Google's stance on this was fairly draconian when I was working there, basically Google's position was that they could be in ANY business at ANY time so that ANY thing you worked on was theirs. On the day I joined, one of the other new hires had a marked up copy of the agreement with some VERY simple wording changes that said basically "wasn't in this business at the time the employee started working on the project" (aka a no retro-active clause) because this individual pointed out quite reasonably that if they were working on something in good faith on their own that wasn't part of Google's business and it turned out to be a really good idea, then Google, based on how the agreement was written, could go back and say "but we're in that business now too and you were working for us so we own your idea."
To which the HR person at the orientation had said, "Don't worry Google wouldn't do that." And this individual said, "I'm sure they wouldn't, that's why it seems like a no-brainer to put it into the agreement, it just says they won't do something that you and I both agree they would never do. I can't sign the document as written without this." The HR person took the updated version off to someone (presumably legal). And then after lunch this person was not in the group (I had seen them eating lunch) So when we had finished up, before my mentor had arrived I went out and found them waiting on the circle for a ride and asked them what happened. They said, "Google said no and also said they were rescinding the offer of employment."
And that told me everything I needed to know about how Google really thought about things vs what they said they thought about things.
Works in Austria. The legally binding collective agreement contract for IT workers here has a specific clause regulating the terms of when an employer may or may not claim rights on IP created by the employee. (§18 Diensterfindungen)
In California (where Google is headquartered) the law regulates the boundaries of IP ownership. If you work on something unrelated to your work on your own equipment on your own time, your employer can't claim it no matter what the employment agreement says.
I live in California, and they can. The key there is that is isn't "Unrelated to your work" it is "Unrelated to the work of the company." Also phrased as "The company's business." Google literally claims they could be in any business[1] at any time so anything you work on belongs to them. Further, as my lawyer pointed out to me at the time, California is an 'at will' state so they can fire you for any non-protected reason, one of which is 'working on things and forcing them to sue to get rights to that work product.' It isn't a very balanced situation from a power dynamic. My advice to anyone at Google (as it was when I was there) do not work on anything that you might later want to develop further while working at Google. If you really want to work on this thing, quit, and then start working on it. Otherwise you are at risk of the "success disaster" where your side hustle is suddenly worth something and at the same time you're being told to hand it over to your employer or be fired and sued at the same time.
[1] They rationalized this when I was there with their "20% time rule" which was time to work on what ever you wanted, but working on whatever you wanted still belonged to Google because they had a unlimited right of first refusal to productize whatever it was you worked on.
I think you're overstating. If it's on your time and your equipment and unrelated to your work, but it is related to your employer's business, it's not obvious.
If you work for a big tech, there's a huge range of stuff that's related to your employer's business, which means you have to tread carefully.
Hmm, collective action, you might be on to something there :-). Personally I think if we could eliminate the who 'no warranty of any kind' disclaimer ability for software and organize around collectively fixing this sort of abuse in the market that things would be different in a very positive sort of way.
How about if all employees of all companies did it together, organized in a way called law, so that you don't need to engage in this rigmarole and the company just never owns anything you do unless they specifically paid you to do it as part of your job?
This is part of the reason why I never worked for big tech. I always have a side project going. I cannot function without a side project.
I don't believe that any corporation would ever reward me for any reason; so without a side project, I wouldn't have hope... How would I get out of bed in the morning to go to work, without hope?
For me; day job is survival, that's it. I do it well because I'm well practiced and I need good output to provide me narrative cover but I don't trust any of it. I'm not invested in my day job at all. I assume it's all a PsyOp and I could lose the job any day for any weird reason. I act and pretend constantly and I care about nothing and no one and I trust no one...
I literally believe that if I worked for some big tech company which was actually rewarding employees for real, that they would stop rewarding employees as soon as I became one. I've encountered a situation like this in the past. Horrible situation. The secret to happiness is just don't expect anything and do unto others what they do to you.
This is definitely a sound strategy, you have to be careful about little tech too. Personally I managed to work at several "big tech" companies that were okay with me doing side work for profit (both consulting and design/development work). I carried that forward as a manager and was always supportive of people who did side projects because my experience was that those people were less likely to burn out than ones who were spending all their time at work.
Yes, it is. I feel like this level of distrust is probably something that wealthy people often experience; but at least they can take a look at their bank account or portfolio app from the comfort of a house they own to help soothe the pain.
