with business partners (basically no-poaching) but they were sued and I believe stopped doing that.
Now unofficially, your guess is as good as mine.
I heard rumors of recruiting guidelines to not accept people back who left Apple to go to Netflix back when it was the new kid on the block. I also only knew 2 people who left and came back in several years there.
Given the rest of my experience there I am not chomping at the bit to return. It’s not a great place to work in server side infrastructure. At least not until some significant cultural shifts occur.
Genuine question for anyone who gets RSUs at a public company like this. Why do you keep your $FANG stock when it is granted?
You've already paid income tax on the basis, which is the closing price the day you got it. The year long timer for long term capital gains tax starts the day you get it. So vesting $X of grants on your vesting day and holding is equivalent to just buying $X of stock on any old day. As a bonus, you're already heavily heavily exposed to that stock because A) they're your employer, and B) presumably unvested RSUs coming in the future.
If your particular letter of FAANG currently outperforms the market ("S&P 500" index, etc), I see no incentive to immediately sell it and reinvest into something else. Of course you can sell and reinvest if you see an even better investment opportunity, but most of the employees don't, they are engineers, not experienced stock traders.
> If [your company] currently outperforms the market
What does that mean? Outperforms over some past time period? That has no bearing on the future. If you have insider knowledge that you think your company will outperform the market in the future I agree it makes sense to keep, but see above about dollar cost averaging and also consult your lawyer about insider trading laws.
> most [don't], they are engineers, not experienced stock traders.
Exactly, and the standard advice for non-experts is to buy index funds. Not try and guess which specific companies will outperform the market.
> At best you get nothing from it
At best, other people can get something from it.
Obviously it's not a good idea to bad mouth individual people in your exit interview. The time for that was when you still worked there and could give it as candid feedback.
In Europe I have never done an exit interview, wasn't even aware that they are a thing if it wasn't for the occasional HN comments.
Naturally you might talk with someone informally, but isn't given.
- When you hire a contract photographer to make some pictures, he owns the copyright on those pictures even though you hired him.
- The same goes for your programmer employees. They own the copyright on their work.
- Therefore you need to require your programmer employees to sign an agreement to sign their work over to you.
I am not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that's a gross misunderstanding of work for hire. If someone is your employee, they are doing work for hire and you own the copyright on their product. Photographers own their work because they were independent contractors and thus their work was not work for hire. I believe work for hire doesn't apply to patents, thus possibly justifying a patent agreement. But seriously, this (AFAIK) broken explanation is his opening justification?
Depends on how the two parties set up the deal.
If you want the copyright or to change the license in some way that gives you (the publisher) more rights, the agreement will spell out those details and you could up spending more (maybe a lot more). I sometimes work with professional photographers and for pre-existing work I pay for a non-exclusive license that costs less than a commissioned piece. I also use stock photography extensively which works in a similar manner.
For commissioned photography or design work I'll insist on owning the copyright and the agreement will spell out that it's not work-for-hire:
To the extent that the Provider’s Work includes any work of authorship entitled to protection under the laws of copyright, the parties acknowledge and agree that (i) the Provider’s Work has been specially ordered and commissioned by Publisher as a contribution to a collective work, a supplementary work, a translation, or such other category of work as may be eligible for treatment as a “commissioned work” and a “work made for hire” under the United States Copyright Act; (ii) the Provider is an independent contractor and not an employee, partner, joint author or joint venturer of Publisher; (iii) the Provider’s ’s Work shall be deemed a “commissioned work” and a “work made for hire” to the greatest extent permitted by law; and (iv) Publisher shall be the sole author of the Provider’s Work and the Work, and the sole owner of original materials embodying Work and the Work, and/or any works derived therefrom.
Of course, the photographer or designer can opt to reject these terms, or make additional demands upon the publisher (more money, the right to use images in their own promotional materials, etc.)
Not sure how it works with independent contractors doing programming.
I am a software developer, so I write software. I am employed full-time by an employer for which I (usually) write code, documentation and such, and still I own the copyright to each and every line of code or documentation or whatever I write. Simply because copyright in German law is non-transferrable. Even if I want to, I cannot sign over the copyright to anybody else, hence my employer couldn't make me sign it over to him in my employment contract. Instead, there's a clause that I grant my employer an exclusive and irrevocable right to use the work I create during my paid work time in any way he wants. This effectively leaves me with the copyright, but I don't have any rights to profit off of that work anymore, so that copyright isn't of much use to me.
I very much doubt that. Software isn't something that exists in a vacuum and even if you are the sole author of a program, it might contain or be based on trade secrets of the company.
