IBM employee forced to stop kernel work under personal email address

Re:IBM employee forced to stop kernel work under personal em... by kitd on Tuesday April 20, 2021 @11:25AM (#26875935)

I don't think it's meant literally. Only that you "represent" IBM all the time, even if not technically working for them. This is a fairly common stance AIUI.

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Re:IBM employee forced to stop kernel work under personal em... by michaelt on Tuesday April 20, 2021 @11:44AM (#26876158)

It's a common stance, just unpopular with workers.

Very popular with employers, of course: You get to avoid the minor risk of them embarrassing you; you reduce their job market value by preventing them from having a portfolio or any public profile; you remove non-work distractions from their free time; and you get to vacuum up any IP they generate outside of work hours.

So naturally, employers want to normalise the idea.

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Re:IBM employee forced to stop kernel work under personal em... by johnnyanmac on Friday April 23, 2021 @01:01PM (#26916736)

I see it more as an inevitability of the growing online nature. As long as people use their personal name on social media and have an obvious link to their line of work, any and everything you say represents your work. For better or worse. And what you say can persist for years unlike before.

I didn't take the statement as "we own all your time" so much as "you represent the company at all times".

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Re:IBM employee forced to stop kernel work under personal em... by setr on Tuesday April 20, 2021 @05:11PM (#26881746)

>you remove non-work distractions from their free time

I don't think the narrative is usually "you can't work on anything else"; it's that you can't claim to have two jobs.

>you reduce their job market value by preventing them from having a portfolio or any public profile

It's not clear to me that "[email protected]" vs "[email protected]" changes the equation on portfolio lookup by any significant degree.

>you get to vacuum up any IP they generate outside of work hours

This seems to me the only real significant part of the equation, and by far the dangerous one -- a benevolent company will generally not care if your side projects are unrelated to you main project, but ultimately the decision is entirely their's, leaving a gaping hole of largely unnecessary risk.

The justification however is really that it becomes murky really quickly -- your generated IP is usually in the same vein as what you do at work (you work at what you're good at, and you presumably need to be good at X to produce new IP in it). So it quickly becomes questionable how much of that IP was really just you pulling on resources/knowledge/equipment from your working environment.

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Re:IBM employee forced to stop kernel work under personal em... by michaelt on Tuesday April 20, 2021 @05:39PM (#26882126)

> I don't think the narrative is usually "you can't work on anything else"; it's that you can't claim to have two jobs.

In the case we're talking about, the employee was told they can't work on the kernel in their free time. Clearly not a second job.

> It's not clear to me that "[email protected]" vs "[email protected]" changes the equation on portfolio lookup by any significant degree.

In this case, they were told they couldn't work on the kernel even under their personal e-mail address - and to remove the credit for work they'd already done. Seems pretty clear-cut to me?

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Re:IBM employee forced to stop kernel work under personal em... by setr on Tuesday April 20, 2021 @10:30PM (#26884770)

I’m not sure what you’re reading but it’s not what I’m reading.

TFA only talks about working under gmail vs ibm email; it says nothing about not working on it period (perhaps by removal from maintainer’s file? But I read that as switch it with it the IBM email, since that’s all it talks about otherwise.)

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