I don't think therapy would help me to be honest. My problem is not psychological; it's that I need more money to buy my time and freedom. One time I was earning a modest passive income for about 3 years while working on open source projects; I was quite happy then and the fact that I didn't trust anyone was not a problem as I wasn't forced to interact with anyone.
I guess one positive aspect about this feeling of 'not caring' and putting on a mask is that it comes across as confidence and it gives me more control. I can say unexpected things and control other people's emotions to some extent.
When you're always willing to throw away the entire relationship in every interaction, people tend to respect you more for some reason. It's like; if you don't value the relationship, it signals high status or something. I suppose this is the trick that psychopaths use?
I've related elsewhere[0] my story about how Google laid me and half my team off 2 weeks before we were set to receive a six-figure retention bonus following an acquisition.
In the original Q&A with corp dev just after the acquisition was announced, someone pointed out that the contract we were offered allowed for that sort of thing. Google's representative said something similar to the parent comment: "Don't worry, that's not something we actually do."
It was especially galling because, after a round of layoffs a year or two prior to the acquisition, that startup had issued retention bonuses to those of us who were left. Unlike Google's subsequent post-acquisition bonus, contracts for those bonuses explicitly stated they were payable even if we were subsequently laid off or fired, as long as we weren't fired for one of a few specific reasons like embezzlement or harassment or other serious workplace misconduct.
It was such a marked contrast and, like the parent comment, it told me all I needed to know about how Google really feels about its employees, and how very literally true the old saying of "you can't trust what you don't have in writing" is.
I can't agree with this interpretation. A human, somewhere in the bigco, decided laid you off. That specific person decided to take advantage of you, and is responsible for that action. Bigco may have an incentive structure that pushes for this behaviour, but a human looked at incentives and morals and decided. Don't let them off the hook by pointing at the bigco.
"And that told me everything I needed to know about how Google really thought about things vs what they said they thought about things."
What you describe doesn't really provide much signal about this, because a big corp will always have a huge interest in having uniform working contracts. Exceptions are possible but only worth the headache with them for fairly high level employees. So even for a clause that they really wouldn't care much about, you'd expect a similar reaction.
I encountered a similar situation in my career.
The work looked good, the team looked good, money was good.
Then when the work contract came up, there were some unusual clauses about my salary that I was not comfortable with. They first said that it was OK to ignore the clause as they would pay my salary as explained orally. I insisted that they write the work contract as they plan to pay me.
After about 1 week of back and forth, they admitted that the clause was indeed unusual, was there for historical reasons and that they plan to change it in the future. However, they said no clause in the contract could be changed as of now, as it was the same contract for every employee, and no past had employee ever complained about it.
Unfortunately, I ended up declining the offer, as I considered the risk was not worth it.
A colleague and I demo'd something really neat we'd made in our spare time to the execs at the tech company we worked at, as a potential investment.
Two days later the network admin of the company stopped by my desk and whispered in my ear, "They're looking at your employment contracts. Whatever you showed them, they are trying to figure out if they can take it for free." (I guess he was reading all their emails...)
Bad news for them: they'd been in such a bind to hire me originally that I'd taken a pen and scribbled out a large chunk of my employment contract before we signed it. I'd never have thought to try it, but someone with bigger balls than me had done it the day before on theirs and told me about it.
I think a good strategy is to change companies often and ensure that your side project isn't related to any of them. This creates a lot of complications and adds a layer of protection because if your current employer tried to claim the software as theirs, your previous 3 employers would all have claims (weak claims, that is).
If the software is different from what all 4 companies would produce and it is all built outside of business hours, it gives you full leverage.
If any specific company tries to imply that their claim is valid, they cannot do this without validating the claims of 3 other companies... Thus preventing themselves from obtaining the full ownership rights over the product.
The company which actually wants your software would be better off just paying you and accepting your simple version of reality than trying to create complications for themselves by inventing some elaborate legal fiction.
This doesn’t really work if you work for megacorps, where everything is related to their business, and also it requires your past employers go to bat for you and enforce their claims.
My company was acquired by another company that had in-house lawyers. California Law states that you have rights to your own IP, when produced on your hardware and on your own time. So, I was careful to air gap all my work on a separate computer. Meanwhile, the acquiring company ask me to sign an employment agreement. Its terms restated the California law in very ambiguous terms. I couldn't tell if I was declaring rights to my own IP or signing away my rights. So, I asked them: "which is it?" Their replay was "Yes." ... I was an employee for a day.
