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Comment by bsdpython | Hacker News Reader

I've been seeing the same basic topic come to the top of hacker news over and over. I thought the with the advent of GitHub, Stack Overflow and easily sharable web and app projects that this would make vetting software developers easier. Are these resources not being utilized at all in the hiring process? Am I to believe that a software developer with several years of professional experience, references, and some sort of work portfolio can't code at all? I don't get it.

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Many, many dev candidates do not have a Github account with any code on it, nor do they have an SO account with any answers on it. And past work often belongs to the employer (and was written by a team anyway), so.

If you want to say "don't hire those people," you're being far more restrictive than those who want to do fizzbuzz-style weed outs.

Github-centric candidate filtering is great for the tiny percentage of programmers who get paid to work on open source, and terrible for the much larger percentage who can't write open source code even on their own time without risking a lawsuit from their employer. Only way to fix that's unionization or getting an awful lot of laws passed in a an awful lot of states (for US devs, anyway), thanks to employer/employee power imbalances and incentives to defect from any strictly voluntary resistance movement.

Wow most programmers aren't allowed to have any sort of hobby involving programming without risking a lawsuit from their employer? That seems pretty crazy, I'm surprised places like California permit that.

Any ideas what companies tend to have such onerous conditions in their employment contracts? I've never seen something similar but I've only ever worked for smaller (less than 500 people) companies.

It's the default state in English and American Labour law hint on one of the key legal acts is named "Masters and Servants Acts"

And this is from some one I worked with was a GC and a lawyer.

That doesn't seem right, at least in America. All companies I've worked for have required me to sign an agreement giving them ownership over any work or inventions produced using their technology or on their time.

If that was the default state why would everyone require those too?

Lawyers covering their asses mostly and it also makes it much harder to try and fight any disputes.

America is a tiny bit more liberal than the UK but of course most people can't afford the lawyers to dispute.

I wouldn't say "most", but I once had to fight to get an exemption in a startup's proprietary information agreement. We were asked to sign this after most of us had been there six months, and I had to threaten to walk off the job if they couldn't be flexible.

The way it was explained to me was that they needed to be able to claim ownership of anything I did for the company or using the company's technology. Since that could include things I did outside of work for the company's benefit or my own, they needed to be able to claim ownership over 100% of my "works of authorship" in accordance with "provisions of the Pennsylvania Labor Code" which they refused to elaborate on.

I finally got wording added to my agreement for open source software, provided I didn't use any proprietary startup magic to build it.

Psychology is kinda tricky - I keep my "screw-around" and "play-with-a-little-bit-of-this-and-a-bit-of-that" on a (not visible to the outside world) BitBucket account, as

(a) I'm never sure the code is high quality (idiomatic, proper variable naming, documented)

(b) I'm not sure I'd be able to complete it to the point where it's a decent-looking project, not some random half-done stuff,

so I don't want to be judged by it

No side projects even? I used to be one one of those big corporate programmers with no side projects to show off and while I was decently good I wouldn't hire my old self to work on my startup. Also, an interesting idea - ask candidates to find any 3 unanswered questions on stack overflow and answer them. It would at least provide a useful exercise for the candidate and the community at large.

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