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Comment by drob518 | Hacker News Reader

Most employment agreements for tech companies have a clause that says that the employer owns everything you do while you’re working for them. And if you’re on salary, as opposed to working by the hour, there really is no “free time.” In practice no company is going to go after you for anything that is non-competitive, and doubly so if it’s also open source work. But yea, if you’re inventing competitive products in your “spare” time, companies could go after you.

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The relevance isn’t wholly work hours but rather “work for hire,” I.e. if it’s in the scope of your paid responsibilities.

A handful of states including California disallow this condition.

Most? No. Many, sure.

> have a clause that says that the employer owns everything you do while you’re working for them

Good companies will have a clause that says the employer owns everything you do in the relevant field of the company while working for them, explicitly naming that field.

If you work for a logistics company, you would be able to write your own video editor without any worry. If you work for a not-shitty company.

I’ve worked at 12 companies in Silicon Valley and they all had variations of such language, whether huge Fortune 50 corporations or 4-person startups with the ink still wet on their incorporation filing. Yes, the better ones have a clause that restricts the claim to competitive work, but not all do. Smaller companies will be more flexible with you, particularly if you’re a key hire. At larger companies, it’s typically take it or leave it. HR has forms that must be signed and they sure aren’t going to involve the legal department for you. And to be clear, nobody is going to come after you for a completely orthogonal work product. There’s no point because they can’t monetize whatever orthogonal thing you created and it would cost them lawyers fees for no return. But I have seen companies try to enforce those contracts before. I have not ever seen one go to court. They typically settle before they get that far, but rumors were that IP was given to the company. The employee left in any case and redid the work outside.

> Yes, the better ones have a clause that restricts the claim to competitive work, but not all do.

Yeah, this is my whole point. The rest of your comment, I agree with. In practice you're unlikely to have an issue for something orthogonal and especially something financially worthless.

But you might. There are a lot of people out there that have predatory attitudes towards IP, especially among C-level or would-be-C-level.

And companies that restrict to competing IP do exist.

It’s certainly shifted toward restricting the scope to competing IP, but that’s only in the last 15 years or so. Prior to that it was definitely more all encompassing. But yea, companies are becoming more enlightened as key employees push back and the companies figure out that they don’t really want your orthogonal ideas anyway. But back in the day, particularly when many employees might only work for a maximum of three to five companies anyway, it was extremely common to have “we own everything you create” clauses.

> HR has forms that must be signed and they sure aren’t going to involve the legal department for you.

Three times in my career I've returned hiring agreements with redlines and never once had them questioned or countered.

Do you have any figures that show it's _most_? I sure hope not, but I wouldn't be surprised either.

Finding one that doesn't would be very hard.

All of my employers have let me specify my personal projects are mine. Maybe I've been lucky but I wouldn't work at a place that doesn't allow me my own life.

I’ve seen this done as a carve-out or exception that has to be explicitly documented. Trouble is that documentation is not presented as simple.

Yes, but you have to declare them to the company and the company must approve them. If they don’t, because it’s competitive, you’re out of luck.

This is also something I try to ask for - generally I get the "that's fine" from the hiring manager and HR, but both times I've then had to push back and get it added to the actual supplied contract. And that was very much not easy.

And even then there's normally a "Sufficiently Different Sector" requirement for those personal projects - which makes sense, but it is inevitably worded vague enough that it would likely require going to court for pretty much any project to show it's not directly related. And that would be near prohibitively expensive for me as an individual if the relationship actually became adversarial.

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