The Amazon 'Personal Games' Policy | Hacker News Reader

The Amazon 'Personal Games' Policy

techraptor.net

255 pointswyldfire174 comments

If I have to work in some other field to be allowed to retain rights to the work I do outside of work, that's going to be their loss. I couldn't get anything more than extremely vague assurances that my unrelated side work "shouldn't be a problem" from my former employer, while there were IP assignment clauses in the contract. They weren't willing to put anything in writing to exempt it, so development stayed on pause while I worked for them, I resented them for it, and eventually I had to leave because my motivation was sapped. (For that and other reasons, but largely that.)

Salaries should buy a job well done and come with some boundaries to protect the company and any IP it has a right to. Salaries shouldn't buy the rights to my first born child nor the thoughts I have in the (24 * 7) - ~40 hours that I'm not working for them every week. I applaud Mr. Liu for walking away, and while I've always ignored the AWS recruiters, this policy ensures I'll never consider them.

It's like saying to employees: we'd rather you don't have any external motivators for caring about software development as a topic.

Yeah IP assignment and invention are pretty wild clauses. They're designed at the behest of investors; so your "brilliant" SWEs can't come up with a great idea, leave your company, and get rich on their own.

Some jobs are like that, like maybe ML or AR or something--cutting edge tech kind of work. But like, if you're a mobile app dev building a feature, what are you inventing?

And if you do invent something (not impossible; game devs invented all kinds of cool stuff for example), there's not a lot to stop you from quitting, "waiting" a month or two (setting up a company quietly), and marketing/building your product.

That said, I know people who've had their side projects picked up by their employers under these kinds of clauses. They're serious, and many companies are serious about enforcing them. Don't just wave them off.

Those clauses are just designed to be as broad and all encompassing as possible. Why? Because then there will never been an contention who owns IP. No trial, no arbitrage.

> 2. I will not use or incorporate Amazon resources or information in the development, release, or marketing of my Personal Game...

> 6. To help Amazon improve its products and services, I will use Amazon's publicly available products and services in the development and release of my Personal Game wherever possible...

Amazon must have had entirely separate teams write these reps.

euh no they don't contradict each other ... resources are not products so meaning in 2. you can't reference some Amazon doc in your stuff but in 6. you gonna need to use AWS for example. at least that's my understanding.

The former is referring to using company time and resources only available to employees, the latter to Amazon's consumer-facing products and services.

IANAL, but I think point 2 is talking about private stuff that is only available to internal people, while point 6 is talking about public stuff that is available to anyone (like AWS).

I think most of it is uncomfortable but reasonable until point 8, at which point I tell them "thanks but no thanks" for the job.

2 is for resources available to you as an employee to do your day to day work – laptop, office, internet connection, internal software.

6 is for publicly available services – mainly AWS.

While it can be inferred, that is most certainly not clear, and any lawyer worth their salt would tear these two conflicting clauses to pieces.

I have no background in law and this difference was immediately clear to me. The text itself mentions examples that make all of this pretty explicit. I can also assure you that Amazon's lawyers who wrote this agreement are most certainly "worth their salt".

Including the misspelling in clause 5? "I will submit it for sate [sic] on the Amazon platform"

You are reading the version reprinted on someone's blog, not the original text.

I don't think they're contradictions, especially if "resources and information" is defined elsewhere, but if we're assuming it's vague or contradicting then:

If it's in Amazon's interest to be misleading or ambiguous, then the lawyers are doing their job. Make the text seem to imply one thing (to get employees to sign it), while text in another part of the contract is explicit in contradicting it.

Even good lawyers make mistakes and draft vague clauses all the time. That's why there are lawsuits. Rule of thumb is that if a person can make a plausible argument for a particular interpretation you can bet it's going to be made in litigation.

As others have said they are referring to different things, but what really rubs me the wrong way is the sense of Amazon wanting to have its cake and eat it too.

They want to keep their distance (do it on your own time with your own resources) and still demand editorial control (but use these services and distribute in our app store)

"If I work on machine learning at my day job, it should be fine to ask for patent rights on any ML related work I do outside of it, but asking for copyright ownership of a video game I make on the side is absurd." – James Liu

I don't understand the reasoning, why is it OK to hand over patent rights for work done outside of contractually defined hours simply if it's the same discipline? Hard to reconcile.

If you're there to develop novel machine learning tools, and you sit there thinking about machine learning tools all day, then go home, publish it, and take the patent for yourself, that's a bit much.

Well they provided the environment for you to think, but that gives them the right to own your thoughts? It's possible, and even common in universities for the organization to have the right to use but not own your discoveries. If that makes a business non-viable, it's really not our problem.

If I pay you to invent something, and you invent it, I expect to get it. I'm not paying you for the privilege of inviting you to my office. I'm paying you for the output of specific thoughts you have.

It's cool I get to repost this twice in a row:

"Very cool and healthy that people on this website instinctively imagine themselves as the boss of random commenters on a website."

Cute, but just a weak sort of ad hom deflection. But while you're down there go clean the toilets.

Where do you draw the line, is the context as generic as "AI" or "ML", implying that anything AI related, even if not directly comparable to your employers product is owned by the employer?

I mean I would personally say it's anything directly in the employer's lines of business with a fairly limited scope. But as personal advice I wouldn't recommend others to do anything with AI on the side, with the intention to own it, if they work in AI as a career.

I find your last sentence troubling, all the cost is on the individual.

I agree with the sentiment of the first sentence, if we simply say the blast radius is the the product(s) level you're working on.

It is. Employer reach is too far. And yet, having some reach is still very reasonable.

> all the cost is on the individual

And all the salary too. I really don't see the issue.

This is incorrect both de facto and de jure. Anything you invent while employed at a university or a company like IBM or Microsoft will belong to them forever, without exception.

The cardinal rule is that, if you do not want your invention to belong to your employer, don't work for them.

