AnneDev

I found myself in a similar situation with a company I worked for. If I didn't know any better, we interviewed at the same place.

I worked for a company for six months before we decided to renegotiate our contract. Thinking back on it, they offered me a few days of extra PTO but like any good business, they used it as an opportunity to sneak a few of these IP clauses in. (and a few other clauses).

It literally said what you're saying: anything that the employee creates or invents, in any field (competing or not) and at any time belongs to the company.

I had a hard discussion with my employer about this clause. It was one of my first jobs so I was pretty frightened. I also had a pretty awesome blog and some open source work. One of my open source projects was a Wordpress theme boilerplate (I was at a WP shop). I worked on it for weeks, trying to get it right, trying to use it to quickly generate new themes. I worked on it in my spare time, never during work. And I worked on it on my own equipment.

I was really proud of it (and still use it today) and got a lot of great feedback on it in the community.

So imagine having that discussion and knowing there is already something that they could claim their rights to.

I asked my boss directly about my theme.

  > You used your experience from your job. We SHOULD own the rights to it and use it. What if we wanted to sell it and make a business out of selling Wordpress themes based on that boilerplate? We have a right to that theme.

I was taken aback. I asked about my technical blog:

  > We reserve the right but we would most likely not exercise unless it would really benefit the company.

I asked about my sci-fi book.

  > Yes, that does fall under the IP clause but why would we want your sci-fi book?

I asked about how that would conflict with my freelancing work (that was my stipulation on the original contract):

  > You should not be devoting any energy to anyone else. If you're working, you should be working on our projects. You're wasting mental energy on other work. If you can work extra hours freelancing, you can surely work extra hours for this job.

I asked how they can justify that kind of reach with IP and otherwise:

  > It's industry standard. Do you think Google lets their employees keep IP to the things they make? Of course not, that would bankrupt them. And Facebook? Or any other tech companies?

Lastly, I noticed a non-compete clause that stated:

  > You may not work for any possible competitor that may reach any field that we have ventured into or may venture into within a 40 mile radius of the company. This includes tech, marketing, sales, etc. for the next two years.

I asked my boss WTF because that covers my entire field of work and pretty much the entire city. I'd have to move or work somewhere completely different:

  > Well, it's a pretty big city! And anyways, it's industry standard. You'll find the same clause at Google.

I delayed signing for a couple of months, got my resignation ready and got fired a couple of days before handing it in with some severance. Never signed anything about IP and I bought my work laptop out in case they try to pull some shit.

I think that in the end, the way to really address these issues is with WebTorrent or a similar service. When you're online, you should be:

    1. contributing your own bandwidth to the images you upload

    2. contribute your own bandwidth to the images you look at.

If you look at an image, maybe you should be required to seed it twice over. If you upload your image, maybe you have to seed it at least 10 times for it to stay up past a certain deadline.

As a user of image websites and, well, websites in general, I'd gladly contribute my bandwidth to help the services run. Or even act as a mirror rather than a shared peer.

What do you think about that? It could lessen the load on the image host and help scale things. I just can't seen this happening if you embed an image directly unless you embed iframes or require users to go to the site itself.

My friends die a couple at a time each year so it's a constant reminder of things. The worst part is, I was trying to write out a list like yours, and I just can't remember everyone that already died.

that's badass!

Article OP here.

The time-tracking we did was real-time. You sit down, you press "play" and you're tracking. The added bonus (oh jesus, I forgot about this one) was that your status was visible to your manager at all times.

Anyways, thanks for the thoughts!

Article OP here.

God, I love Seinfeld so I feel a little flattered by that! :)

The article is more of a musing about an insecurity than anything else. But as to the content, maybe I can explain a few things better:

1. The management WAS bad. The job where I was time-tracked was a nightmare in so many different ways. However, it instilled a sense of insecurity in me. A single comment from a manager at a completely different company brought all that stuff back up and ever since then, I haven't been able to put my mind to rest about my own performance.

2. Developers are often quick to blame management for problems without considering that THEY might be the problem. So I mentioned that when someone tells me "The management is bad if you're missing deadlines", it doesn't make sense to me as a blanket statement.

3. I concluded with saying that I have certain abilities that I recognize as good but I'm still wondering if that's enough or anywhere near enough.

Thanks for the feedback though! I'm trying to do better with writing this type of stuff so that it's as concise and self-explanatory as possible. Looks like I still have more work to do.

Article OP here, it was supposed to be implied that this was a job I worked at in the past (the time tracking thing).

I confronted management about the time tracking but it was one of my first jobs so I had little experience with that kind of thing. The job was a nightmare in so many different ways that the time tracking was the straw that broke the camel's back.

article OP here. I should mention that I'm a Lead Dev for a whole team (which is why I write this anonymously).

I'm not sure if I'm humble. I sure as hell am not when I'm interviewing but I blame that on American culture.

Thanks for the feedback! :)