I don't care about street cred. I don't care about particularly making any money off of anything I publish myself from now until I'm no longer gainfully employed. What I do care about is learning about my craft. In particular, I want to know what it takes to bring a personal project to market as a product and I'm certainly not going to learn that at my day job. There is a tremendous amount of effort involved there. Beyond my college comic book misadventures, I haven't ever seen that. I'd bet that most people haven't and that's a damned shame. I think that if more people had experienced shipping a product--their product--that we'd see a lot more consideration from the general populous. All too often we assume that things we don't understand are trivial and that is very often not the case.
For those not intimately familiar with my past job decisions, the last time I changed jobs I chose this one over the other largely due to issues with their non-compete clause. It basically read "you can't work in the games industry for two years after you leave our employ" which was not at all acceptable (this is why I read everything). They gave me every assurance that this wasn't something they'd ever do except in very particular circumstances and that the chances of my ever being held to that were exceptionally slim. If it was such a statistical improbability, I wanted it out. They wouldn't budge. I now work elsewhere. I was informed that this policy was changed to only apply to a small geographic area as a direct result of the stink I made. I'd like to think I did the others in my chosen field a good deed but, honestly, few people read or really understand the legal and binding contracts they sign when they take a new job.
Today I learned that any programming work I do is owned by my corporate overlords including those done outside the scope of my employment. The legalities of this are sadly unarguable even if they are imprecise and likely unenforceable. At the end of the day, if they want to put legal pressure on me they sure can and there's no way that I'd be able to survive that financially.
Given that my current employer can fire me at any time with or without reason, I don't particulary see a strong need for them to also be able to take anything I do outside of work. That just seems...wrong--especially when you consider mandatory overtime and a stagnation of professional skillsets that myself and my co-workers tend to suffer. I do on the other hand, understand what it is that these policies are trying to protect, it's just that I think they a) aren't really true to the intent, b) are a little intrusive and thus disrespectful to employees, and c) kind of do a crappy job anyway.
Learning that all programming work I do is owned by my employer comes as news to me--I thought I understood that part of the law. It all hinges, I suppose, on what the "scope of my work" really is. If that includes my hobby work at home then I think I might be entitled to more than I currently make (I write a *LOT* of code at home). I don't think that this was the intent of the law but I'm also not a laywer. I think it's silly that I'd need to be to answer the question: "who owns the work I do outside of work".
Next time around (if there is one) I'm going to be a lot more careful. But I suppose that's how we learn: screw something up bad enough and you'll know to watch for it next time.
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