This is dated 1997, so a lot could have changed since then.
You're right that California has IP assignment limitation clauses that override anything in the boilerplate employment contracts. I know one person who blew up their job offer by trying to get it modified to limit the IP assignment clause, but the company had a hardline stance that they didn't do one-off contracts with employees. Later they realized their state had already limited IP assignment, so the entire battle was moot.
California’s law has a truck-sized loophole though: if the IP in question relates in an way to your employer’s current or anticipated work/research, then they may claim it. Not your work at the company. The company’s work or their future work. And these big companies can believably claim that the scope of their work and research is huge and all-encompassing.
That's a nice thing in Switzerland, even if developed with company resources, only what you're being asked to do belongs to the company.
Things that are done in the course of employment (but aren't part of the contractual obligations) would often need to be disclosed and the company could license it. IP would typically still be owned by the employee.
Obviously things done outside of work would be even more clearly owned by the employee.
I wonder if any other country has a similar system.
> I wonder if any other country has a similar system.
Many states in the United States have limitations on IP assignment that protect against overly broad contracts.
Employers write their contracts as broadly as possible with the understanding that state limitations will limit any overly broad claims.
California (where Google is headquartered) is one such state with IP assignment limitations, though I'm not sure how much of that was in place when this article was written nearly 3 decades ago.
It should be flat out illegal to claim copyright on employees' work like this (which includes making people sign contracts giving up copyright on their work). If someone does something on their own time, with their own equipment, then they should own it regardless of their employer's business interests. These are employees, not slaves.
In the old days a friend considered working for Radio Shack and their contract basically had a we own everything you create regardless of what or when. They turned down the offer.
Google's stance on this was fairly draconian when I was working there, basically Google's position was that they could be in ANY business at ANY time so that ANY thing you worked on was theirs. On the day I joined, one of the other new hires had a marked up copy of the agreement with some VERY simple wording changes that said basically "wasn't in this business at the time the employee started working on the project" (aka a no retro-active clause) because this individual pointed out quite reasonably that if they were working on something in good faith on their own that wasn't part of Google's business and it turned out to be a really good idea, then Google, based on how the agreement was written, could go back and say "but we're in that business now too and you were working for us so we own your idea."
To which the HR person at the orientation had said, "Don't worry Google wouldn't do that." And this individual said, "I'm sure they wouldn't, that's why it seems like a no-brainer to put it into the agreement, it just says they won't do something that you and I both agree they would never do. I can't sign the document as written without this." The HR person took the updated version off to someone (presumably legal). And then after lunch this person was not in the group (I had seen them eating lunch) So when we had finished up, before my mentor had arrived I went out and found them waiting on the circle for a ride and asked them what happened. They said, "Google said no and also said they were rescinding the offer of employment."
And that told me everything I needed to know about how Google really thought about things vs what they said they thought about things.
You think making such reasonable demands of your employer would go better if every employee did it together, organized in some way?
Works in Austria. The legally binding collective agreement contract for IT workers here has a specific clause regulating the terms of when an employer may or may not claim rights on IP created by the employee. (§18 Diensterfindungen)
In California (where Google is headquartered) the law regulates the boundaries of IP ownership. If you work on something unrelated to your work on your own equipment on your own time, your employer can't claim it no matter what the employment agreement says.
I live in California, and they can. The key there is that is isn't "Unrelated to your work" it is "Unrelated to the work of the company." Also phrased as "The company's business." Google literally claims they could be in any business[1] at any time so anything you work on belongs to them. Further, as my lawyer pointed out to me at the time, California is an 'at will' state so they can fire you for any non-protected reason, one of which is 'working on things and forcing them to sue to get rights to that work product.' It isn't a very balanced situation from a power dynamic. My advice to anyone at Google (as it was when I was there) do not work on anything that you might later want to develop further while working at Google. If you really want to work on this thing, quit, and then start working on it. Otherwise you are at risk of the "success disaster" where your side hustle is suddenly worth something and at the same time you're being told to hand it over to your employer or be fired and sued at the same time.
[1] They rationalized this when I was there with their "20% time rule" which was time to work on what ever you wanted, but working on whatever you wanted still belonged to Google because they had a unlimited right of first refusal to productize whatever it was you worked on.
I think you're overstating. If it's on your time and your equipment and unrelated to your work, but it is related to your employer's business, it's not obvious.