All of the sour grapes about these arrangements are indictments of working for someone else, and I wholeheartedly agree! If you have the least bit of cojones, make something people want and sell it yourself. But, if you prefer the golden yoke, the owner of the farm gets all the fruits.

That can be the case, but depends on circumstances. The point I was making is likely to hold up in court even without a specific contract clause in place to address it.

> why is it OK to hand over patent rights for work done outside of contractually defined hours simply if it's the same discipline?

This is always naturally in contention because if you don't also constrain scope of work an employee can work in competition with their day job "on their own time" based on information they wouldn't have if they weren't employed by the company.

So this isn't supposed to cover random side projects, but should cover you creating a competitor, or related patents, etc. "off hours". Some companies legal departments just try and claim everything because it's easier.

The way I've seen this done well is some sort of internal review and/or disclosure mechanism.

On the other hand, if employees are so uninterested in their collective success at the company they are employed at, hasn't the employer already failed?

I've had two really good employers in my life, and I would never even have had the idea of competing with that company because working there was great so why would I try to make it worse by competing? It was/is in my own interest to not compete.

If an employer feels the need to have that clause, they should fix the problem at the source: become a better employer so that the employees have no reason to compete.

Eh. The principal-agent problem can't be disposed of so easily as that.

There's no amount of compensation and excellent work environment which can provide enough upside to make founding a whole company pointless. Better expected value because of lower risk? Absolutely. But not total potential upside.

I say that as someone working his dream job, who can't imagine trading out for mere money. But I can imagine leaving to found something, though I have no intention to do so.

And the converse: if someone has that a strong desire to found something that happens to be similar to what they're currently working on, do you really want them to stick around only for a contract clause, when their heart's no longer in that work?

Wouldn't it be far superior to be able to have an open conversation with them about it?

(I also object to the premise: a desire to found something doesn't show up in a vacuum. There's something else that founding something brings (independence, permission to try ideas, small chance at wild stacks of money, whatever) and many of these should be negotiable also at your current employer.

Any good long-term organisation has a few crazy projects that just might turn out to be the next best thing. Let this person "found" one of those, in house and with freedom but full support of the rest of the organisation?)

I feel the same way as you, but contracts don't exist for the "happy path". I'm sure many people are invested in the success of their employer, but not all are.

Internal reviews / disclosure mechanisms sound a bit dark to me, the power balance is unhinged. Imagine having a novel idea outside of work, putting some effort in at the weekends, only for your employer to absorb the idea because you naively disclosed it. I can't see any benefit to this system at all for the employee.

In my experience these reviews are not technically detailed, so much as about scope. The closer what you want to do is to what your company does, the more detailed the discussion is likely to be.

> I can't see any benefit to this system at all for the employee.

The real benefit to an employee is to have on paper agreement that they can proceed with a project without fear that the company will claim it later.

I suppose it could be done terribly, but my limited personal experience (on both sides) it's been fine.

Because otherwise someone will say that they invented a new algorithm for ML based on their ML effort at work but it was really solved at home on their personal computer. What happens if you come up with an idea while walking back from the bathroom to your home office related to your day job during business hours? Is that during work or outside of work?

I think it is ridiculous to claim things unrelated to your active job assignments. Making a board game as a hobby is unrelated and non-competing to deriving a new ML solver.

Many employment agreements don’t really define hours. If the boundaries are fuzzy that makes it difficult to determine what happened as part of the employment and what did not.

So deciding that work within a specific discipline should be considered part of the employment unless explicitly exempted can be a practical way to avoid 9-5.

Let's say you get this offer with a yearly salary of $104,350. With 2087 hours as the full-time expectation that would be $50 an hour.

However since they want to own all of your creations that might happen while not at work I wonder if they would accept a counter offer. Would you accept this counter offer?

At $50 an hour, 8760 hours in the year, my expected full-time salary would be $438,000. Before you suggest I cut out sleep time what if the idea or solution comes to me in a dream?

I think that is a good compromise. I have the expectation of being "in office" 2087 hours out of the year while also collecting on all of the chance ideas that happen the rest of the time.

Edit: I like this idea. A clause. I collect $104,350 a year. But if Amazon claims ownership over a personal project I create then the rest of the hours uncollected over my employment are owed retroactively. So I work there for 5 years before I have a successful personal project that Amazon wants. They then owe me $1,668,250. Pennies to them but a good chunk of change to me.

Are you writing fan fiction? Not sure I follow.

More of a thought experiment. What would satisfy me to accept an agreement where every thought I have while employed is owned by my employer.

Trying to come up with some compromise that would justify them giving a yearly full-time salary (2087 hours) while at the same time they expect to cash in on all of my non-work hours.

Good luck with your negotiations.

Yes it quite the fantasy but also feels reasonable to me. I don't think an employer would feel the same way.

This is part of why engineers should so much now. We realize that 40 hrs a week is a joke, plus we'll be on call, and there will be maybe 21 days in a year where one can truly be fully off (and those 21 days will make the prior and subsequent week or two more intense anyways)...

So that's why engineers should demand $100 an hour times 3000 hours. Cause that's the actual math, not the lie of WLB that never happens.

Basically no place in the US is going to let you rewrite terms of their employment contract.

I saw this on Twitter yesterday. As a datapoint, Google's policies on this stuff are quite enlightened by comparison. There are two paths people can take. One is to create an open source project. I started a game (then got distracted by other things), and A/B Street[1] also took that path.

The other major route is the IARC program[2], in which the game author owns the copyright. A friend of mine did The Shepherds Rock under that policy.

All this is to say that the policies around these things vary widely even within FAANG.

[1]: https://github.com/a-b-street/abstreet

[2]: https://opensource.google/docs/iarc/

Does Google even make games? This policy only applies to developers under the games division. Non-games developers have significantly more freedom.

Jumping T Rex can answer this. Also, probably one of the most popular titles in existence.

They used to (for Stadia), but recently laid off their entire game development studio before they could release a single game.

