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Comment by werid | Hacker News Reader

The company is AppendTo.

"In appendTo, we’ve constructed our business model to encourage our staff to keep an effective and balanced schedule. The definition of work-life balance is unique for each person, but we’ve built our organization with the features and tools that empowers our employees to customize their interaction with appendTo to their needs. This manifests itself many ways, from flex time to giving our engineers time to work on personal growth or open source projects."

-- http://appendto.com/company/values/

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Shame on them. They used to be a front runner in web development tutorials and it seems they have built a company out of that.

A quick pro-tip for appendTo: if your company's business model is in building things for developers, don't do scummy things to your developer employees.

Shame on them for not wanting an employee to take what they've learned at work (on a monetised product) and release it open source? The tech stack is largely irrelevant, the products are in the exact same domain.

I think any company would be rightly pissed off if their employees did that. Can you imagine github, for example, being happy for one of their employees to be working on a complete web front-end / issues tracking system for git, in their spare time and releasing it open source, provided it was written in Java? Or Atlassian being happy for one of their employees writing a complete ticketing system in their spare time, and releasing it open source provided it was written in javascript?

Really?

That is completely within the employee's rights. Unless it's covered by a trade secret, patent or copyright, what you know (even if you learned it on the job) is yours to use.

How would the employee know what is a trade secret though? When something is first discovered it is not known yet that the employer would want it kept secret until someone in a position to make that decision does so.

Are their laws around this? Or is it set mostly through case law? Anyone have additional information?

IANAL, but the important pieces (in most states) come from the Uniform Trade Secrets Act[0], which defines a Trade Secret. I'm pretty sure that most software ideas developed at software companies can be considered trade secrets, unless they're commonly known, but once again IANAL and don't have a solid handle on that.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Trade_Secrets_Act

There's hundreds of continuous integration systems out there, enough to learn from and build your own. Even if you have a product that is truly a snowflake, there's a lot of other ways to go about handling this. Maybe they tried to go about this a different way, for some reason I doubt it. Here's a few other ways this could have been handled:

- Talk to the employee about their open source implementation. Maybe there are some things you can bring back to your product from their open source implementation and pay the developer to work on doing it.

- Realize that the employee seems to have passion about this product and figure out how to elevate them into a more important role.

- Talk to the developer about how we can make open source a big part of our business model (I notice appendTo has some open source projects already) and offer to put them in a role getting paid to work on their project so long as the repo goes under the appendTo organization on GitHub, or the developer gives a shoutout to appendTo on the project, blog posts, conferences, etc.

>we’ve built our organization with the features and tools that empowers our employees to customize their interaction with appendTo to their needs

Welcome to Zombo.com. You can do anything at Zombo.com.

today's winner in BS bingo.

Basically, manager can push you in any way and you'd not have any structure to hold for.

They do have a section for Open Source on their web site. This is their github repository https://github.com/a2labs

They have a Visual Design Engineer position? That's unique.

Management team is here

http://appendto.com/team/

I guess go ahead and find where one of them contributed to prop 8 or something.

According to the readme, the guy only worked on the repo for a week while he worked there. Shouldn't be too hard to redo a week's worth of work. Maybe easier than undoing the damage being done to appendto's reputation by their scumbag policies.

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