That’s meaningless if you don’t use their equipment to do it. If you make a sandwich, do they own it? A table? A child? A novel? A painting?
One of my first companies put a clause in to say that they owned the code you wrote in your spare time. I peaced out too.
KevonLooney@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Joecool2087@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Only the first born. You get to keep them after that one.
MonkderZweite@feddit.ch 8 months ago
I’m pretty sure this is illegal even in the US.
Cryophilia@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Repeat for every labor issue
sturmblast@lemmy.world 8 months ago
that would never hold up in court I would imagine so long as you aren’t using company property to write the code
lobut@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
I almost got into legal trouble by them when I left. Their contract also said I couldn’t work within 15 miles around any of their head offices in the world or any of their clients. They had hundreds of clients.
So I left and I did apply to work for their clients and they told my employer that this was against my contract. The employer laughed and said this isn’t enforceable anywhere. However, when they passed it by their legal department they said that it isn’t worth a legal fight even though it’s easily winnable. Just asked me to wait a year.
seang96@spgrn.com 8 months ago
Sounds like a good reason for the client to ditch them too.
vidarh@lemmy.stad.social 8 months ago
Depends on jurisdiction. Worth checking before taking any chances. Also worth considering that an employer willing to put that in the contract may well try to fire you and/or sue you if you come up with something valuable and they decide they want it, so even when you’re in the right it’s often not worth working for a company like that.
tony@lemmy.hoyle.me.uk 8 months ago
I had one tried that, I crossed it out before signing… it’s total BS.
ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 8 months ago
One of the companies I worked for put into their employment agreement language that stated they owned all the code I had written before starting work for them. It was the most hilarious overreach I’ve ever seen in an employment agreement - but then companies can put literally anything they want into the agreements, and they aren’t worth shit anyway.
I told them this was utterly ridiculous and edited the agreement to remove this and some other nonsense before signing it, and they hired me anyway.
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 8 months ago
If you’re an engineer employment contracts generally include clauses to give them anything you invent
Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg 8 months ago
These are typically limited to business relevant intentions (e.g., in theory if you work for shopify you would be able to work on code for rocket powered roller skates but not anything related to commerce – this tends to be the extent of what’s legally enforceable anyways). I wouldn’t accept one that gobbles up any work that I do, too much red tape.
Staying away from big companies typically makes this all easier, because in the worst case it ends up in court … and the mega corp may make an argument for way too many things and drag out the court to proceedings with a near infinite number of lawyers.
Lojcs@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Why would they do that?
lobut@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
I’d be lying if I said I knew for sure.
It was a software consulting place.
JDubbleu@programming.dev 8 months ago
So glad to live in California where that type of shit is explicitly illegal. Open source software would be so fucked with how much software is produced here.
Anders429@programming.dev 8 months ago
It’s explicitly illegal in California? I’ve never heard that before.
vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
California has a lot of laws that stops corps from pulling shit, the corps usually leave it in their employee contracts as a scare tactic though. Non-competes for example are illegal, the reasoning os that most arguements for it are already covered by corporate espionage laws. It also fucks over the worker 9/10.
vidarh@lemmy.stad.social 8 months ago
In large part because at least some portion of California lawmakers knows their history well enough to be aware that all of Silicon Valley is a thing in the first place because people were able to leave and take their ideas with them and start something new.
A huge portion of the value of Silicon Valley today can still be traced back to when the “Traitorous Eight” left Shockley Semiconductor to form Fairchild in 1957, and build tech based on what they’d learnt at Shockley, with many of them then going on to leave Fairchild and found further new companies. The outcome of that among many others resulted in both Intel and AMD, and the same pattern has repeated many times.