If you work for a big tech, there's a huge range of stuff that's related to your employer's business, which means you have to tread carefully.
Hmm, collective action, you might be on to something there :-). Personally I think if we could eliminate the who 'no warranty of any kind' disclaimer ability for software and organize around collectively fixing this sort of abuse in the market that things would be different in a very positive sort of way.
How about if all employees of all companies did it together, organized in a way called law, so that you don't need to engage in this rigmarole and the company just never owns anything you do unless they specifically paid you to do it as part of your job?
This is part of the reason why I never worked for big tech. I always have a side project going. I cannot function without a side project.
I don't believe that any corporation would ever reward me for any reason; so without a side project, I wouldn't have hope... How would I get out of bed in the morning to go to work, without hope?
For me; day job is survival, that's it. I do it well because I'm well practiced and I need good output to provide me narrative cover but I don't trust any of it. I'm not invested in my day job at all. I assume it's all a PsyOp and I could lose the job any day for any weird reason. I act and pretend constantly and I care about nothing and no one and I trust no one...
I literally believe that if I worked for some big tech company which was actually rewarding employees for real, that they would stop rewarding employees as soon as I became one. I've encountered a situation like this in the past. Horrible situation. The secret to happiness is just don't expect anything and do unto others what they do to you.
This is definitely a sound strategy, you have to be careful about little tech too. Personally I managed to work at several "big tech" companies that were okay with me doing side work for profit (both consulting and design/development work). I carried that forward as a manager and was always supportive of people who did side projects because my experience was that those people were less likely to burn out than ones who were spending all their time at work.
That's a difficult place for your brain to be in. Maybe some therapy with a human would help?
Yes, it is. I feel like this level of distrust is probably something that wealthy people often experience; but at least they can take a look at their bank account or portfolio app from the comfort of a house they own to help soothe the pain.
I don't think therapy would help me to be honest. My problem is not psychological; it's that I need more money to buy my time and freedom. One time I was earning a modest passive income for about 3 years while working on open source projects; I was quite happy then and the fact that I didn't trust anyone was not a problem as I wasn't forced to interact with anyone.
I guess one positive aspect about this feeling of 'not caring' and putting on a mask is that it comes across as confidence and it gives me more control. I can say unexpected things and control other people's emotions to some extent.
When you're always willing to throw away the entire relationship in every interaction, people tend to respect you more for some reason. It's like; if you don't value the relationship, it signals high status or something. I suppose this is the trick that psychopaths use?
Big companies are soulless.
I've related elsewhere[0] my story about how Google laid me and half my team off 2 weeks before we were set to receive a six-figure retention bonus following an acquisition.
In the original Q&A with corp dev just after the acquisition was announced, someone pointed out that the contract we were offered allowed for that sort of thing. Google's representative said something similar to the parent comment: "Don't worry, that's not something we actually do."
It was especially galling because, after a round of layoffs a year or two prior to the acquisition, that startup had issued retention bonuses to those of us who were left. Unlike Google's subsequent post-acquisition bonus, contracts for those bonuses explicitly stated they were payable even if we were subsequently laid off or fired, as long as we weren't fired for one of a few specific reasons like embezzlement or harassment or other serious workplace misconduct.
It was such a marked contrast and, like the parent comment, it told me all I needed to know about how Google really feels about its employees, and how very literally true the old saying of "you can't trust what you don't have in writing" is.
Big companies are soulless.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43680191
I can't agree with this interpretation. A human, somewhere in the bigco, decided laid you off. That specific person decided to take advantage of you, and is responsible for that action. Bigco may have an incentive structure that pushes for this behaviour, but a human looked at incentives and morals and decided. Don't let them off the hook by pointing at the bigco.
It's really not as bad as it sounds from the contract. It's easy to get the committee to give you a release for your project.
The real rule as always is do not get in a legal fight with your employer
I remember Orkut being in a weird legal position. Did they donate all the rights back to the guy eventually?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orkut
"And that told me everything I needed to know about how Google really thought about things vs what they said they thought about things."
What you describe doesn't really provide much signal about this, because a big corp will always have a huge interest in having uniform working contracts. Exceptions are possible but only worth the headache with them for fairly high level employees. So even for a clause that they really wouldn't care much about, you'd expect a similar reaction.
I encountered a similar situation in my career. The work looked good, the team looked good, money was good.