Yes; Google's IARC Official Policy has a section on guidance for gaming personal projects, which boils down to "don't spam us about low-tech games, but high-tech stuff is very much on the plate". According to rumors, historically it was also used to curb on googlers working on private android games when android was young.

Nianticlabs.com used to be part of Google. And stadia is still a thing, even if the games studio isn't.

"As part of your employment agreement, Google most likely owns intellectual property (IP) you create while at the company. Because Google’s business interests are so wide and varied, this likely applies to any personal project you have. That includes new development on personal projects you created prior to employment at Google."

So, a "we actually own all your stuff but we might be nice enough to agree to let you keep it" policy?

"The IARC process is only open to full time employees in good standing. The IARC only assigns the copyright in your project upon approval—it does not assign any patent rights or other IP rights Google may own. ... IARC review is a voluntary service Google provides to employees and it is not required either by the employment agreement or local labor laws."

"Enlightened."

This is my interpretation, yes. The language you are quoting is largely legal boilerplate. In practice, how it works out is that (a) if you want to do a game, there's a very good chance (though not a guarantee) the answer is simply "yes", and (b) the questions of who owns what IP are all very clear, and often in favor of the individual. For example, if you go the Apache 2 license, that actually comes with a patent grant as well.

In any case, the specific claim I made is that it's more enlightened than the Amazon policy, and I don't think that can really be questioned. Just the fact that large parts of the policy is public is itself relevant here - other discussion threads are arguing whether the posted text is authentic.

Google IARC is _not_ enlightened. The only way in which Google is enlightened is they have perfected the art of PR and selling employees that pro-employer policies are really pro-employee policies.

If you are in California, which is where the majority of Google employees live and where Google has their HQ, if you work on something outside of work hours and without work equipment or resources, then you own it, full stop. That's California law.

Google lawyercats will show up and say "well unless it's related to what Google does, and Google does everything', which is an incredibly flimsy argument with zero legal precedent that only a lawyer on Google payroll would accept. A company can't in good faith say "we work on literally everything therefore the law doesn't apply to us."

IARC is a trap. If you just didn't say a word to Google and worked on something off hours, you own it. With IARC, now you've created a paper trail and a chance for Google to say we discussed it and we clearly said the employee could not work on this, so now if it does go to court you've just massively complicated your life, all to accomplish something that the state law guaranteed you in the first place! There's literally zero upside to IARC.

I've unfortunately witnessed the head of OSS approvals at Google, mislead people on this issue and go as far as to vaguely threaten that employees who continue to debate the topic on internal company mailing lists will be terminated.

Google IARC is a scam and it should not be held up as a gold standard. CA Labor Code Section 2780 is the gold standard.

CA Labor Code Section 2780 includes a fairly broad exception: "except for the inventions which: Relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer's business, or actual or anticipated research or development of the employer"

For a company like Google or Amazon, I'm not sure that there's very much that falls within 2780.

>> I will own my Personal Game. However, Amazon will not be constrained in its development of games or incur any liabilities by allowing me to develop and release Personal Games. Accordingly, I hereby grant the following license to Amazon to ensure that Amazon wilt never be liable to me for any Amazon work on games: I grant to Amazon a royalty free, worldwide, fully paid-up, perpetual, transferrable license to any and all of my intellectual property rights associated with the Personal Game and my Personal Game development.

WTF? No.

"Amazon wilt [sic]..." this typo in the putative official contract quoted here and in the OP actually makes me suspicious that this is a true cut and paste of an official contract. Lawyers are many things but typo-prone is not generally one of them.

I also noticed the numerous typos in the contract; a couple within a single clause here:

> if its (sic) a PC game made available for sale, I will submit it for sate (sic) on the Amazon platform

I don't know if that's really evidence it's not a genuine Amazon contract, though. It could be that this was typed up based on a hard copy or something like that.

It was originally shared on Twitter as an image[1], and that version doesn't appear to include any typos I can spot (the "wilt", "its", and "sate" typos are certainly missing). I'm assuming TechRaptor OCRed the image, and that introduced the errors.

OCRing it via https://www.onlineocr.net/ produces some similar typos ("if its a PC game made available for sate, I will submit it for sate on the Amazon platform"; "Amazon wilt not [...] Amazon wilt never be liable"), so I'm guessing this or a similar tool was used and not fully cleaned up.

[1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E5pZWdNUcAAEc96?format=jpg

Edit: combined duplicate comment and added onlineocr.net

Ahh - that makes a lot of sense. Thank you. Can you link the image?

The link to the Twitter image is in the article near the top of the page.

https://twitter.com/james7132/status/1412540904225738753

'Wilt' is an archaic version of the word 'will', frequently used in legal documents. "singular form of the present tense (indicative mood) of will"

Considering there are a number of other typos and `will' is used consistently everywhere else in the document, I think `wilt' is an error. Personally, I don't think I've ever seen the word used in that way in a legal document (in America--no idea if it's more common in the UK or elsewhere).

I totally agree that the credibility of the text is questionable. I just wanted to point out the use of 'wilt' is acceptable (in the UK).

disagree. have read many things handed to me by a lawyer, and typos and inconsistencies are something I have found regularly.

In the future, all code will be written in the cloud for servers we never own or touch. Code will be generated by Copilot-like systems in browsers, turning us into Mechanical Turks. Because of this our salaries will drop below six figures.

We'll be tracked, and any work we do outside of our jobs to liberate ourselves will be copyrighted and carted off, never having contractually been ours to begin with.

Our sessions and employments can be killed at any time. Once you reach a certain age or have children, and your healthcare costs become a burden, you'll be terminated.

We own nothing. We rent everything. Our cars, our homes, our music, our movies are all on subscription.

We're becoming serfs.

The only way out is to build, but it's nigh impossible to compete with the Giants. Facebook will clone years of your work in a month with a team of twenty engineers.

The gravity well of modern computing.

On an intellectual level I know how often trends suddenly shift and how unpredictable the future is, and yet... this seems like such a plausible future path that it's pretty unsettling.

