Employees working on their own business

http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.728913

by mattjung • 18 years ago

74 91 18 years ago

discuss.joelonsoftware.com

pclark2• 18 years ago

don't see what the issue is.

c1sc06• 18 years ago

The issue is that coders can only load so much code into their brain at once. There's a huge switching cost involved in going from 'own-app' to 'company-app'. You are simply not as productive when working 2 significant projects at the same time.

pclark2• 18 years ago

you're also not as productive if you play video games all night, or if you go drinking, or if you ...

gnaritas• 18 years ago

This simply isn't true, in fact for many the working on only one project is extremely boring and the home project may actually revitalize his interest and let him pursue more interesting work that further increases his skills. That increase in skills will benefit his other work projects.

mightybyte8• 18 years ago

This is not true across the board. It's very sensitive to people, projects, levels of interest, and time between switches. For me, it's especially false with boring projects, where I simply have to be able to switch to something interesting.

brlewis• 18 years ago

I find my day job productivity and side project productivity rise and fall in concert. Rarely does one work against the other.

Tichy• 18 years ago

I feel that if an employer pays me for 8 hours, I owe him 8 hours - not my whole life and soul.

mdasen• 18 years ago

My gut reaction would be to just let it be. Telling him that he can't sell it will lower his morale and possibly hasten his departure for a firm that doesn't mind (or for the project itself should the income prove to be at least enough to live off).

Does the item have value? He might be interested in selling it to you. If an employee likes his employer, they won't mind giving you their work for a little bit of money. You can always branch out into new areas.

Unless you're willing to make the employee a partner at your firm, I don't think there's much you can do that wouldn't seem "evil" and you don't seem like the evil boss type. If they're a partner at your firm, they get to direct the firm to an extent and share in its profits. If they're just a wage laborer, they will leave when something better comes along and that's one of the costs an employer must beat - and similarly the employee must bear that they cannot be paid the full value of their output as a wage laborer.

I'd say just let it be. Most web applications don't go anywhere. Be supportive and happy for him. In the case that it fails (or makes a few hundred dollars a month), he won't be leaving you and you'll come off as the awesome boss who is supportive of personal growth and chill with stuff. And that will make him stay even longer.

josefresco• 18 years ago

"But obviously, there are a lot of issues involved."

The issue here is that you have an employee that's passionate about what they do (shocker I know). A trait that's rare and should cause you concern only because there's a good chance this developer will jump ship to pursue their passion full time on their own.

I'd try to keep them employed (for you) as long as you can by encouraging this 'free time' project which will hopefully also influence your other developers to take up their own pet projects.

It's not the project that is of value, it's the engagement of the mind that benefits you and the work they create for you.

puzzle-out• 18 years ago

He's doing it in his own time - end of. If he's really that good then I would invest in his idea. If he is losing focus then kick him out. There's no absolutes here, just depends on how he works.

JabavuAdams• 18 years ago

Investment implies (part) ownership. So, you're back to figuring out who owns what.

doki_pen• 18 years ago

Judge him only on his performance. If you can't do that then you are a bad employer. His work performance is what you pay for. It's up to him to make sure he delivers on that promise.

mightybyte8• 18 years ago

I'll second this. The issue of whether you are paying for his time or his performance is a cloudy one. The paying for time argument invariably gets into issues like how much other unproductive time you spend doing things like talking to coworkers, using the bathroom, staring out the window, and browsing the web. In general it seems to degenerate into the horribly inflexible clock-out-when-you-go-to-the-bathroom factory-ish policy.

So if you are happy with his actual concrete performance, then I'd say don't worry about it. If he can make you happy spending 15 minutes of real work per day, then you need to think hard about how to better leverage his talents. Unfortunately, increasing your expectations of him while keeping everyone else the same will not make him happy either. It's still a tough issue.

euroclydon• 18 years ago

Performance Metrics: Many companies view this as overhead. It's sort of a pain in the ass, so if I have to do it because my employee is working on the side, then he needs to carry the burden compiling the metrics. He could stay on-site an extra half hour per day and generate a report on what he did, or I could generate the metrics, and just pay him a little less for this inconvenience.

icey• 18 years ago

If he's your employee, you really should have a feel for how long it takes him to get something done. You should also know what sort of quality to expect from him.

If you can't determine those things, then one of you is not doing your job already.

ntoshev2• 18 years ago

Measuring performance of programmers (or knowledge workers in general) is an unsolved problem.

johnrob2• 18 years ago

Not when you are deciding whether or not someone should be let go. Every employer should know whether a developer is doing an acceptable job.

mightybyte8• 18 years ago

Objective, concrete, quantifiable metrics are the unsolved problem. Every one that I've ever heard of can be gamed by the developer. The only exception to this that I can think of is the metric of product success in the market. But it's too large-scale to be useful in measuring individual employees.