Even if that's not the case, software doesn't generate profit on its own - you still need to sell licences or services based around it. Both of which are equally contributing to any profit a program generates.
Since it's still the employer who bears the entrepreneurial risk, there's a solid argument to be made against winning such a case.
I am curious, what rights have you retained with your work then? What are the corner cases where you might you still want exercise your copyright?
If you wrote code, the company isn't allowed to claim someone else did.
But remember that gets very murky when you are working in a team.
In practical terms this means mostly boopkis.
"Before I start: be careful before taking legal advice from the Internet."
He got that much right, at least. I'm not going to argue every point, but as one with a broad range of experience on the topic I'd say there's enough wrong with that article to go find my advice somewhere else.
Nginx got in some legal issues because it started out as an employee’s side project: https://lwn.net/Articles/807324/
If Joel practiced what he preaches, and thinks no employees have a right to develop OSS software while on the company payroll, he needs to stop using nginx right now.
“This is where we are by default. This is the standard employment contract for developers, inventors, and researchers.”
Proofreaders are not prohibited from reading books.
Concept Artists are not prohibited from creating art.
Writers are not prohibited from writing.
Teachers from teaching.
Workers from volunteering work.
Non-compete clauses "are automatically void as a matter of law in California" [0], where Apple is based (though they have offices in other states and countries). I wonder if a ban on open source contributions would fall afoul of this law (I suspect yes, though Apple can afford pretty good lawyers).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-compete_clause#California
Now, disclosing secrets, that's a different matter. If I go to Google to inform them of amazing killer project Apple wants to do within 5 years, that's called corporate espionage.
No reason why I couldn't work for multiple companies though. In fact, I don't even see a reason why I should even tell these companies I work for multiple companies.
You can, if you are being paid by the hour. But you probably aren't being paid by the hour, you are probably collecting an annual salary which means you might be expected to work 8-10 hours per day, not work for other companies, and other restrictions.
My contract also specifically states that I agree to work 40 hours a week.
Maybe this is not the case in a typical US employment contract?
Some of us outside CA do sign non-compete agreements, though, which is another matter entirely.
Many the employment contracts have a "no moonlighting" clause, which basically says that one won't be working for another employer during the employment period.
I've heard of someone that did this. Held two full-time jobs at different software companies. It wasn't Apple and Google, IIRC it was something like Oracle and Nvidia or Oracle and Salesforce.
He was fired from both when they found out and presumably blacklisted from being rehired, but other than that there weren't repercussions. It's not worth it to sue an individual engineer, and for many of the clauses in your employment agreement, their remedy is limited to firing you. He did it for a few years, too, and banked up a bunch of money doing so.
One thing that surprises a lot of people who were raised to follow the rules: you have a lot of freedom if you're willing to deal with the consequences. Some people are afraid to question their boss because they're worried about losing their job; others will steal all of their employers' self-driving car plans for $680M, risking $180M in fines and possible jail time in the process. You get to decide where on the risk/reward continuum you want to sit.
It took 3 or 4 months and 5 or 6 levels of management above his new boss before getting "an extraordinary one-off exemption" to allow him to finish thinking/writing his thesis and allow the university to publish it (as required by the terms of completing the PhD...)
Everyone was _pretty_ sure that would have been unenforceable here in Australia - but that there's a serious practical difference between what is and isn't enforceable in contracts, and going up against Oracle's legal team even when they're on the wrong side of the law. So he just "stopped thinking" for several months until he (temporarily) had written permission to think non-Oracle thoughts...
Your examples aren't helpful because the don't address the issue, which is risk.
In the examples provided there's really nothing about the 'personal work' that puts the employers position at risk. Which is why, by the way, schools don't generally defy teachers from teaching on the side. Or proofreaders etc..
In fact such limitations are rare outside industries with IP issues.
Apple is a $1T company and all of that valuation is up for grabs by litigious people of various kinds who can use any kind of side-show tactic interpretation of the law to make money.
So imagine someone 'working from home' on the 'same computer' that they use for work. What counts as 'work time' vs. 'personal time' when flipping back and forth between activities?
How will a judge view this?
Then you have competitive problems: you work on 'iMovie' for 1 hour, then you work on 'MyMovie' (personal) the hour. This creates ugly conflicts of interest.
Then you have liability issues if Apple is seen to be contributing to an OSS without the right legal bits in place. It doesn't matter that it 'shouldn't' be a problem, what matters is that a bad actor + a lawyer can possibly make enough of a fuss to convince a judge that there's a problem 'Apple's contribution to this OSS code materially affected my business and it was no clear in the liscencing' etc..
As we've seen with Google/Uber, this stuff is very expensive, very strategic, can be very ambiguous, which is bad.
