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Comment by ipsum2 | Hacker News Reader

Most big tech companies that I'm familiar with allow you to program on your free time, as long as you give them a heads up and it doesn't conflict with the company's products. E.g. working on a video game or contributing to open source.

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From what I understand from coworkers from Google and other parts of Amazon the process is pretty similar to get approval outside of games.

Why is game development different?

Worked for Amazon. It was a big issue internally, but we never got a good answer to that question.

Please name one, they all have the same non-compete language in their job offers and they are at-will positions. It may be allowed by your manager but company policy isn't such.

Other companies have exemption policies, or mechanisms to get approvals. Amazon does not. Your choices were work privately on your own project or leave (or risk being fired for violating the policy.)

Amazon was more aggressive (in my opinion) and much stricter than any other company I've ever worked at.

Edit: I researched a lot of the other tech companies. Here's Google's documentation, for example, which outlines an exception process: https://opensource.google.com/docs/iarc/

Amazon has an exemption policy.

Not to the game development policies.

Off the top of my head, there's company policies for employees to work on their own projects at Google, Facebook, and Github.

How often are they granted, and under what circumstances?

Hopefully a more recent Googler will answer you. In 2013 they were granted often, so long as they didn't compete with a Google product. I had to close my photo sharing site off to new users when I started at Google.

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