Then when the work contract came up, there were some unusual clauses about my salary that I was not comfortable with. They first said that it was OK to ignore the clause as they would pay my salary as explained orally. I insisted that they write the work contract as they plan to pay me. After about 1 week of back and forth, they admitted that the clause was indeed unusual, was there for historical reasons and that they plan to change it in the future. However, they said no clause in the contract could be changed as of now, as it was the same contract for every employee, and no past had employee ever complained about it.
Unfortunately, I ended up declining the offer, as I considered the risk was not worth it.
> a big corp will always have a huge interest in having uniform working contracts
Then what they choose for that uniform tells us a lot.
If only there was a way for a uniform working contract that employees could collectively choose. Oh wait, no, companies don’t like that either.
Normalization of deviancy via law.
A colleague and I demo'd something really neat we'd made in our spare time to the execs at the tech company we worked at, as a potential investment.
Two days later the network admin of the company stopped by my desk and whispered in my ear, "They're looking at your employment contracts. Whatever you showed them, they are trying to figure out if they can take it for free." (I guess he was reading all their emails...)
Bad news for them: they'd been in such a bind to hire me originally that I'd taken a pen and scribbled out a large chunk of my employment contract before we signed it. I'd never have thought to try it, but someone with bigger balls than me had done it the day before on theirs and told me about it.
I think a good strategy is to change companies often and ensure that your side project isn't related to any of them. This creates a lot of complications and adds a layer of protection because if your current employer tried to claim the software as theirs, your previous 3 employers would all have claims (weak claims, that is).
If the software is different from what all 4 companies would produce and it is all built outside of business hours, it gives you full leverage.
If any specific company tries to imply that their claim is valid, they cannot do this without validating the claims of 3 other companies... Thus preventing themselves from obtaining the full ownership rights over the product.
The company which actually wants your software would be better off just paying you and accepting your simple version of reality than trying to create complications for themselves by inventing some elaborate legal fiction.
This doesn’t really work if you work for megacorps, where everything is related to their business, and also it requires your past employers go to bat for you and enforce their claims.
Has California Law changed, since 2015?
My company was acquired by another company that had in-house lawyers. California Law states that you have rights to your own IP, when produced on your hardware and on your own time. So, I was careful to air gap all my work on a separate computer. Meanwhile, the acquiring company ask me to sign an employment agreement. Its terms restated the California law in very ambiguous terms. I couldn't tell if I was declaring rights to my own IP or signing away my rights. So, I asked them: "which is it?" Their replay was "Yes." ... I was an employee for a day.
This is dated 1997, so a lot could have changed since then.
You're right that California has IP assignment limitation clauses that override anything in the boilerplate employment contracts. I know one person who blew up their job offer by trying to get it modified to limit the IP assignment clause, but the company had a hardline stance that they didn't do one-off contracts with employees. Later they realized their state had already limited IP assignment, so the entire battle was moot.
California’s law has a truck-sized loophole though: if the IP in question relates in an way to your employer’s current or anticipated work/research, then they may claim it. Not your work at the company. The company’s work or their future work. And these big companies can believably claim that the scope of their work and research is huge and all-encompassing.
That's a nice thing in Switzerland, even if developed with company resources, only what you're being asked to do belongs to the company.
Things that are done in the course of employment (but aren't part of the contractual obligations) would often need to be disclosed and the company could license it. IP would typically still be owned by the employee.
Obviously things done outside of work would be even more clearly owned by the employee.
I wonder if any other country has a similar system.
> I wonder if any other country has a similar system.
Many states in the United States have limitations on IP assignment that protect against overly broad contracts.
Employers write their contracts as broadly as possible with the understanding that state limitations will limit any overly broad claims.
California (where Google is headquartered) is one such state with IP assignment limitations, though I'm not sure how much of that was in place when this article was written nearly 3 decades ago.
The author worked at Apple in this case.
Thanks, I got my comment threads mixed up.
Apple is also headquartered in California, so the same applies.
It should be flat out illegal to claim copyright on employees' work like this (which includes making people sign contracts giving up copyright on their work). If someone does something on their own time, with their own equipment, then they should own it regardless of their employer's business interests. These are employees, not slaves.
In California, it is.
At least he was able to sneak the “Antler!” easter egg in: https://www.mackido.com/EasterEggs/UT-Stickies.html
In the old days a friend considered working for Radio Shack and their contract basically had a we own everything you create regardless of what or when. They turned down the offer.