There's so much grey in the equation, and so much at risk, it's simply not worth it for Apple and Amazon.
So if you want to work there, that's it, you can't make games.
It'd be nice if there were some kind of regulatory issues around it, but it'd have to be clear.
I also think they should be nice enough to 'wave' people's rights to do certain things, like work on specific OSS projects.
The obtuse case is I work for your company as the lead engineer making TVs. All the TVs can't display blue. I then go home have an epiphany, and develop a method for making TVs blue. We fix the problem and call it day. Later still, I leave the company and sue you for infringement because I technically came up with the solution outside of work and therefore I own that code. This is the situation most companies are trying to avoid.
If you solve this problem without having the company own everything the programmer does in and out of work, then you can have stricter walls between work and home projects.
Most are actually. If you're employed as a writer, you can't just go and write what you want without permission from your employer. They usually get the right of first refusal, meaning that you have to show it to them first and if they want to publish it then they get to do so.
The one hard exception was game dev which remained a firm no-go, for reasons that never really made sense (Claim at the time was because Amazon had its own game studio?!)
https://amazongames.com/ make games and a game engine called Lumberyard https://aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/ that's based on CryEngine.
An old boss used to say "good friends make for good paperwork".
IIRC the non-compete is pretty wide ranging from Amazon. Makes it almost impossible to get another tech job, depending on how you interpret certain phrases. Fun stuff.
And honestly, given your political climate and attitudes towards immigrants, whew, no way, do not want to move to the USA.
They bought Twitch, they control a massive physical and digital distribution platform, and it's just a matter of time before they launch games that are exclusive to Prime/Twitch members. They literally control the whole pipeline. Yet another reason to break them up.
[1] $64Bn in 2018 - https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tech+company+lobbying
https://www.sacattorneys.com/san-jose-intellectual-property-...
The relevant quote is: "It is legal to require an employee to assign intellectual property created in the employee’s own time if it required any of the employer’s tools, facilities, or intellectual property, or if that intellectual property relates to the employer’s business or research and development."
Since Apple operates in a wide swath of the IT world, it is very likely that most OSS developed by Apple employees could reasonably be considered "relate[d] to the employer's business". That is certainly the position that Apple takes in most case (source: I am a former Apple employee).
"(a) Any provision in an employment agreement which provides that an employee shall assign, or offer to assign, any of his or her rights in an invention to his or her employer shall not apply to an invention that the employee developed entirely on his or her own time without using the employer’s equipment, supplies, facilities, or trade secret information except for those inventions that either:
(1) Relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer’s business, or actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of the employer; or
(2) Result from any work performed by the employee for the employer.
(b) To the extent a provision in an employment agreement purports to require an employee to assign an invention otherwise excluded from being required to be assigned under subdivision (a), the provision is against the public policy of this state and is unenforceable."
This is the catch-all and I've always been curious what the seminal cases are which apply this language. For example, the charter for most corporations these days usually establishes the business for "any lawful activity", so if the scope of an employer's business is defined by the charter, then pretty much any commercially viable FOSS project could potentially be ensnared by an employer. Any IP lawyers here have some pointers to how "employer's business" is supposed to be interpreted and applied?
I lost but learned a valuable lesson, one just never knows with the law. These things are where one starts argument, it’s not where they stop.
Lawyers will have to decide how comfortable they are with the risk, and balance it against the reward. It’s totally natural that different entities will come to different conclusions in this environment.
Imagine you use KDE, and find a bug, and make a small PR with a patch for it. I can't even begin to fathom how a company can while being fair/just say that you're not allowed to do so (without "our approval" which could take months).
It's ridiculous beyond measure, and we should make it a goal to purposely get fired for doing OSS, and then also make sure to post about it online as much as possible so it draws a lot of attention, and hopefully results in a change in this.
After all, it's probably a piece of cake to land a new job (once the COVID crisis is over), if you have a Big N company on your resume, even if you were fired from it (not that you'd want to preemptively disclose that - unless you went public with it - which some folks might even see as a positive).
My grad school friend(s) at Google visited Apple, and I visited elsewhere similarly, when working at Apple HQ. Not scandalous in the least.
There are many companies that have this setup.
It could be his level of employment. Or it might be that it doesn't apply to all apple employees, or they don't know, or they don't bother.
Eating lunch at Caffe Mac was just print a visitor badge and walk across the quad with visitor.
Maybe some campuses require transiting team-specific lockdowns, but Infinite Loop for lunch did not.
Off-topic: remember eating lunch at restaurants?
I understood this one way at first, then I got quiet. Our world is really different.
Ooh that's a good one. I nearly snarfed my Pepsi.