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Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

Most commonly is working a side hustle without ensuring your employer does not have some IP or other contract mechanism to cause problems later.

One suspects that an awful lot of open source contributions are in such grey areas

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Just don't tell them.

I told my employer and all my work colleages I had a really boring hobby, Chemistry (something I am actually interested in)

Then bang on about it every chance you can get. Go into elaborate detail about the most boring parts. After a few weeks people will learn to leave you alone.

Make sure you always have an answer for "what are you doing tonight", "what are you doing this weekend" be super excited about it, but make sure it's really boring.

Then when it's time to leave tell them you're going travelling around Europe and you have no idea what job you will do next.

Launch your product, and never work the 9-5 again (it's a new type of work now)

That's what I did.

I know people are gonna say "Thats risky", "You could get sued" etc etc etc ... but you know what? Life is risky, and if you dont have the guts, my answer to you is that this is the least of your problems running a startup : maybe you should stay in that 9-5

Yep. About 15 years ago I made the mistake of telling a coworker about a side hustle. He ratted me out to a VP. I had an interesting conversation the next week, but at the end of the day, nothing happened.

Just talk to the VP before it becomes anything significant and get clearance. If you want to start something and they say no, then you know in advance and you can decide if you want to leave or not. If you start a serious side business and they find out without you having told them, then it's problematic. You signed a contract when you started.

If you didn't sign anything then you are free to do as you like. But this is probably an unlikely scenario.

Fortunately, that VP (or anyone else) doesn't control what I do in my free time.

sadly that very much depends on the contract you signed

If you don't use company euqipment could you still get into trouble ? Like let's assume I don't even the gitlab/github page of the project. Will that also cause problems ?

Depends on what you've signed, what state/country you're in, and how much the company cares even if it's technically a violation.

Answers to that depend on state employment law -- California has an explicit proviso that employment contracts can't claim certain work the employee did on their own time, with their own stuff. But most states don't, and even California's provision has limits -- IIRC, the project has to be unrelated to the business, and what's unrelated to Google's business these days? Or Amazon's?

I've gotten explicit waivers from my employer for unrelated projects, which hasn't been a problem. But people who just don't tell the boss run the risk of legal action if they find out about it by other means -- so, at the very least, I'd suggest a chat with a lawyer well-versed in your state's employment laws before working on any side project of potential commercial value, with your employment paperwork in hand (especially the Intellectual Property assignment contracts, or their equivalent), so you have some concrete idea what risks you're running.

Is there a tool or something to check this ? Like for example what language to look out for in employment contracts ?

If anything, what you'd be looking for is the _absence_ of language restricting claims to work done using the employer's facilities -- but whatever's there really needs to be read in context of the whole agreement, and the applicable state law. There's no phrase search yet that can substitute for a lawyer with relevant knowledge.

Most of the non-compete agreements I've seen cover side work that uses knowledge specific to your job because they don't want you to create a tailored application that allows you to take their clients.

It's all in your employment contract. Almost certainly there are IP clauses and exclusive work clauses.

First thing - read your current contract (if you are like most people you will need to ask for a copy as you cannot find the original)

it should be fairly clear (even without legal training) what the gist is. It will be one of "we own you and everything you ever think" or "We own your work that we hire you to do"

Trust me it's not about company equipment (but not don't do that!) - it's about the knowledge you gained at work being used for something else.

Don't do this ...

If you build a side project without your employers knowledge, especially if it's in a similar space, and you are successful ... your ex-employer and their investors will make your life very very difficult. In my experience, companies don't care if you're working on a non-competing idea. Just get clearance before hand.

No need to take a risk here.

> I know people are gonna say "Thats risky", "You could get sued" etc etc etc ... but you know what? Life is risky, and if you dont have the guts, my answer to you is that this is the least of your problems running a startup : maybe you should stay in that 9-5

I don't know about you, but when I do things, I do them to succeed, not to demonstrate how much guts I have.

My point is that risk taking is a prerequisite of success

I’m pretty sure most contracts only cover what you have created on company equipment/time. It may not even be enforceable if your company tries to go farther. But it is true that you don’t want to deal with a legal battle against a potentially large and hungry corporation during the early stage of a side gig.

I’ve also heard that if you are employed in a specific sub field such as eg airline booking software, and you start a side gig doing exactly that, your employer has a stronger case that you used trade secrets or whatever to strong arm themselves into ownership. Even if you don’t really use anything proprietary and your employer doesnt truly have any secret sauce

I am a software engineer and I have two monetary side projects, neither of which conflicts with my work and I don’t worry about them. I don’t think my employer wants to own a small food e-commerce business or a mobile game!

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