That is entirely possible, but not at all a problem. If something is being done in secret, so that the employee doesn't know that the other division is working on it, then there are no trade secrets that would be divulged by working on something similar.

That companies require you to get approval to work on something on your own time is fundamentally absurd. If I were a carpenter, I would not need permission to make a table. If I wrote ads, I would not need permission to write a book. That we think it reasonable for open source contributions to require company approval show that there is a severe overstepping of bounds on the part of the company.

People outside a company will not believe that employees of the company keep secrets from each other, at least when it suits them to believe otherwise.

So like it or not, if it looks like there're a conflict of interest (even if there isn't), people will blame it on the company.

So I don't really think it's so bad that they want to know what you're working on, provided that approval is usually granted.

Asking for approval, even if that approval is typically granted, still implies that they have the authority to refuse permission. The farthest that the employer's moral authority extends is to ask politely to be informed. Not to require to be informed, and certainly not to require approval.

May be the permission should be flipped - the company has to ask the employee for approval to stop the opensource project.

It would work by having the employee list their projects, and the company will, when they find a conflict or some shared interest, ask for the employee to volunteer to stop their project. The employee can refuse, but typically won't.

Microsoft doesn't. You're only required to get pre-approval in case of conflicts of interest.

> You're only required to get pre-approval in case of conflicts of interest.

Given the extremely diverse set of things that Microsoft works on, much of which is likely done without you being disclosed on it, how can you be sure that your project is not a conflict of interest?

Conflict of interest = something you are directly involved with at work, or potentially worked on for the company previously. For example, if you're on the SQL Server team then contributing to SQLLite would reasonably be considered a conflict of interest, but contributions to the Linux kernel wouldn't be.

Even if your company works on a direct competitor to Linux?

By asking?

This. I have it in my contracts or a rider if they don't like amending the contract itself. I write code, when I stop working for you for the day I still write code. Yes it's lucky that I can get paid to do the main thing I enjoy, but you aren't paying me for the stuff I do off the clock. I will let you know about any major pieces of software I write (not like twenty line Python scripts for managing my music) and if you detect a conflict that's the moment to object, if you do then I'll work on something else, otherwise I own it outright and that's fair.

Good employers don't want to abuse you, and in turn don't want to get abused, drawing a line is something they can understand and their lawyers can get their heads around. "This is mine, this is yours".

Who decides what's the conflict of the interest. Developers?

Ultimately, if there's a disagreement over this, it would be the courts, since it's in the employment contract.

Right, but once the devs release something valuable into the wild, well, the cat is out of the bag. The implications can be seriously damaging to the company. It can be as severe as invalidating patents or infinging patents belonging to other companies. Can be evenvia a dependency. I can’t believe devs make those decisions without any supervision.

However, if that is the case, I’d love to know how so one can implement similar processes internally!

Every company that is based on california, or that employs you in california, is better.

No matter what the non-compete says, if you're in CA, you can use your own hardware and non-work time to develop anything that doesn't directly compete with your employer/dayjob and doesn't use trade secrets/IP from the company.

Amazon though is mostly based in Washington, where no such law exists, so sweeping non-competes are legal.

The above is the reason that there is a difference between various FAANG companies. Even if the company policy requires you to get approval, if it really isn't a work-related piece of code, you can simply tell them to pound sand and CA will have your back.

This is misleading. While non-competes are enforceable in Washington, employers can not force employees to sign away the rights to inventions produced on their own time without employer resources.

Compare https://apps.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=49.44.140 to the equivalent CA law: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio... . It's essentially the same wording.

Isn't "invention" a patent term? Not all creative work is invention.

> No matter what the non-compete says, if you're in CA, you can use your own hardware and non-work time to develop anything that doesn't directly compete with your employer/dayjob and doesn't use trade secrets/IP from the company.

What if you work for a company that happens to have a stake in basically every field of technology?

This is one of two reasons why I work for a small company, and also why I left another small company when it was acquired by a large company -- CA 2870 only offers meaningful protection when your employer isn't active in the relevant field of endeavor.

I don't want to compete with my employer, I just want to write some sound software on my own time and to maintain my ability to contribute in open source administration. It offends me that the state of the industry is such that I'm expected to sign away my soul on taking any software development job.

(The other main reason I won't work for a big is that I don't want to work 40 hours each week but the bigs won't budge on that.)

It may be reasonable for them to do this, but it may also be reasonable for individuals to decide the practice is not worth enduring for them to work at such a place.

VMware requires approvals even for own-time projects. They don't put up artificial barriers in my experience; there's a very simple process for declaring outside projects and approval is quick as long as it's not viewed as competitive. I thought their approach seemed reasonable for a big company with a large IP portfolio.

It was not always this way--VMware has become much more open source friendly over the last few years.

Not even open source - most googlers I know will not code anything even volunteer community projects outside of work because if they were involved google would claim it was theirs.

It's entirely possible that the big company's interests could encroach upon my open source project, too. Why do they get a pass?

>Truth is, excepting maybe Netflix, the rest of FAANG requires you to get approvals.

Is this really true? In my company (not FAANG, but a big one), you need approval only if what you do in your spare time has overlap with the work you are doing in your job. What the rest of the company is doing is immaterial.