Great suggestion to make in advance placeholders to contain side projects.
In what ways do you trust, and not trust, your colleagues?
How do you feel about that?
The better question is in what ways do you trust, and not trust, the company you work for?
And the answer to that can be very complicated, and depend on the company a great deal. It also depends on who might buy the company in the future, and they might not be trustworthy at all.
Where does the workplace dishonesty start and end?
Does the person think that their colleagues have the same rules, or different rules?
How does that affect their work environment?
(Incidentally, I'm sick of HN downvoting legitimate comments.)
Nobody is entirely honest to everyone about everything in their workplace. You really think everyone is actually sick on every single sick day, or that every single doctor's appointment on their calendar is a real doctor's appointment? People never make excuses to their manager that are lies? Managers never lie to their employees about a justification or a deadline or a promise or a policy?
Workplace dishonesty is everywhere. Because workplaces are made of human beings. It's just something you learn to manage in a realistic way. People are mostly honest, but they're never entirely honest.
...I.....used to. Huh.
There aren't usually a whole lot of other legitimate-sounding reasons for why you'll be out of the office for a 3- or 4-hour chunk...
That's 100% true, and lamentable. But two wrongs don't make a right. And while one can't control the company's behavior, a person can control their own behavior. As such, it is perfectly reasonable to criticize them when they choose to act without integrity.
That leads to a society where people are punished and corporations are not, simply because they are too big to be criticised.
Much more often than people, large and publicly quoted corporations end up becoming inherently evil.
The total self-serving lies made by individuals will always be a drop in the ocean when compared to the self-serving lies of a single S&P500.
They're both wrong, but the real issue here is to start by criticizing and correcting the corporations, not the people. Once it feels like a drop in a glass of water, we can start thinking of criticizing the people.
If workplaces are going to invent dumb rules, then honest hardworking employees are going to feel justifying in working around them.
And furthermore, as an employee end of the day it's your right to have to be look out for yourself. You probably don't realize that because you're infected with startupitis where everyone has to be all in to succeed.
However, employees work in a company with other people, so we'd like to know what we can and can't trust from each other.
If a colleague engages in criminal fraud, do they have a rigorous philosophy about when and when not to do that? How do they behave towards the team? Is defrauding the company OK, over something they think they company shouldn't demand anyway, but they will still be honest and responsible towards their teammates? That would be very good to know.
If so many people weren't so anxious to downvote things that don't suit their kneejerk reactions, we could discuss this.
How do you feel about torrenting?
In short: it's complicated. Nobody minds about the technically "criminal fraud" when somebody brings home a couple dollars' worth of office supplies for private use. Everybody agrees that embezzling a million dollars should send you to jail. Meanwhile, something like grabbing a second lunch from the free company cafeteria and taking it home to eat as dinner will result in a lot of disagreement as to how bad that really is. But it also probably doesn't have a whole lot to do with whether you can trust that person's code reviews, because people are multifaceted and use different moral standards in different areas.
> so we'd like to know what we can and can't trust from each other.
Alas, we can't know. There are the things that are obviously fine, the things that are obviously not, and a GIGANTIC gray area in the middle which nobody is going to agree on, and companies will try to make policies that will always go too far in some parts and employees will always evade some of the policies they think are bad or unimportant.
And I think that when a company has a bad policy of overreaching in trying to claim ownership over things you do on your own time, and employees respond by falsely claiming that something they made predated their employment, that it's a fascinating example of that gray area.
I think the question you're really asking is whether or not they can be trusted down the line so that the system 'works'.
So here's the thing: You can never have a 100% guaranteed trust that someone is going to be doing as the company wills and wishes them to be, even if you have a written contract, and even if you shove a bunch of extra rules in it.
When it comes down to it, people will always have to look out for their best interests eventually, and having extra unneeded rules will push them to think transactionally, system and morals be damned. So the solution would be to treat them well enough to not have them think about it in the first place.
Sure, a company could not like you doing that and find a reason to fire you, but they have no valid legal recourse and you may even be able to sue them for wrongful termination.
We are one of the only states that prevents employers from having ownership of your brain on personal time.
Corpos have tried to claim ownership of things I did in my personal time, multiple times. I just show them this law and they back down immediately.
Having rights to my own brain is a big reason I live in California, cost of living be damned.
https://california.public.law/codes/labor_code_section_2870
IANAL, but know your rights!
> (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;
So, if you work at $BIGCO, they will argue that since they have their fingers in everything, that anything you might work on "relates" to their business or actual or demonstrably anticipated R&D. This is a truck-sized loophole.
There is not a paycheck big enough to make me give up the freedom to do whatever I want with my personal engineering time.
I have only worked for employers that do just one thing, so this law offers me lots of protection.
The short version is, what do you know, if you make it easy for smart people to start new companies for their big ideas, they’ll do it. And if you don’t? You don’t become a tech hub, no matter what else you’re doing.
Something something the idea must have come from something they saw at work, obviously.
I was once advised to take a vacation to California every year and do all my thinking then. But I hate wasting fuel, and it'd be so much more fun to say "this little park in the middle of Detroit is actually California soil", and just walk down there every few weeks with my notepad, and ponder what problems need solving and how.
I've had experience with a similar "committee" (probably same company) and I concluded the safest path is to just not do side projects while employed with BigTech.
That can be difficult when you work for a company that has it's fingers in almost everything.
That's why so many repos say "Not an official Google product." That's the boilerplate of someone's side project that got open sourced, but Google wanted to claim copyright.
I tried to re-license a previously-released project (like from GPL to MIT or similar) and they wouldn't budge. I had written all the code.
In the end, I decided that them suing (or firing) me to assert their ownership of $VALUELESS_PROJECT, so they could then license it back, was ridiculously unlikely, said fuck it, and did it. And I was right.