Ask HN: Can I work on my side project while working for your company?
Borrowing from this post "Ask HN: Are side projects allowed at IBM?" news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9820993, I too have several side projects I want to work on. They range from making my own game to making my own niche search engine.
Of course, all projects are going to be limited in scope to what one person, me, can do on a part time basis.
For example, let's say I want to work for Google. I also want to create my own niche search engine for myself and anyone else who cares to use it. It will probably run on three or four servers on a SQL or an easy to maintain NoSQL backend. Compare this to Google's gigantic ultra scalable Spanner database system which requires hordes of people to just maintain. Technology wise, it's night and day. Can I work for Google while keeping ownership of my engine? If not, why not?
I don't want to go beyond what I as an individual but I still want to work in whatever side project I feel like doing without the hassle of doing things like getting "approval" for every idea I come up with since they can change at any time.
An open Ask HN community consultation from 2015 where @joinforloop convened hundreds of developers and bootstrappers to share real experiences, hard numbers, and tactics.
Hundreds of active indie hackers contributed case studies, pricing heuristics, and pitfalls to avoid when moonlighting on side projects.
I'm not a lawyer but here is what I know.
These clauses are for the company to cover their ass. Let's say you make Flappy Bird at Google and they try to claim it. The bad publicity will not be worth it.
Working on a side project that competes with their core business is different. But if it's a pet project with 100 users then Google will be seen as the bad guy again. How about 1 million users? Then you've created a competitor and less people will sympathize with it being shut down.
I hope that made sense.
Everywhere I've worked has had an IP policy that was agreed/signed at the same time as all of the new-hire paperwork. The ones I've signed essentially said "if you develop it on your own time and equipment and it's not based/dependent on our code, it's yours; if you develop it on our time or equipment or codebase, it's ours". The others I did not sign. Anecdotal experience, probably not reflective of everyone's hiring practices, et cetera.
There's a lot of law in California related to this specific IP topic, but IANAL so maybe someone with legal experience could chime in.