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Comment by ig1 | Hacker News Reader

It would also breach the work contract of many developers. Most work contracts tend to (1) prohibit you from taking on other paid work (2) claim copyright of the work you do while under employment (which is why the FSF & Apache foundation require employer waivers from contributors).

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Do you have a source for this claim? None of my contracts in the US have ever had something like this. It's in fact illegal in most jurisdictions, including California.

>It's in fact illegal in most jurisdictions, including California.

IANAL, but AFAIK it's absolutely not illegal in California; what's illegal is preventing you from working for a competitor AFTER you quit.

I've never had a salary employment contract in California that DIDN'T say they owned everything I did in my off time, at least if I was working on something in a similar domain. The best contracts explicitly state that I can get an exemption, or that I can work on unrelated projects, but all have the clause.

If it's illegal, a lot of companies are breaking the law.

The interpretation is complicated, but its neither black or white. Also, its standard in asymmetric contracts (EULAs, employment, rentals) for the drafting side to completely overreach.

RTFM here:

http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=lab&gr...

>.... except for those inventions that ... [r]elate 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

Seems pretty clear on the "similar business" front. IIRC that's been the wording in many if not most of the contracts I signed while I was still working as an employee in CA.

I've mostly worked in games, too, and so that pretty much meant "no game dev in my free time," period. A strong motivator to go indie/consulting.

That document actually says that YOU own everything you do outside of work, so long as it doesn't use company resources or is directly related to your work at company.

The document most certainly said that my employer owned everything that I did that was related to my employer's business. The thing about working on salary is that there's no punching in and out; just because I'm working at home doesn't mean I'm necessarily "outside of work" -- I worked at home doing paid work for over three years, in fact, seeing the inside of their office only 2-3 days a month.

I work in games. If I do something in my free time that's game-related, it's arguably related to the work my company does.

So I quit and started contracting. Now I own what I work on when I'm on my own time.

You want to check the small print of your contract but it depends on how related to you day job it is - the real point is could you afford to fight your employer.

And if you get caught using any of employers code like Sergey Aleynikov you are SOL

You're a fool if you'd sign away copyrights to all work you do outside of your place of employment. Actually, that shouldn't even be legal.

You could make it a short take-home assignment where the code doesn't get used by the interviewing company and the assignment is short enough that the interviewee doesn't feel like they need to get paid for it. It would basically be the same as doing it in-person but removes the added stress of the over-the-shoulder scrutiny, leading to a more realistic scenario where a developer has resources such as Google and Stack Overflow at their disposal.

In my engineering days, a company I interviewed for had me prototype some stuff in SolidWorks but gave me the courtesy of working alone. I just had to tell them when I was done. Even this was much more preferable to an in-person on-the-spot tech interview. I got an offer for that job, but if I had to perform the same task with someone watching, I don't think it would have gone as well.

How would this be enforced?

I suppose it could end up being more of a problem for the hiring company after this practice became more widely known.

This is the root of the problem with contract-as-interview, as far as I can tell. It wouldn't be completely unreasonable for someone to take a few days off from their job to interview (although I wouldn't do it). But both of the points you mention are standard for creatives, at least in the US, so I don't know how many people you'd legally be able to interview.

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