IBM employee forced to stop kernel work under personal email address

Re:IBM employee forced to stop kernel work under personal em... by virgilp on Tuesday April 20, 2021 @07:00AM (#26873003)

I get the feeling, just want to say that it all worked out well (towards "spectacularly well") for me. It's easy to say "for any amount of money" in the abstract, but that job directly and indirectly took me from "relatively poor" to "fatfire-level-of-rich". And didn't _really_ restrict me in any way - I got the written approvals to teach when needed, and contributing to OSS was possible (though there was some red tape).

I'm by no mean advocating that one should ignore the contracts, but I do think you need to look at the larger picture... sometimes it just is overzealous lawyers and not necessarily a bad company to work for.

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Re:IBM employee forced to stop kernel work under personal em... by jokethrowaway on Tuesday April 20, 2021 @09:08AM (#26874071)

Completely agree with you. More power to you!

You just need to know when to quit

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Re:IBM employee forced to stop kernel work under personal em... by 1_player on Tuesday April 20, 2021 @08:37AM (#26873734)

There's usually pretty incredible benefits in signing away your soul to the Devil. Happy that it worked out for you in the end.

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Re:IBM employee forced to stop kernel work under personal em... by virgilp on Wednesday April 21, 2021 @05:13AM (#26887092)

You went pretty fast from "you are just a cog in the machine and there is no 'you'. Sign here please" to "signing away your soul to the Devil".

I understand the first statement/feeling, and my reply was meant to say that it might be ok to take the risk that "you are just a cog in the machine". As for the latter statement, not sure where you got that one from, there was nothing in the contract that suggested it (and there was nothing evil in the job that I was originally hired for, either - it was code intelligence (code hinting) for PHP).

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Re:IBM employee forced to stop kernel work under personal em... by 1_player on Wednesday April 21, 2021 @05:28AM (#26887209)

My bad, it was a sorry attempt at being witty. I didn't mean any disrespect to your choice.

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