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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

The two cases seem pretty dissimilar.

One is primarily companies not wanting to take any risk that IP could walk out the door through off hours work.

The other is that for sufficiently visible and controversial off hours activities, it’s hard to divorce the person 100% from their employer and that’s a PR problem and a distraction many employers are quick to remedy.

When I was an industry analyst, anything I said related to the industry even on a personal blog or Twitter account was (somewhat reasonably) taken as my professional opinion not really separable from what I wrote as part of my job.

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Both cases seem to be mostly a US thing. Here in France, whatever I do outside my job is my own business: I write code on my own time, it's mine. I publish articles on my web site, they do not represent my company.

I've heard a story about someone from Europe travelling to the US to work for IBM. He was in the process of choosing a house, and was told that it was too modest. That is, "not the kind of house expected of an IBM engineer". Clearly in the US the line between your job and personal life is so blurry it's often hard to even see.

From my perspective this looks like a problem in and of itself, but it gets magnified tenfold when coupled with "at will" employment and work-tied health insurance: it means your employer owns you, 24/7. Isn't slavery supposed to be abolished?

Then there are the obvious Free Speech implications. The US has supposedly freer speech than Europe, but how free is your speech really is if your employer can fire you and terminate your health insurance the instant your boss stumbles upon something you said he didn't like?

> That is, "not the kind of house expected of an IBM engineer". Clearly in the US the line between your job and personal life is so blurry it's often hard to even see.

Hmm really? Citation needed.

Yes really, but this was a couple decades ago. I expect this has changed since.

Unless it’s some context where someone is expected to do a lot of home entertaining I have believe would be unheard of today.

Lots of old stories about IBM requiring workers to wear nice blue suits and drive shiny new cars.

I think that mostly ended by the dotcom era though. As an intern in 2001, everybody there wore casual clothes just like at a startup.

This is strong, “not the car expected of a doctor” energy

> sufficiently visible and controversial off hours activities

The point is that it doesn’t have to be controversial at all. They can fire you for whatever reason they want. He didn’t cross any lines because there was never any line to begin with. His healthcare is at the mercy of a dictatorship.

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