cbarrick 10 days ago

> Your employer is bad and they should feel bad!

For the record, my employer is Google.

They call this process the Invention Assignment Review Committee or IARC.

From what I understand, the process is not actually enforceable anyway. Code I write related to my job is owned by them; other code I write is owned by me. I don't necessarily have to go through their process for this to be true. And their lawyers certainly know this.

I've done it once, and the process is lightweight. And I probably could ignore it in practice with no one actually caring. But the fact that the process even exists is enough of a blocker that I don't readily publish my hobby projects anymore, and that's kinda shitty.

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grayhatter 9 days ago

> I've done it once, and the process is lightweight. And I probably could ignore it in practice with no one actually caring. But the fact that the process even exists is enough of a blocker that I don't readily publish my hobby projects anymore, and that's kinda shitty.

and they know this, and that's the point... there's a reason people talk about the chilling effects of shitty, but not technically illegal behavior

> For the record, my employer is Google.

Yeah, I knew that from your hn profile. Which caused me to ask a friend, also SRE at google, how onerous it was, he said basically the exact same thing you did, just intrusive enough his github is also completely empty.

I wonder what cool stuff doesn't exist today because of it