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Comment by darkwater | Hacker News Reader

And the cherry on the cake: you get paid to work on your engineering project, get traction around it as opensource and if there is enough traction, leave the company and spin-off a new one to sell the same product to other companies!

It's surely a lot of work but you get basically the discovery phase til market fit with your ass covered. Kudos to the engineers that pull that out, I really mean it!

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That’s why nowadays every company will require that they legally own projects you work on during work hours unless explicitly asked. And many ask you to sign non compete clauses so you don’t take all the knowledge you acquired on the job to the competition, including your own projects, through this is quite hard to really enforce.

As long as you convince them to MIT license it doesn't really matter though right?

That seems to be common sense, is it not the default? That should be the norm if it isn't, it's like being a freelancer and being hired and publishing the project in your own name, that's borderline criminal imo.

A lot of companies were founded by one or a group of people leaving a company and opening a competitor with the knowledge they gained while working for them. Anthropic, as I understand it, is an example (from OpenAI). Even the company I work for was founded by people who used to work at the "old" industry giant and today we compete with them directly. This is not criminal unless you signed a contract forbidding doing that, though you may certainly claim it's morally a gray area. But yeah, it's very common. You don't get lots of domain knowledge, which is required to start most kinds of businesses, until you've worked in the area for someone else for a long time.

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