Ask HN: Can I work on my side project while working for your company?
Of course, all projects are going to be limited in scope to what one person, me, can do on a part time basis.
For example, let's say I want to work for Google. I also want to create my own niche search engine for myself and anyone else who cares to use it. It will probably run on three or four servers on a SQL or an easy to maintain NoSQL backend. Compare this to Google's gigantic ultra scalable Spanner database system which requires hordes of people to just maintain. Technology wise, it's night and day. Can I work for Google while keeping ownership of my engine? If not, why not?
I don't want to go beyond what I as an individual but I still want to work in whatever side project I feel like doing without the hassle of doing things like getting "approval" for every idea I come up with since they can change at any time.
These clauses are for the company to cover their ass. Let's say you make Flappy Bird at Google and they try to claim it. The bad publicity will not be worth it.
Working on a side project that competes with their core business is different. But if it's a pet project with 100 users then Google will be seen as the bad guy again. How about 1 million users? Then you've created a competitor and less people will sympathize with it being shut down.
I hope that made sense.
How about creating Flappy Birds while being glue coder #1,341 for EA's next big budget NFL next gen console game? Would the same idea apply? Would the idea be different for EA vs Amazon or Microsoft?