Comment by ptero
7 years ago
> I had to supress my commercial project once I joined big blue.
I am pretty sure this is the standard practice at all large companies, at least in the US. Small companies may just not care too much, but even at a small company if your management notices you might have to choose between that and your day coding. I wish it was not like this, but to me this is at least somewhat justifiable.
Much worse is the desire of most employers to control everything you do, including your work on open source project off hours. Want to fix coordinate computation for an open source satellite sim? Call the lawyers first. Lead a robotics club at a high school? Check with the management. IMO many employees do it anyway and hope to not get called on this, but this is formally going against the contract.
I've only worked at one large company (EA), but they were ok with side businesses as long as it wasn't competing with their core business of gaming. IIRC you could even promote it internally. This was about 9 years ago.
For game related things you could list them as existing inventions when joining. So you can carve out exceptions. Which is common with game companies.
How do enough people agree to those terms to make them plausible in the first place? That's like going to work at a restaurant and being required to stop working at a soup kitchen on the weekends.
I would never agree to those terms and strike them out. That's ridiculous.
One way of looking at it is paying for mindshare. Sometimes companies want your brainpower only focussed on one programming problem. They might not want you at work, thinking about items in your side project.
Focus is a big deal. Doesn't make it right but it's the only business justification I've ever heard that actually seemed legit.
At the same time, there should be an expectation of compensation to give something like that up.