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Comment by flukus | Hacker News Reader

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flukus·

> Think about what kind of open source contributions you could make in this job

Probably nothing important due to copyright issues, company time + company resources means the company owns the work.

I do wonder if this is the origin of a lot of fun projects like "HN command line client" though.

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Not "nothing important", but nothing at all. All my work contracts around here clearly stated that what you write in your worktime is the company's intellectual property.

It doesn't matter that you are not writing a thing.

Ok, but that's a loyal employee's perspective.

If you're doing it on your private machine over which you have full control then how can anyone prove it was done during work hours?

If you are sitting at the office, then you are a company resource, and the code you write must necessarily belong to the company...

You're missing the point. If the rogue employee is already taking advantage, what's to stop them from doing so in a manner that also defrauds the company of any proof of ownership over a pet project?

Yes, that's possible, it still feels bad though (not to mention that most of the time sysadmins can still access my not exactly private machine) - why not work at a company that values me as a resource?

I can sit bored (with a couple of hours worth tracking in the timesheet software) for a month or two, but then I usually start looking for something interesting.

Dude was a manager who reported to nobody. Pretty easy to authorize yourself to release your work.

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