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Comment by jarjoura | Hacker News Reader

There are hundreds of thousands of software engineers who, given FU amounts of money, would absolutely keep writing software and do it only for the love of it. The companies that hire us usually make us sign promises that we won't work on side projects. Even if there are legal workarounds to that, it's not quite so simple.

Even still, whatever high salaries they do give us just flow right back into the neighborhoods through insane property values and other cost-of-living expenses that negate any gains. So, it’s always just the few of us who can win that lottery and truly break out of the cycle.

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> whatever high salaries they do give us just flow right back into the neighborhoods through insane property values and other cost-of-living expenses that negate any gains. So, it’s always just the few of us who can win that lottery and truly break out of the cycle.

You break out of the cycle by selling your HCOL home and moving to LCOL after a few years. That HCOL home will have appreciated fast enough given the original purchase price that the growth alone would easily pay for a comparable home in a LCOL area. This is the story of my village in Texas, where Cali people have been buying literal mansions after moving out of their shitboxes in LA and the Bay Area.

moonlighting is permitted by law in California (companies legally can't prevent you from doing it, iiuc), as long as there's no conflict of interest with your main job...

As long as you don't use their hardware to do it.

that goes without saying, but it's still not free permission when you use your own stuff.

"no conflict of interest" is basically meaningless if your day job is writing software. These clauses you sign are quite broad in what that scope of conflict could be.

Every company I've worked for has had very explicit rules that say, you must get written permission from someone at some director or VP level sign off on your "side project," open source or not.

You might want to check your company guidelines around this just to make sure you're safe.

Side projects that aren't a conflict of interest when working at Google is rather limiting. Likely less so for small companies.

Not really, in my personal experience and per my friends, most of big companies are pretty lenient about it, except for Apple.

No, they're pretty strict. It just changes what you are allowed to do, with Apple being very restrictive in not letting you do it at all.

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