Subjective metrics are quite common and effective. That's how good programmers such as <insert favorite hacker hero here> are regarded as good.

tom_rath14• 18 years ago

This can be really nasty for a small business. On the one hand, you understand the desire to build a seed for a software company, on the other you're dedicating scarce resources to pay this employee to work exclusively for you.

I'd tend towards overly-harsh on this one: You're either an employee or an entrepreneur. The choice is binary. We'd love to have you as an employee, but a person building their own business and riding on the salary we (a small business ourselves) pay while they do it is not welcome.

Every employer I had before heading off and starting my own company had an air-tight IP policy which basically owned my software-developing ass. That makes sense: You're either an employee or an owner, you don't mix the two.

c1sc06• 18 years ago

I agree it can be pretty destructive in a small company, but what about big businesses? They're inefficient anyway, so the lost productivity is not such a big deal over there. Is it morally acceptable to freeload, but only in big businesses?

tom_rath14• 18 years ago

I don't think it's morally acceptable to freeload, but for big businesses the point is likely moot: The IP agreement they will have had you sign at the start of your job will take away all rights to your on-your-own-time product in any case.

davidw4• 18 years ago

What if you're doing open source software? That's a similar situation. I think the idea of an employer trying to tell you what you can and can't do in your own time is pretty offensive. You have to keep things separate, of course, but beyond that, your own time is your own time, period. Obviously, if it's visibly affecting an employee, in terms of less hours worked, or lower quality, ok, sure, have a talk about it, but the difference is that you're looking at work time in that case.

tom_rath14• 18 years ago

I've nothing but good things to say about employees working on "side-projects" and open source projects. They're superb for self-education (I enjoyed participating in both while I was an employee) but are completely different than running a business.

Running a business isn't a hobby: It takes all of your attention, day and night.

I'm not paying employees to start their own business, I'm paying them to work on mine.

edit: I know this chafes with the 'free spirits' on this site who haven't found the guts to start an actual business yet, but I promise you'll find it's true when it's your cash going out as wages.

ryanwaggoner6• 18 years ago

you're dedicating scarce resources to pay this employee to work exclusively for you

Bull-fucking-shit. I don't understand the mentality that because someone pays me for 40+ hours of work per week, they think they own me and can demand that I work exclusively for them, or that anything I do in my own time belongs to them. If my work suffers, or if I'm stealing IP or clients, that's another story. But if I'm working on something in my own time, fuck you if you think you own it.

Tamerlin3• 18 years ago

Hear, hear.

I can't believe that anyone worth anything would choose to work for a company that believed that it owned them even after hours.

tom_rath14• 18 years ago

As I mentioned in replies to your other comments above, running a business requires your full attention. It's not a hobby. It's not a side-project. It's a way of life.

You cannot work for another person while running your own business. A business becomes the centre of a person's universe and an employee's work will suffer if they are building a genuine business on the side. No amount of dramatic profanity will change that reality.

Of all the vigorous down-mods and "you're wrong!" comments I've received here in response, I've yet to read a single real-world example of a person who has a full-time employee on staff working on their own business, or who is a full-time employee working on their own business while being paid a salary by another company.

Why? Because you're an employee or you're an entrepreneur. Those are not compatible mind-sets.

If you work for me and want to start your own company, great! I'll happily send you on your way and offer every bit of support I possibly can to ensure your success, but I won't pay you to build your own business.

okeumeni2• 18 years ago

I started working on my own stuff to keep on with technology and bring some fun into my life. I never stopped working on a side project; I do not mix my time at work (at my employer) and my side business. Today as a full time consultant I found it even easier to equally use my time at both my startup and my clients.

rokhayakebe• 18 years ago

Ask him what would he do if he was in your position.

lgriffith2• 18 years ago

I practically rewrote every IP "agreement" for nearly every job I had since I started working in industry (ca. 1965). The terms were more or less as follows.

1. I am in the business of invention. I invent many things. I cannot possibly disclose all of them. Hence, ANYTHING I have done in the past is excluded and ANYTHING I will do after I leave your employ is excluded without having to be disclosed. This is true even if the thing invented can be construed to be directly or indirectly connected to your business. The only exception to this will be those things directly and explicitly connected to your IP disclosed to me during my employ for a period not to exceed two years after my departure for un-registered un-patented IP. Normal patent and copyright laws apply - BOTH ways.

2. What I do 0n your time with your equipment on projects specifically assigned to me is yours.

3. What I do on my time with my equipment on my self assigned projects distinct from yours is mine.

4. Since my business is invention, if the invention was concieved on your premises but is not DIRECTLY connected to your business, your disclosed IP, and your assigned project, the invention is mine. This will be true even if the invention is used to indirectly support project. In that case, a non-exclusive license to use will be granted by me to you but I still own the resultant IP.