It's not really a WTF. In any disagreement about intellectual property, where some part of Amazon is working on a game and it happens to conflict with some other employee's personal project, Amazon wants all the leverage. It makes sense to have something that says "in a pinch, we're going to use what we use, even if you say it's yours".

If an employee expects to do something interesting or profitable with a personal project, then it's a "no", but it's not a WTF.

EDITED TO ADD: This is why we need laws that protect personal projects and make it impossible for companies to demand this. But in the absence of such restrictions on companies, they're going to set themselves up to win in any kind of dispute. It is not a WTF.

Ironically, this is actually the improved policy. It actually used to be even more locked down and pretty much disallowed you from doing any game development at all.

Source: I previously worked at Amazon for many years.

From the article:

> I grant to Amazon a royalty free, worldwide, fully paid-up, perpetual, transferrable license to any and all of my intellectual property rights associated with the Personal Game and my Personal Game development.

So their personal games policy is Amazon owns it? That's a very poorly named policy.

Owning the rights and licensing the rights are different things. This policy is horribly restrictive, but if you grant Amazon a perpetual license as described, they can do what they want, even after you quit. But you can do what you want also.

If they demanded ownership, you still couldn't do what you wanted after you quit.

I figure that if Amazon thought the game could be profitable enough, they could just take everything in it, including the source code (which they have a license to and conveniently access since you were required to use their repository services), change the name (to avoid trademark concerns), deny you access to publish it anywhere (which they can do because you're contractually obligated to use their services and their services alone), and publish it themselves.

Sure, they don't own it. But it comes damn close.

This ignores the post employment situation. You don’t have those obligations after you leave the company.

I suppose it doesn't say that the obligations survive termination of employment. But the perpetual license certainly does, and if you have a family etc., you're not likely to quit your main source of income to go all in on your personal game.

>All work on my Personal Game will be performed outside of my regular working hours.

What? Why exactly is Amazon involved at all then?

Do many aws/amazon engineers even have regular working hours? I'd imagine there is no 9-12,1-6 at Amazon.

Perhaps this is what Bezos meant when he said that rather than talking about work-life balance, he’d rather think of things as a circle.

Bezos is quoted frequently using the term "Work Life harmony"[1].

Having previously worked at Amazon, I learned that "harmony" meant, if I'm not working, I should be preparing my mind and body to work better the next day.

Bezos also believes that workers are inherently lazy[2].

[1]https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/09/what-jeff-bezos-does-instead...

[2]https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-polices-based-jeff-be...

A lucky few do have regular hours, but that could change anytime with a change in manager, skip-level, or even few senior engineers.

I do. I'm a 2-year-in-a-row top tier rated senior SDE. I work 8:30 to 5:30 every day. If I work later it's because I'm working on something interesting to me personally and it's my choice.

I'll admit I have good management. That makes a huge difference. I also give reasonable estimates for project timelines up front.

do you choose that time by choice? or if you didn't have a meeting at 8:30 or until 5:30 would you have to really work that hour? That's more what I mean. Not that the hours can't be reasonable. On my team sometimes I work till 4, others I work till 5 kind of thing.

Tell that to the non-senior SDEs whom either (1) don't have the clout with management yet, (2) don't know any better, or (3) have drunk the the lines of "work hard, have fun, make history" a little too deeply.

Enjoy your seniority; you're harder to replace. But don't apply that experience liberally to the rest of Amazon SDEs.

I interviewed with Twitch back in the day (right after Amazon acquisition) and asked my normal question to them which has never been a problem anywhere else I've work: "Can I contribute to open source projects?". The answer was that all of my contributions had to make it through an Amazon review first to ensure it was a "quality contribution". Granted this was not a contribution to an Amazon-owned piece of software. I decided not to continue interviewing with them...

IANAL…I always wondered about how small businesses play into this.

By that I mean, if I have an LLC and I assign intellectual property rights of my side project to it and claim that my LLC was the author, can’t that get around restrictions like this?

Amazon is employing me as a person, but my LLC wrote the side project software, in the same way that any software I write for my employer is copyrighted by my employer and not me personally.

I am pretty sure this is NOT how it works legally but it would be nice if it was.

Another idea that might be workable would be to make the source intellectual property worthless to someone without an unwritten secret. Perhaps encryption or obfuscation could be employed. Here you go, here’s your unlimited and perpetual license to my unreadable blob.

(Or just don’t work for Amazon)

The funny part about this is that it's an "improvement" over the old policy from ~pre-2017 (IIRC):

- No working on personal games whatsoever. Full Stop.

There's been plenty of complaining about the policy internally. The timing of this is interesting though, it always seemed like the big issue was that Bezos had a personal stick in his ass about this stuff. People are wondering if Jassy will change things up.

My last job just claimed to own all copyright I produced period while I held that job. If I wrote a short story or a secret note to my family, they would own it. I left the company largely because it made me so uncomfortable

Well you should have atleast written some really nice wattapad fanfiction.

The best part is, this applies to not only the corporate people, but also the people working at the warehouses.

Meanwhile, Apple employees have been barred from developing personal apps for years.

Wow man yeah, that's pretty ridiculous. Fairly certain the ridiculous parts wouldn't stand up to legal scrutiny, but still, this isn't really that far off of reifying the old joke about signing over your first-born.

Welp, glad I saw this. I have an application in with Amazon and a code assessment they sent me I was planning to complete in the next few days. But I also make little video games in my spare time. Time to retract my application.

Go through the whole process, and then when they give you the contract, ask for an exception, then if they don’t grant it, withdraw. The interview process for you will be good experience, and they’ll learn that they’re losing lots of good candidates with the stupid rule.

This is the advice of "Never say no, say yes with conditions."

Of course if the whole thing gives you a bad taste in your mouth and you basically never want to work for Amazon, I'm going to echo LadyCailin's advice. It does send a message, but it also allows you get in some more interviewing experience. Something that will hopefully make your next interview go even smoother.

Also, if you really want to send a message as well as get in some practice asking for absurd things ...

