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Comment by virgilp | Hacker News Reader

While working for the previous employer (multinational corporation), my contract had a clause that any work/personal projects that I do outside work must be approved, in writing. Doesn't matter if I only work on them outside working hours. Their justification was that the rest of the time is for me to rest/ I was employed full-time, so they were not comfortable with me e.g. working a second job & being tired at work.

It does sound like a bit of an overreach, and I'm not sure how enforceable their contract really was, but the language was unambiguous and unsanctioned contributions to open source projects were definitely out of the question.

(I'm currently working at a startup, they don't have this problem/ contributions to OSS are encouraged, I just have too much work to do already :D )

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> any work/personal projects that I do outside work must be approved, in writing. Doesn't matter if I only work on them outside working hours

F that, no way in hell I'd sign that contract, for any amount of money.

It's legalese for "you are just a cog in the machine and there is no 'you'. Sign here please".

I get the feeling, just want to say that it all worked out well (towards "spectacularly well") for me. It's easy to say "for any amount of money" in the abstract, but that job directly and indirectly took me from "relatively poor" to "fatfire-level-of-rich". And didn't _really_ restrict me in any way - I got the written approvals to teach when needed, and contributing to OSS was possible (though there was some red tape).

I'm by no mean advocating that one should ignore the contracts, but I do think you need to look at the larger picture... sometimes it just is overzealous lawyers and not necessarily a bad company to work for.

There's usually pretty incredible benefits in signing away your soul to the Devil. Happy that it worked out for you in the end.

You went pretty fast from "you are just a cog in the machine and there is no 'you'. Sign here please" to "signing away your soul to the Devil".

I understand the first statement/feeling, and my reply was meant to say that it might be ok to take the risk that "you are just a cog in the machine". As for the latter statement, not sure where you got that one from, there was nothing in the contract that suggested it (and there was nothing evil in the job that I was originally hired for, either - it was code intelligence (code hinting) for PHP).

My bad, it was a sorry attempt at being witty. I didn't mean any disrespect to your choice.

Completely agree with you. More power to you!

You just need to know when to quit

Personally, at that point I would start demanding 24/7 pay coverage. You don't get to tell me what I can or cannot do outside of the hours that you're paying for.

You are right. Such demands are written in a contract. You either sign or not.

In all honesty, this should not even be possible to require in a contract (and I'm fairly sure that it indeed isn't, in most EU countries), considering that employment contracts are negotiated from a position of power imbalance.

I'm in the EU; I mentioned that I don't think the verbiage was really enforceable, but that can't stop them from putting it in. Fortunately it never came to be tested in a court of law :)

Power imbalance is wildly dependant on a lot of factors and it's already reflected in the contract clauses and compensation. I personally wouldn't care about that clause and I'd happily work for them (provided my requirements were met - and, to be fair, a company coming up with this clauses probably wouldn't).

This is usually a problem for lower paid jobs, not for developers.

Hiring a good developer is hard, hiring a good cleaner is simple.

Law and application seem to differ/lag somewhat. Each influences the other. It’s worth being aware that neither fully determines the other, and that each evolves in parallel. We live in an organic world where things are not as well defined and predictable as the typical programmer might wish. To thrive, one must dirty oneself in the actual code, rather than get bogged down in the terminology of the man page.

This is sometimes covered in contracts by some legalese in the vein of "we pay you more than we ought to, so we also expect you to ...".

So the big companies have a cartel to suppress their workers' salaries, and then they write "we pay you more than we ought to" into their contracts.

They probably believe people should feel honored to work for them for free, but paying you less than fair market salary and taking away all your hobbies is the most they can get.

Worked for an MSP that basically required 24/7 availability but wouldn't pay for it. They got around it by saying things like your ringer must be at 100% volume at all times, you must be working within 30 minutes of receiving the call, and then you must clock out the minute you stop working. They'd want you to wake up at 2:03 AM, work on something for 5 minutes, and clock out at 2:08 AM. The way the rules you were wrote, you could get in trouble for just about everything except not answering the phone entirely. So guess what I started doing?

> my contract had a clause that any work/personal projects that I do outside work must be approved

I might be wrong but I don't think this kind of thing would work (legally speaking) in the EU.

"The general rule – IP ownership

The general position under English law is that IP rights created by an employee within the course of employment automatically belong to the employer; where there is any doubt as to whether an employee or their employer owns IP rights, the relevant legislation largely favours employers."

It's been that way for decades, while the UK was in EU.

I had to get it written into an employment contract that Open Source activity outside of work was my own.

I mean, fair enough if the contract mentions working in your free time to use / contribute to the IP of the company you work for (or that of the competitor), but I was more referring to working on hobby projects not relating to your work.

The situation isn't any different in NL either. Although there is no blanket your-company-owns-your-**s policy (your IPs), the general rule is: if you create something in your spare time that your employer could well have paid you for (i.e. it's in line with your job description), the IP belongs to your employer.

The idea behind this is that your employer pays not just for your time, but also for the skills you acquire during your work. Therefore, the output of those skills has at least partial ownership. There's a huge gray area which contains liabilities and opportunities for both sides, which is why most companies insist on signing off on personal projects. The alternative is fighting it out in front of a judge, should it ever come to that.

It certainly was a thing working for Telefónica in Germany. We needed to get separate permission to be allowed to do work/volunteering outside of the main role, which was conditional on you being able to complete the main task.

I heard a story of someone who had this permission revoked because they worked weekends as a DJ in Berlin, and would often take sick days/turn up late on Mondays to deal with the hangover.

Yes, this is normal in Germany. The idea is that you're legally only allowed to work 40-ish hours per week and your employer is legally required to ensure that you observe break times and at least 24 hours of rest on the weekend. In turn you are usually required to get signoff if you want to do another job on the side, though I think volunteer work is generally allowed. I have no idea how this works for part-time jobs and why your employer can allow you to take a second job if doing so will violate the legally mandated recovery periods.

I definitely was required to get written approval in multiple companies I worked at in Germany.

Also it is legally enforceable as in it can be considered a valid and completely legal exception to usual termination protection.

It should be legal. I dont see the problem with having terms like this. There are plenty of other companies to choose from if you are a developer. From a company perspective it makes 100% sense to have terms that restricts when a developer is allowed to work on a project.

> It should be legal.

It should be if consideration is provided.

I do think there's an argument to be made whether the base salary counts as consideration for things outside of the defined working hours though.

It should not be legal. You exchange your time to produce money for the company, and that's it. You should be able to do whatever you want out of the company hours, and I don't see how that can be a problem. It makes 100% sense from a worker perspective to not have your company have complete control of you. There are plenty of other workers to choose from if you are a company, in case you are dissatisfied with an employee.

I think the argument is that you gain some specialized knowledge at work, so they want to prevent you from working on a competing product using that knowledge, personal, OSS or otherwise. At some point a lawyer probably reduced the sentence to simply require approval in writing for anything to avoid any expensive disputes.

No, they had that one too, it's the non-compete clause basically (it extends a few years after your employment terminates, if I'm not wrong). Again, not sure it's enforceable, I'm not aware of them ever trying to. Probably they might if you were in a leadership position and tried to outright move to a direct competitor? But I never heard of it used for a "regular" employee so I basically ignored its existence.

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