[dylan604]

I've personally started working for a company that demanded any code that I write during employment for company is owned by them regardless if I write it during working hours or at home. I had to list out each project that I had worked on or continuing to work on to establish a history of before/after start of employment. Any new personal project had to be added to the list after a discussion to see how that project and continued employment could co-exist.

The concept here is that if you learned something new at work and then implement it into your own private projects, the company wants that project since they paid for your time learning new something. Also, NDAs and other forms of copyright and what not gets weird.

To me, the gold standard of how to do this is how Woz handled the creation of the first Apple computer. He took it to his employeer multiple times being told they did not claim any ownsership on each occassion.

[saagarjha]

> The concept here is that if you learned something new at work and then implement it into your own private projects, the company wants that project since they paid for your time learning new something.

This is not how the law works if you’re in California at least. They’ll still get you for other things if you work at a large company, but not for that.

[pbreit]

How would they even remotely be able to enforce such and thing? And is there any chance they actually would?

[dylan604]

Depends on what the valuation of the project your developing is I'd guess. Also how similar your new project is to what your day job is.