Say yes, but ask for the exception AND ask for indemnity from any legal action that Amazon (or anyone else) takes against you with respect to any software you develop on your own time AND ask that $50,000 be put in escrow that you're allowed to use in the event that Amazon gets cold feet in paying for your legal defense.

I can't really imagine that anyone would ever say yes to that, but it means that the next time you ask something that's a bit of a reach for an employer that you actually might want to work for, then you'll have had some experience asking for things that feel like a lot.

I'm not really that desperate for more interview experience. I'm already juggling interviews with 7 other companies right now, two of them already at the final stage and another one close, and I'm expecting to get 2-3 offers within a couple of weeks.

It's taken up most of my free time just keeping up with all of the assessments and interviews and correspondence as it is, I don't feel the need to spend another 2.5-10+ hours on Amazon (the assessment alone is 2.5 hours) just to give them a data point for why I withdrew that will likely be ignored anyway.

Welp this isn't going to help their problem of burning through workers faster than they're being born[0]. Granted that was more about warehouse employees but I imagine they're going to run into some limits finding enough software devs willing to jump in the meat grinder one of these days.

[0]https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-warehouse-turnover-wo...

Am employee is not a slave. You owe your employer the work for which they have hired you, and no more. These kinds of employee agreements should be illegal; what I do with my own time and resources is none of my employer's business.

Edit: Removed

I couldn't agree more.

Unless it impacts your performance during working hours

I'd say you have to be more specific on that.

I broke my leg once playing paintball, my personal time hobbies impacted my performance during work hours for a couple months due to mobility issues + appointment followups. Is it in my employer's purview to tell me I can't play sports?

Sometimes. A previous employer of mine fired a colleague for breaking his leg in a football game. Well, actually, they fired him for calling in sick with a supposed fever and going off to play football. The broken leg was just a smoking gun.

Under some circumstances, yes, under most, no.

Actors will sometimes have clauses which prevent them from doing dangerous stuff they like to do (skiing, race car driving) while they're shooting a film. An actor becoming unavailable is very expensive.

For any given worker, losing their contribution costs more than just their share. There's always a certain amount of working around the gap in the roster. But that's priced-in, if you will: people go on vacation, take sick leave, parental leave, and they quit outright.

So I don't consider it ethical for employers to add that sort of clause under normal circumstances, as indeed, they don't tend to. I do consider it ethical in specific circumstances, however, such as the one I just described.

In the absence of a clear and direct conflict of interest (e.g., awarding contracts to vendors, making strategic decisions), what you do on your own time with your own resources shouldn't matter at all.

I know games companies that let their employees work on games on the side, and publish them. It doesn't hurt the company, and the employees are happier.

Unless it impacts your performance during working hours to an extent that you are not reasonably fulfilling your duties - “impacting your performance” is too vague.

“Unless it impacts your performance during working hours” — Shouldn’t the employer just note the poor performance and tell you to improve, rather than police your personal life? Under your reasoning, an employer could require a certain number of hours of sleep per night.

Would it be ok to work to develop a competing business and then quit to launch that business? That's unethical. There's an implied contract that when you work for someone you don't also work against them. In higher level jobs, the contract is written.

Because Amazon sells video game software, if you decide to work for them, you should not be in the business of making or selling video game software.

Your argument is a good one against letting companies like Amazon take over so many industries that they can shut everyone out!

> There's an implied contract that when you work for someone you don't also work against them.

But working on something else is not "work against"? What does "work against them" mean to you?

If you work an 8 hour shift at McDonalds, and then another 8 hour shift at Burger King, have you "worked against" McDonalds?

> Because Amazon sells video game software, if you decide to work for them, you should not be in the business of making or selling video game software.

But that definition is so expansive, that no one would ever be allowed to work on anything ever again. It's impossible for anyone to build a career in anything, under a definition this broad.

If you punch a clock for Amazon, does that mean you can't work in any warehouse (because they do that), you can't work in software (because they do that), you can't work in any sort of retailer or grocery store (because they do that), you can't work in any TV or Movie production (because they do that), you can't work in gaming (they do that too), you can't work in any datacenter (they do that too), you can't work in the music industry (they do that), you can't work in book publishing (they do that), you can't work in home devices / IOT (they do that too), you can't work for UPS or FedEx (because they run their own delivery service), you can't be a pharmacist (they do that now), you can't even be a plumber or electrician (Amazon technically does that now too) and so on.

I'm referring mainly to businesses that create intellectual property, but you are quite right... the problem is that Amazon is in so many businesses, which leads to poor treatment of employees, suppliers, and customers.

You would only be allowed to do shift work for a competitor under any of those examples you mentioned. No one would allow you to be a manager for the competitor.

If one isn't working in the games division of said company and one creates a game in their own free time, then no it is not unethical. Just because these mega corps have an interest in a broad spectrum of industries, that should not constrain employees working in unrelated sections from doing their own thing in their own time.

Folks doing shift work don't usually have intellectual property constraints, but someone working on software for pay (even if it isn't games) who makes software and tries to sell it while he is working at company in that same business, regardless of the genre of the software title, is acting unethically.

Again, this is an argument in favor of working for yourself, which I totally support!

If it's a direct competition, I can see how that makes sense. But your argument is essentially that no one can take side work. Salaried photographers can't work a wedding; illustrators can't help with a friend's book; SWEs can't write a script for a friend.

There has to be a limit, and it seems like the limit that makes sense is: you did this on company time using company resources.

No, the limit is does your business create or use intellectual property that is also a line of business of the company. This is how its actually handled in contracts with people who perform this kind of work.

A photographer who works in commercial ad photos and shoots weddings on the side does not compete with his employer. If he did ad shots on the side, he would. If the illustrator publishes books and helps a friend with a book (for money) that isn't published by that company, you're in a grey area. If your friend is Microsoft and Apple pays you, no grey area.

