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Comment by lamontcg | Hacker News Reader

> "You are an IBM employee 100% of the time".

That would instantly make me start to execute on becoming an IBM employee 0% of my time.

Clauses like that aren’t allowed in California. California law says that anything I do in my own time, on my own equipment, and not related to my company’s product is something my employer is not allowed to own.

I make this crystal clear whenever signing an “inventions” clause, and I avoid companies which make, say, DNS servers, for exactly that reason.

In this case it is related to the company's product so that exemption would not apply.

The sentence in question is misinterpreted. I read it like this: our contract applies all the time, not only when you're directly working for the company. We don't know what the contract exactly says. Likely there's an agreement not to work on IBM-related products in spare time.

California law overrides illegal contracts. However, in this case such provisions would be legal as the sibling comments point out.

Why only CA? Shouldn't it be that "the law" overrides illegal contracts - basically a tautology? Otherwise, what's stopping anyone from writing illegal contracts and forcing the other party to abide by them?

Because the basis of every state's contract laws are different. Something are illegal in CA but not in NY.

Sure, but in this case they were working on the kernel driver of an IBM NIC.

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