Almost without exception, the terms were accepted. Where there was substantial disagreement, I looked for another job/contract.

ph0rque• 18 years ago

Comments like these make me wish there was a "bookmark comment for future reference" feature on HN.

thedob• 18 years ago

Click 'link', then 'Save to Delicious'. Problem solved.

nostrademons3• 18 years ago

What size employers? I'm finally understanding that basically everything is open to negotiation with smaller organizations. However, many large organizations have stock contracts on their Intranet which you e-sign, and there's literally nobody to negotiate with. Plus, if you decline to sign, they'll happily find another employee, since they've got too many already.

lgriffith2• 18 years ago

I did it with large and small. The largest one was General Motors (ca 1998). I negotiated the IP agreement with my first industrial employer. I didn't get all the terms I asked for but I did get enough to make it worth while to sign.

An additional requirement might be that you actually have to be an inventor with a proven track record. If your proven record and skill set is indistinguishable from millions other workers, you are hosed no matter what. You have to take what you can get. In that case, it doesn't matter because you have no IP to protect anyway.

Most IP agreements are written by lawyers who arrange the terms to be totally one sided. Your employer is to have absolute claim over the entire contents of your life. THAT is simply unacceptable. Yes, you need a job but the employer needs someone who can do the work as well. You don't have to agree to be a rightless drone. A job like that is not worth having.

You have the right to pursue your skill to make a living. An employer does not have the right to prohibit that. Ask for terms that respect BOTH your and your employer's rights and you are likely to have them accepted.

known• 18 years ago

Since 1993 there were number of Anonymous authors in Linux Kernel http://lxr.linux.no/linux-old+v1.0/net/inet/sock.c#L50

geebee• 18 years ago

I do completely understand why an employer would own the employee's work if it is related to the job and was completed using the employer's equipment... but it still worries me, as a developer, and as a consumer.

I figure the public has an interest in promoting as much innovation as possible. This means that we want employers to be able to hire employees to work on innovative projects, but we don't want to discourage employees from working on projects on their own either. So if this relationship gets out of balance, we could end up stifling innovation from one side of the relationship.

Think of it this way... suppose I'm a house flipper. I mainly do this on my own time, but I do search the web for properties, email friends about investment opportunities, and call mortgage brokers while I'm at work. It's not a huge time sink, probably no worse than the random goofing off or reading hacker news that goes on at work.

I doubt a court would allow my employer to "own" my profits from flipping houses.

Now say I have a side programming project. I mainly do this at home on my computer, but occasionally I think about it at work, and I have fixed bugs, sketched out an algorithm, or tested the site at work, and I did write a bit of code on my work supplied computer.

In this case, I suspect the courts (IANAL, of course!) would award ownership to my employer, even if the project is unrelated to my work tasks.

So basically, the law does encourage programmers to start side businesses in areas unrelated to technology... but don't we want programmers to innovate in their field of expertise? Personally, I'd much rather see programmers writing innovative applications than flipping houses.

I don't have an easy answer for it, because like I said earlier, I also do see a clear need to provide IP ownership for investors employers who are paying employees to innovate. But I'd draw this line more narrowly - no big surprise, since I am a programmer "employee" myself, and these rules would favor me.

blurry• 18 years ago

Am I the only one who's read the original issue as not the problem with extracurricular activities per say, but the fact that the employee now wants to sell one of those apps?

The employer said:

One of my employees is always working in small applications for his family or just for the fun of it. Now he wants to start selling one of those applications.

... and

I think that anyone can do what he wishes with his own time. But obviously, there are a lot of issues involved.

The way I read it, he's known about the side projects for a while and never had a problem with them. He is having second thoughts only because he's learned that the coder wants to make money off one of those projects...

I think that what's really happening here is the employer having a personal bias of the money-is-dirty variety. Obviously, anyone is welcome to whatever moral attitudes they like, but to force them onto your employees is completely inappropriate.

lsc2• 18 years ago

The employee running his own business is going to be somewhat distracted, just like an employee with a family or kids. It's something else that is more important than his job. The thing is, an employees interests don't exactly align with the business owners interests. As a business owner, almost everything I do is focused on growing that business. The closest you can come to that in an employee, really, is a single person who is really into programming. these people will have hobby projects, but that's ok, especially if they can be things kindof related to technologies your business uses. Like the SysAdmin who writes apache modules.

That said, you don't always just fire people when they get married. the question, simply, is 'Is the employee, with all his or her distractions, still worth his or her salary?' - Most of us are unwilling to remain single and completely dedicated to our jobs for our whole life. Right now, for instance, if you want to hire me, you have to put up with my business being my primary focus, otherwise I won't work for you. (but then I'm a contractor, so that's not unexpected.) And just imagine the outcry if you acted against people who valued their family over your business.

quellhorst• 18 years ago

I like to turn projects I am working on for clients into services I sell to new clients. It seems to work ok. My clients get better quality and I get more income without extra hourly work.

Employees working on their own business

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