Well, isn't it all a grey area though? What if the photographer's ad company is Christian, and she shoots a gay wedding? What if the SWE's work at Apple is on a product Microsoft doesn't compete with? What if the illustrator's friend's book is so low-circulation their company wouldn't illustrate it? What if the friend owed the illustrator a favor and wanted to give them some exposure, and would never have contracted the illustrator's company?

I mean, either we're talking "might makes right" and your employer just bulldozes you with "our army of lawyers defines what the grey area is", or the line is "you can't use our resources for your personal gain". I think those are really the only two options here.

Yeah, I'm calling bullshit on your entire premise.

If you're a non-managerial employee its unethical for any company to force you to sign a non-compete.

We've been subject to so much corporate propaganda that we don't understand what our rights are any more and have them backwards and we've been taught that up is down.

If a company teaches you to hammer nails into a 2x4 they absolutely can't prevent you from hammering a 2x4 for someone else.

Amazon's reach is too broad and they already have the playing field slanted so heavily in their direction that if you decided to compete with them they could squash you like a bug anyway. That whole premise is nonsense.

Fuck all non-competes for workers.

There aren't usually non competes for workers and I totally agree there shouldn't be... unless they're salaried workers who create intellectual property.

You can't have your cake and eat it, too. If you want to sell software, don't work for someone else in that business. Just sell it yourself!

In my country, as a salaried dev, I can definitely get sued for copyright infringement if I decide to quit working for a company and open a competing business. Even if I didn't intentionally copied any code/asset the legal process by itself would be a hassle to deal with when I'm just starting a business and depending on how I decided to write my new stuff for my business I can indeed be found guilty because I unintentionally copied myself (same design decisions, using the same tech stack, variable naming convention, same price formula for... to the point that could be reasonable argued that I just copied and pasted some important portions if not the whole code base), so yeah, if I decided to do something like this I would quit before writing a single line of code for my business and probably take a vacation/work on something else for a few weeks, before jumping in.

yeah that's bullshit, you can own the IP you can't own what the employee knows about their field. that is just corporate overreach.

https://www.npr.org/2021/07/09/1014366577/biden-moves-to-res...

You are working for your employer for ~40 hours a week. There are 168 hours in a week. It is never acceptable for an employer to tell you what you can do with the remaining 76.2% of your time that you are not working for them.

If an employer is paying you 125k a year salary, but wants to control how you spend all 168 hours in a week of your life, then that means they are paying you 14.3 an hour, below minimum wage in amazon's home city of seattle.

Ya, no thanks.

You will find that in professional work for a salary, they are not paying you for hours but for many aspects of the relationship they have with you. One of them is what you do while you're there. Another aspect is what you do while you're not. You'd be hard pressed to find any big software company that did not have rules about your "off time" in the contract, and working on competing products is definitely one of them.

This is, yet again, the reason that people should really try to get away from big companies. If you don't like how big companies don't work, folks shouldn't say, "Aw, I don't like how companies work!," they should get together with other like minded people and make a company.

Of course, they will quickly find that, regardless of that company's size, they will want the same kind of rules for their employees! It will not be a hippie commune and, if it is, it won't be in business long.

Say you do quit and start a software company with two buddies. Six months in, one of them decides to start working on a different product that you didn't want to do. He's still "doing his job," of course. Would you be ok with that? No, you would have a heart attack. Because you need that person 110% on for you and only for you.

This is the reality of business. If you operate a company where everyone isn't "on for you" all the time, you get low efficiency. This is exactly the reason that FAANG companies pay so much. This is the golden yoke. If you accept the big salary from the mother ship (which you didn't build), then you accept the golden yoke and you help keeping them build their empire. Or you quit and wash, rinse, repeat!

> You will find that in professional work for a salary, they are not paying you for hours but for many aspects of the relationship they have with you.

Of course they are paying for hours. An employer has no right to control your life outside the hours it pays for.

I suspect that you might not have worked in one of these positions. I assure you that it'll be in your contract.

I assure you it isn't.

> Would it be ok [...]

As always, it depends, doesn't it? Sure, there are lots of cases where it would be unethical. But I can also see a case where it would be otherwise.

Imagine one joins a company for a cause, believing in a certain important mission they have. Then, at some point, they realize the company is now taking a "wrong" approach (e.g. had a hidden agenda or makes a certain decision you strongly disagree with). Can we really say it would be universally unethical to leave said company over a disagreement and do things the right way instead? Thinking only about ethics and not the legal aspects - they can't work there because they've started to do a wrong thing, and no one shouldn't have to give up on their ideas based on a history of having associated with "wrong" people.

I guess this is another argument against knowledge being considered someone's property.

It's never wrong to leave if you disagree with the company's direction. We would have far less evil companies if more people did this!

There's a great real world example in the HP 9110A, the world's first desktop computer. The inventor worked for Smith Corona Marchant and the machine he proposed was way ahead of what they wanted to do, so he quit. He shopped it out and HP hired him as a consultant to build it (he never wanted to be anyone's employee anymore, which is the crux of my entire argument here), but HP did have to pay a license fee to SCM to make sure they had the rights to the machine because it was developed while he worked there.

Of course, since no one ever heard of SCM and HP is a household word, clearly quitting and doing your own thing was the right decision!

> Would it be ok to work to develop a competing business and then quit to launch that business?

Yes, this is absolutely OK.

The experience, knowledge, and connections you gain by working for a particular employer belong to you, not the employer.

I agree. As long as you quit before you launch or sell something. One of the best ways to start your own business is to learn everything you can under someone else, then go work in that industry.

As an employer myself, I encourage and seek out employees with this mindset. If they are truly entrepreneurial and want to own something, that's good for me if they apply that mindset to my company (and are remunerated accordingly, of course.)

What I meant (and what the Amazon issue is about), is that it's not ethical to start announcing or selling a competing product while you work there. In the case of software, it's seriously uncool to develop competing software in your "off time" and then come out of the gate with it.

No. Your employer is simply irrelevant outside work hours. It's as if you had quit.

Did you have a salaried job in programming where that was in your contract?

