Side Projects: Learning experience vs. Distraction

"unsafe experimentation with new technologies" love this, couldn't agree more with this statement.

It's likely a different way of thinking, possibly an old vs. new. For me, if I work with people that are hacking on cool stuff, publicly, its a great recruiting tool, its reassurance that you've made a great hire, and its confidence that they code going into production is battle tested in more than just localhost.

This is the 500friends model right, lure people in by offering start up money after 2 years, create an environment that people dont want to leave.

Reminds me of that time when my previous company tried to create such a policy ... I even wrote a stack overflow question at that time:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3009885/should-a-company-...

As I wrote at the time, quoting the head of development: "outside work activities create a conflict of interest. [...] [we don't want that] you use your spare time to work on your app, and once it takes off you quit your job".

I remember replying that in that case kickboxing also creates a conflict of interest.

The result: lots of developers started to leave that company.

For many corporations, the legalese related to things you create while under the employ of said corporation is rather extensive. Truth be told, there is a lot of boilerplate in there and most corporations are really only interested in stuff that competes with them, so it's more for defensive purposes than anything else.

That said, the language used is rather deep and entirely one-sided to the benefit of the employer. I would be surprised if any major corporation didn't have a clause of that nature in their standard agreements.

In some countries this is the way the law works

This is very common. I think the key is that most of them wouldn't bother acting on it, UNLESS you were successful and for me, that was the biggest reason I was afraid it -- it scared me to start anything at risk for success.

Of course its a red flag, but when you're coming out of college, being told that jobs are hard to come by, do you really have balls to throw out red flagged opportunities? It's up to us as individuals to know and accept it as a stepping stone rather than a career.

I've only looked at 4 employment contracts for software companies, but all of them included some term claiming ownership of everything the employee creates at any time. In California this is unenforceable in specific circumstances. I also didn't worry about the two companies based in Texas and Massachusetts trying to enforce this, since it seems to be pretty standard.

Pretty common in BigCorp land. The problem is that many of these IP Agreements are very badly worded. The spirit is that you should not take work you do for your employer and turn around and create a product that directly or indirectly competes with them in the same industry.

I'm not sure how enforceable these agreements are. Like anything with our legal system in the US, they're used often to bully people into submission with the threat of legal action, regardless of the company's actual intent. In California, there's a wide range of employee protection laws in place that would make these difficult, if not impossible to enforce. Not sure about elsewhere in the country. (standard IANAL disclaimer applies)

One place I worked at had a pretty boilerplate IP Agreement. I worked with them to change some of the wording so it was less vague. There is often a section on these things where you can provide "prior inventions" that are excluded from the agreement. I took the opportunity to list every idea (as vaguely as possible) I might want to pursue in during the expected course of my employment.

My employer for my current day job (~70k employees) pretty much says this in their 17 page contract. It was a big warning sign for me when considering the offer, but I know that many other major corporations do this.

As a result, I have to take extra care not to "release" anything I create on the side, which is frustrating because I have always enjoyed working on side projects. Realistically though, it's unlikely for the company to claim ownership over any of these petty/small projects; but I'm sure if you released something that gained a lot of traction, especially something that competes with them, they would pounce on it.

Problem is the agreements were discussing typically have a 'non-compete' for a period of time. So you can't create anything that resembles work you were doing at your employer for typically 2 years. For this reason :)

Do you mean the balance of time you spend on the projects ? Or a balance of playing with new-tech versus building something useful ?

Pick what you're good at and focus on it. You can't be good at everything.

I have features I've built, and entire products for that matter, that were nothing more than a Frankenstein of things I've picked out of side projects. Sometimes I learn 2 things completely separate from each other, and then 6 months down the line have a realization that those two things would be amazing together in application.

Product focused or not, there is no reason that you should prevent yourself from learning just because it doesn't have a TLD.