Personal projects while being full-time
I heard that certain companies have written in the contract that they can claim ownership and sue you on any projects that you work outside of work hours or not. They also mention that you can’t work on open source neither. Is it true? If yes, which company? I heard Apple and Google do that. Anyone can confirm?
Afaik, moonlighting is protected by California Labor code.
If you use company equipment or company trade secrets not even CA labor code can protect you. If you want to work on a project in your spare time and you’re at a big org (FAANG/etc) there’s usually an approval process on an internal wiki that basically lets a legal team evaluate your proposal to make sure there are no conflicts of interest that could open you or the company to liability. It’s not that all your IP belongs to them so much as they want to make sure you’re not sharing company IP unintentionally.
Can confirm
So like working for amazon as an engineer and selling on amazon as a merchant?
I thought this was only if you are using company’s assets for personal projects
nope some companies contracts say anything you do while you’re employed by them.
Moonlighting law doesn’t protect when you say “hey I built this awesome <IP> that just happens to be a direct competitor for the company I work with” even if you did it on your own time with your own equipment. It gets even more tricky though when you say work at google search engine. But in your own time you built a phone app that’s a basis for some autonomous self driving vehicle tech. It’s not a direct competitor except... it is because Google is developing self driving tech too. Point is, it gets super gray area and it’s best to maybe discuss with your employer beforehand and know (while rare) you may have a fight on your hands
What it one have solid proof that they have been doing it before joining the company , and the idea is similar to the company. For example of a person working at FB came up with quora, but he had started quora even before joining fb.
If ideas are Soo cheap then why FAANG and companies fear execution. Because still 9/10 startups fail.
Confirmed, more and more companies are doing it. I got an offer from WeWork and it had this stipulation in it