This isn't about contracts, it's about rights.

People should stop agreeing to these. You already went through the interview process, already given an offer. Companies aren't going to rescind the offer because you strike out this line from the employment contract. Just like you negotiate salary, you negotiate the agreement, striking out that part in the contract.

> Companies aren't going to rescind the offer because you strike out this line from the employment contract.

...except in this case that's exactly what happened? Legal was asked to waive the policy and they refused.

You don't ask legal to wave the policy, you remove the offending terms and hand back the revised version of the contract.

That's usually not how it works with employment contracts, especially at big software companies. I'm fairly certain this was given to the candidate using something like Digisign, which can be configured to not allow revisions from the signer.

Not once did I have an opportunity to do that. DocuSign and its ilk take care of that.

They will rescind the offer. Most of the time, negotiating contract is way more difficult than salary.

You don't understand American cooperatism then. The worker is still your legal slave, with all cooperate rights and contracts trumping civil and person rights. Formerly called fascism, which is just an an extension of the old aristocracy brought over into the industrial pseudo-democratic age. Also called the "American freedom". You are free to sign this contract. Or not

This is, to put it mildly, insane.

Games are a pretty interesting category of software in that they're possibly the only interactive software a user would voluntarily use for its own sake. Anti-games policies and agreements seem pretty suspiciously like "you can write any software you please as long as nobody ever uses it". Perhaps open source software development was only ever allowed under the assumption that open source software could never build a userbase competing with parent companies.

Competition could be pretty broadly scoped -- a hobby game could be dangerous to a tech company if it makes no money and has no special proprietary technology but concentrates enough technical acumen and useful experience in its developers/audience that they could recruit internally to found new companies.

>To help Amazon improve its products and services, I will use Amazon's publicly available products and services in the development and release of my Personal Game wherever possible

Does this mean you're not allowed to use Unity because Amazon Lumberyard / Open 3D Engine exists?

In theory if the two engines had feature parity it looks like that is the case. I suspect in practice it would look like you would at least have to provide some justification why it was not possible to use Open3D over Unity for your use case (perhaps some missing feature, however minor).

>All work on my Personal Game will be performed outside of my regular working hours.

>I grant to Amazon a royalty free, worldwide, fully paid-up, perpetual, transferrable license to any and all of my intellectual property rights associated with the Personal Game and my Personal Game development.

So by working for Amazon, you're obligated to give them something you create, that they will not pay you for...

This has to be one of the most insane things I've ever seen...

I swear every big tech company is so far up it's own ass it can see out it's mouth.

Anyone know if this policy would be enforceable under California law? (I realize Amazon HQ.) I know California has labor protection about non-competes, does it also have protection for people doing work on their own time with their own equipment? I vaguely remember it does but can't find a reference.

This is certainly awful for anyone trying to develop a game outside of Amazon while they work at Amazon. But one has to stop and ask, is that really a thing?

If you worked for Coca-Cola, would it be ok to develop a soda that's not theirs? This is an age old HR problem called work for hire. Amazon is ensuring that any work you do on video games while you work there is theirs. In other words, it's work for hire whether you do it at home or not because Amazon is in the video game business.

Same goes for working with the other guys. Would Coke be ok with you moonlighting on a Pepsi product? They aren't.

The hot word here is that either you work for yourself or you work for someone else. Not both in the same industry simultaneously.

Yet if you work in a warehouse, this policy apparently (from other commentators) applies to you too.

I run the servers for an open source multiplayer video game, one of our frequent contributors used to work in the shipping mines at amazon. So I'd say it's an issue. Also one of our maps had a lot of work on it done by a bioware employee in map design who also created one of the valve sponsored community maps for tf2 (cp_coldfront).

The difference between the soda example and the computers example, is that people who do tech work tend to have tech hobbies. Nobody who is a chemist at coke is going to have a hobby creating and random releasing drink recipes on the internet in their spare time.

Anti-moonlighting clauses also fail to take into account one thing: If your employer is attempting to control all hours of your life, they should not be allowed to pay less then min wage for those hours. a $125k salary is still less then Seattle's Minimum Wage when you extrapolate it to all 168 hours in a day that amazon apparently wants to be able to control. ($14.30/h).

Actually, many famous food products, software products, cars, and other things were created by people who did work at their former competitors. It's been the subject of many lawsuits. Reese's were invented by a disgruntled employee at Hershey.

No one has ever tried to control all of anyone's hours. All of my arguments are about the nature of the work and the intellectual property components it carries. If you are hauling boxes for Amazon or hauling boxes for Coke, none of this is relevant.

> No one has ever tried to control all of anyone's hours.

If my employer says I can not do something in my spare time, then they are controlling all of my hours, and they should be paying me for all of my hours.

That's just not how salaried positions work. Shift positions, sure, but you won't find any kind of professional job where you're off the hook when you're off the clock.

There are always expectations and rules about your conduct out of work. Some it is political (you can't be in crazy public political groups), some of it is legal (you can't doing illegal stuff), and some of it is about business (non compete, IP rules, etc).

Once again, this is all one of the best reasons to work for yourself! When you work for someone else, they do get to set some of the rules -- for all of your life. Them's the breaks!

When I went to work for Amazon in 2010, I also encountered many internal policies that were very similar to this. I don’t doubt the veracity of this claim one bit.

Considering the state of Amazon's entire gaming division, this guy dodged a bullet. It would have been a terrible position even if this policy had not existed.

And people a couple of days ago downvoted me because I expressed an opinion of why I would not use Open 3D Engine even if it's open source... Fuck Amazon

An honest question. What kind of threat Amazon is trying to protect itself from with such policy? What kind of precedent gave birth to it?

This is an unacceptable policy and amounts to owning an employee outright, rather than paying them in exchange for specific labor. It should be outlawed and huge fines should be attached for any attempts to hinder outside work. But even leaving that aside, perhaps people should reconsider where they spend their money. A big corporation can do this only because they are wealthy and can afford to reject the few candidates who don't bend the knee and sign the employment contract.

