Hello, Khabrovsk citizens!
Recently, I have been lucky to run a fair amount of interviews and even get offers from some well-known and not-so-European companies, but I will not tell you today about how to prepare to solve tricky programming tasks or how to better demonstrate soft skills. Today we will talk about open source and labor contracts, how much they correspond to each other and what pitfalls can be here. There is nothing sadder than a forced retirement after 3 stages of interviews and a week of homework, when it comes to the understanding that you will not sign this employment contract even at gunpoint. I saw many labor contracts and learned to distinguish very bad from bad, bad from tolerable and tolerable from good. Read more about everything under the cut.
Disclaimer: in this article, I will describe not only my experience, but also the experience of my friends. For obvious reasons, I will not name companies by name in this article.
So, imagine the situation: you do a test task for a week, go through 3 stages of an interview, they send you an offer with a relocation to Western Europe for relatively good money, you are ready to drop everything and already collect your bags, but something worries you, you ask for a little more time think and ask to send you a draft of the employment contract. You carefully study the contract, delve into all the nuances and understand that this is an example of very bad contact, under the terms of which you:
- You have no right to disclose anything at all, from the word at all. Otherwise - a large fine.
- You can forget about your projects. Otherwise - a large fine.
- If there is at least some connection between what you do / invent long time after employment and what you worked on or even learned / gained experience from this employer, then you must transfer all rights accordingly to him. Even if for this you need to go to another country and apply for patents and assignment of rights. Otherwise - a large fine.
- You are shining overtime without additional compensation.
- The terms of the contract, the employer may change unilaterally.
And this is far from all. In general, the matter is clear - past the cash register.
Even before this incident, I was thinking hard about the Intellectual property clause or paragraph on intellectual property rights in labor contracts of IT industry workers and programmers in particular. Writing a quality code is often the only skill that we have and we have been honing for many years with the hope of selling it more expensive, but at some point it comes to the understanding that the skill can not only be sold, but also invested in open source, which is increasingly called the dark matter of the software industry, where its "gravity" and other "laws of physics" operate. Contributing to open source projects is possible for self-development and networking with other devolopers, but often also for potential employers to notice you. A profile on Github is often able to say more about a developer than a profile on Linkedin and writing open source code, participating in a collective review code, fixing bugs and writing documentation for open source projects becomes part of the life of the most active and goal-oriented developers.
Attending various IT conferences in Europe, I got acquainted with the term IP-friendly in relation to labor contracts. This term refers to such agreements, which in no way limit the employees in terms of directing their intellectual efforts in their free time or introduce reasonable restrictions to protect the employer from competition. For example, the terms of the contract, which state that "everything that was done on the employer's equipment and according to the direct instructions of the employer, belongs to the employer" is more friendly to the individual than "everything that was done during the term of the employment contract belongs unconditionally to the employer." As they say, feel the difference!
Google was the first to understand the importance of supporting open source projects by developers, which allowed its employees to devote up to 20% of their time to open projects, while other leading companies picked up the trend and did not lag behind. The benefit for companies is obvious, this is a win-win strategy, because the company receives a reputation as a hub for the most talented developers, which in turn attracts even more powerful professionals. The threshold for entering such companies is very high and the best of the best are selected there.
Most companies are less aware of new trends only by hearsay and try to include as many restrictions as possible into their labor contracts. I had to meet such, without exaggeration, formulations like "The employer is the owner of everything and everything created by the employee." It is a sad fact, but many developers agree to such conditions because of a lack of knowledge in the field of intellectual property rights or because of a difficult life situation (here it’s not up to going over the offer). How can the situation be improved? In my opinion, there are several ways:
- Raise awareness of IT workers about intellectual property rights.
- Promote the ideas of IP friendly contracts among employers.
- Not only participate in open source projects, but be open source evangelists.
- To support developers in their dispute with corporations, to strive to ensure that public opinion is on the side of the developer if the corporation tries to “squeeze” the project.
In the end, I found a job with much better contract conditions. The main thing is not to rush to the first sentence and continue to search. And to contribute to open source, because the developer’s cultural heritage is his code, and if the developer writes all the code for corporations, then his legacy, his visible and tangible imprint on the digital landscape is null .
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PPS The article plans to continue ...