Comment by rdtsc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rdtsc | Hacker News Reader

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> you are prescribed from competing with your employer even on your own time or on your own equipment.

Why isn't the employer prescribed to not compete with the employees' weekend project?

> Recognizing that, we, Google, make it very easy to get permission to open source things, but under Google copyright.

If you get copyright then do you also pay developers overtime for all that work? If you want to own the code you have to pay for it. Or I guess if you are multi-billion dollar corporation with fully staffed legal team, then I guess you can just take the code, yap, make sense ...

> It's easy to get knee-jerk about this and get upset

Sometimes peoples' gut reactions to what is fair kicks in before corporate newspeak does.

> This system works.

Of course it does -- for Google.

> Googlers can work on Google equipment and during their 20% on these kinds of projects.

No problem with that. If it is Google's equipment and Google's time then Google should own the code. But if it is employees' equipment and time then it is stealing.

> That said, we've cleared about 200 (75% of those requested)

And you stole the other 25%.

"Why isn't the employer prescribed to not compete with the employees' weekend project?"

Because the employer is the one giving money to the employee, not the other way around.

"If you get copyright then do you also pay developers overtime for all that work?"

If you're salaried, there is no such thing as overtime. That's what the word "exempt" means on your tax forms. This is also why Google doesn't care when I get in to work at 1 PM, or when I take an hour long lunch break, or when I spend my whole time going to Tech Talks instead of working. As long as I get my work done over the time periods required by the business, it's none of their business how I spend my day.

Employment law recognizes many different categories of employees. If you're a contractor, you're paid for your work - you and the firm agree precisely on the deliverables, they give you a lump sum for the job, and then it's completely up to you how you build those deliverables. If you're hourly (non-exempt), you're paid for your time - you receive a set hourly wage for each hour that you work, and what you do outside of that is your own business. If you're salaried (exempt), you're paid for your ideas - you can manage your time as you please, but anything you think of relating to the company's business belongs to the company.

You should know exactly what you're signing up for when you sign those employment agreements, and pick the form of employment that suits your goals best. But remember that companies adjust the amount of information they share with each class of information accordingly - no contractor is going to know how Google's search infrastructure or ranking algorithm works, but a former employee will.

>If you're salaried (exempt), you're paid for your ideas - you can manage your time as you please, but anything you think of relating to the company's business belongs to the company.

This is not what salary means. As I explained in another post below, salary is not an unlimited purchase of your ideas, imagination, or energy. Salary is a negotiated pay package that represents a fair cut for the employee because the value he provides is not directly correlated with the hours that he works.

That's why it doesn't matter how you spend your day when you're salaried -- because you and your employer have made an agreement that the amount of time you spend on something is not relevant as long as you're accomplishing the tasks that you're assigned within the terms of the assignment. It's not because Google owns all your software-related ideas over the course of your employment. A company cannot own your thoughts.

> no contractor is going to know how Google's search infrastructure or ranking algorithm works, but a former employee will.

Ironically, the moment said employee becomes former, Google no longer has claim to any work they do. What's at issue here is the extent of their claims on /current/ employees.

> but anything you think of relating to the company's business belongs to the company.

A company can own /ideas/? Copyrights, yes. Patents, yes. But ideas? Not so much.

Even the idea that the company has a blanket claim to anything you set to keyboard or paper outside of the office seems ludicrous and unenforceable. Write a song? Google owns it. Write a poem? Google's. So why would they essentially get a blanket claim to any program you write?

edit: What's protecting Google's secret ranking algorithms is confidentiality, not copyright.

Along the lines of the company's business. Google is a software company in many markets. They can make a reasonable case that any software is along the lines of the company's business. They probably wouldn't win all of them, but it's sufficiently gray that the courts would have to get involved to figure out precisely where the line is, and no employee (or employer, for that matter) wants a lawsuit.

I have friends that work in publishing and journalism, and they have similar problems with their blogs. Their employers don't own any software that they write on their free time, but personal blogs are a gray-enough area that most stick to writing on their employers' official blogs.

Same reason that the DragonLance series is Copyright TSR. Tracy and Laura Hickman dreamed it up on the way to a job interview there, and then the plot and characters were developed while they were employed by the company.

As far as owning ideas - technically, yes, to the extent that those ideas are "reduced to practice". A company can't own what's in your head. But if you write it down, it's technically Copyright (c) 2010, Your Employer.

What if you write a song about Google's business? If an employee of Google writes a song about working on a search engine, does Google own that?

I think that it's silly to presume that a company should own something just because it's the same class of work. Does a newspaper own the diaries or private correspondence of its writers? Why should it own the personal blog? If the work is produced without compensation from the company and without using any company tools or resources, how can anyone make an argument that the company "owns" it just because the originator is employed there?

I can see how non-competes might be enforced to upbraid the release or participation of employees or ex-employees in businesses thought damaging to the employer. But that just gives the employer respite until the term of your non-compete agreement runs out; thereafter, all works should still be owned by their original author, and he is free to do as he pleases. You shouldn't be able just to steal that work without regard to the employee.

> If you're salaried, there is no such thing as overtime.

That makes sense. I am salaried too, but I also have hourly limits. There is a prescription in my employment contract that says I should work at least 8 hours / day. In other words, it is more rigid. I do not have the freedom to finish a project at night, and not show up next day. However there is no restriction on ownership over my own OSS projects.

> you can manage your time as you please, but anything you think of relating to the company's business belongs to the company.

I see. My "unfairness" alarm still goes off a little when companies claim ownership of their workers' weekend intellectual creations, but, of course, in the end it is a voluntary employment and a voluntary contract.

> You should know exactly what you're signing up for when you sign those employment agreements, and pick the form of employment that suits your goals best.

Definitely. It looks like many are advocating negotiating and tweaking the contract. I am from a different country and was a bit naive when I came here and didn't know I could even do that. I'll have to keep that in mind if I switch jobs.

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