Is the policy most places that all your IP belongs to them?

Not if its on your own time, your own equipment, and using no company IP.

Is that true? I'm not even a dev but every contract I've signed here (UK) explicitly states this. You can't really prove whether your ideas happen on or off the clock and there is no restriction on this in a contract is there?

I am not a lawyer nor am I looking to give advice.

Not all of that is legal. In IL others cannot claim ownership of the work you produce outside of company time and resources.

Additionally claiming a world wide right won't fly. I don't know what nations wouldn't allow for it with the conditions it was created in, but I am confident there are nations that would look at that contract and invalidate it or not accept it since Amazon did not develop or assist in developing it.

Theres another point in the agreement that would fall through: Amazon doesn't claim any kind of responsibility for the product made, but Amazon also claims priviledges to work not compensated for. (It's either/or .. a product violates other's rights and gets sued.. which one is it? You can't have someone that party owns it and is complete unreasonable for it)

Additionally the nature of the contract is a labor agreement. The labor being agreed upon is employment and has expectations.

TL;DR I hope someone comes after them legally in an agressive manner for this. They're trying to have their cake and eat it too.

1-4 is pretty standard but then 5-8 are just increasingly terrible

> 9. If a minor dependent collaborates on my Personal Game as allowed in term 8, I agree to the following: Given that said minor dependent may hold partial copyright power for my Personal Game, I relinquish said minor dependent into the care of Amazon in perpetuity. I understand that I will still be responsible for said minor dependent's financial maintenance.

> I relinquish said minor dependent into the care of Amazon in perpetuity

Lol I am reading this as Amazon will take care of my kid in perpetuity.

I think that's exactly their point (it's a joke)

Well, jahabrewer is saying Amazon's lawyers seem almost evil enough to take kids from parents, while hartator is expressing possible interest in offering a child to Amazon. I'm thinking hartator's kid is going to grow up someday soon and find his parent's posts on HN. When said child finds this post, it will be an interesting day... ;-)

Yes, exactly. I was seeing this as a net positive. :)

actually believed this was quoted from the ToS by the time i got to #8

It sounds like point #8 is intended to ensure Amazon can exert their other claims, rather than being intended control over the employee. The outcome may be the same so it does not make it right, but it does not support suggestions of devious ulterior motives.

The fact that they even allow development of any software without reserving the right to claim ownership puts it leaps and bounds ahead of Google's policies they force on their employees.

They used to have a ridiculously heavy handed process where you submit your personal project for review by a group of people who would respond with "No, we want ownership of this project, it is ours now" or "you may work on it and we probably wont claim ownership unless the project varies at all from what you described or we change our mind".

They do reserve the right to claim ownership, effectively.

"I grant to Amazon a royalty free, worldwide, fully paid-up, perpetual, transferrable license to any and all of my intellectual property rights associated with the Personal Game"

If they claimed ownership, you couldn't do what you wanted with the IP after you leave the company--they would own it.

They can do what they want with the IP after you quit--they require a very broad license--but so can you. And that is the difference.

I was under the impression that this class of language was standard boilerplate that is included in all software employment contracts.

It's been a long time, but I think my offer letter had some bullshit about the company owning any IP I developed on my own initiative if it could be tied in any way to company resources.

The bits about using AWS services and making your game available on the Amazon Games Store, whatever that is, are slightly odd, but not really enforceable.

This covers things that don't have anything to do with company resources.

The entire point of this seems to be to allow hobbies on the side, but then requires you don't work on it with anyone not at Amazon, and no matter what you do, Amazon just about owns it (gets unlimited license). Doesn't really make a lot of sense in total.

Can anyone find the unique amazon specific definition of "Personal Game" complete with peculiar capitalization?

My guess is we're seeing the stick with all mention of any carrot very carefully edited out. I would further guess Amazon is providing some kind of interesting carrot, perhaps a great big pile of free AWS time or free marketing.

I mean, fine, if push comes to shove, I wrote something I choose to define as a realistic fluid dynamics simulator based helicopter flight simulator, not define as per the unknown Amazon definition of a "Personal Game".

It specifically says you are responsible for all fees associated with using AWS.

Good point, although Amazon is a huge company with their finger in every pie. Given those fingers in every pie, they have some kind of carrot to go with this carefully edited stick?

I recall the horrific fad maybe ten years ago of forcing "employees" to come in and work on their free time for hackathon and maker type events to generate corporate PR. Perhaps, this "Personal Game" policy is a legacy from some awful corporate hackathon event from back in 2012 that nobody even remembers anymore, but the legal paperwork remains in the air like a bad smell.

I suppose until the censorship is removed and we find out the precise legal definition of "Personal Game" we can only wonder and do the usual "big company always bad" thing.

I wouldn't call this censorship. There is likely a paragraph right above "To develop or release a Personal Game..." that carefully defines it - but it wouldn't really add anything to the article to include that when it can be summarised as covering the output of an "indie game developer". Contract terms like that are often defined then given Initial Capitals.

We should assume good faith on the part of James Liu and Robert Adams unless you have evidence to the contrary.

To your point about carrot and stick - yes, the carrot here is likely excellent financial compensation for doing the main job, and the experience on the resume, same as all your colleagues. Amazon aren't going to pay you extra because your hobbies are impacted by their policy - at junior to mid levels it's take it or leave it.

> My guess is we're seeing the stick with all mention of any carrot very carefully edited out. I would further guess Amazon is providing some kind of interesting carrot, perhaps a great big pile of free AWS time or free marketing.

Amazon doesn't give free AWS time or free marketing (or really any marketing) to employees. It's not frugal.

Some additional context: this is the newer, better version of the policy where you can work on games. Previously, employees could not work on games at all.

Amazon doesn't really care about people doing stuff on the side, they want your extra hours to go into amazon.

> not define as per the unknown Amazon definition of a "Personal Game".

Amazon has a bunch of lawyers who will take whatever you make if you achieve any kind of succcess.

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