[btilly]

There are different classes of employee.

Your attitude is appropriate if you clock in, clock out, and are paid different amounts in different weeks if you show up for different lengths of time.

However I'm guessing that you are paid a fixed salary and aren't clocked. And you aren't a contractor. In that case you're a professional employee. You legally have a working relationship with them 24x7. Which is why you're not paid overtime to take clients out to dinner, or answer a page in the middle of the night.

But if that relationship always exists, who owns the intellectual property that you create away from the office? This is up to a combination of the contract you signed, and local laws.

[joosters]

Sorry, I was unclear. I was expressing my view, and not trying to explain any kind of legal position. What I was saying was that I cannot see how a company can justify owning everything I do outside of my work hours. Whether or not that is in my contract is a different matter. I would urge any potential employee to negotiate any such bad contract if they can.

If my job involved taking clients out to dinner or answering pages in the middle of the night regularly, I would damn well want to be paid for it. Not per-call, but the additional workload would have to be reflected in my salary.

Put it this way: If you are a programmer who never has to do any out-of-hours support, and then suddenly your boss says that you need to be on call 24x7, you'd be a fool not to ask for more pay.

[btilly]

The point is that "outside your work hours" is undefined. If you're receiving a page, is that work hours? If you're thinking about work during your shower, is that work hours?

Most people do a lot of productive work outside regular work hours and outside of the work place. It would be a real problem if they could then tell their employer, "This thing you're depending on? It is actually mine! You have to negotiate for it!"

So laws are passed to guarantee that it is clear who owns the brilliant solution to a work problem that you dream up in the shower. The question is how much other stuff gets swept up in that net.

[ChuckMcM]

Exactly this. If you are a professional, and in the US, this also called an "exempt" employee, you are paid a fixed salary (nominally higher than an hourly employee makes) and you don't "clock in" and "clock out", you are always on the clock. That is the nature of the employment relationship you have with your employer.

Contrast that with say Lawyers or contractors, or checkout clerks at the market who sell an hour's worth of work for $x.

This is really important to understand and internalize as an engineer. It is important because it is the way employment law looks at the relationship and that is the law which you are compelled to obey if you want to continue working/living where you are.

[thothamon]

I'm an exempt employee, but my time certainly does not all belong to my employer. I realize there are some who do, but I do not check email at midnight. My phone has a do-not-disturb setting that goes from 10 pm to 6 am. If I was asked to forego seeing my family for an extended period of time so I could, say, work on a report until 10 pm every night -- although I would try to help, any more than a small amount of this would be abusive, and I would decline to do it. If this was a real problem, I'd find another job.

Being exempt does not make me a slave. It does not mean all my creative power is used only for my employer. If I were to accept those conditions, I would have to be paid five or ten times more salary -- not even a linear increase, because the time is non-linearly more valuable to me.

I've been at a company that behaves like this. It was completely abusive of the meaning of exempt. I have nothing but contempt for companies like this.

Simple solution, at least for me: don't sign a contract that suggests that everything you think belongs to your employer; or at the very least, take your pound of flesh when you do sign something like that.

Incidentally, even the awful company above changed their contract for me when I refused to sign the over-the-top original document.

[logfromblammo]

The distinctions between wage and salary employees are very often smeared around by employers for their own benefit.

I, for instance, am technically a salaried employee. But I also have to fill out weekly time cards and account daily for the time that I work. My pay is even calculated by the hour.

The way salary used to work is that the salaried employee would answer some weekly questions. Did you work this week (yes/no)? If no, are you using one of your remaining vacation weeks (yes/no)? If the answer to either question was yes, the employee was issued a check for 1/52nd of their annual salary. If not, there might be further questions about unpaid or partially paid leave categories, or sabbaticals.

But now we have this bizarre hybrid with salaried employees logging their time by the hour, and with PTO balances instead of sick leave or vacation. On top of that, many of us at "at will", and can be fired at any time, for any reason, or no reason at all.

In my situation, I don't even have a contract, and it is obvious to me that I am only "salaried exempt" as a flag of convenience that allows my employer to skirt around certain legal protections for wage employees, most notably overtime pay.

As such, I'll invent anything I like when I'm not on the clock at work. My obligation to my employer starts and ends with the daily ration of working hours. If they want to claim ownership of whatever it is I do on nights and weekends, they might just end up paying me time-and-a-half for it, plus fines for breaking labor laws.