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Admin
Yeah, well, he should have used web assemblies instead of JS/PHP and his work would have worked fine :-)
Admin
Maybe he modified his Browser/WebServer so that this works somehow? Don't know, what would be the greater WTF then...
Admin
I can't remember how picky PHP is about semicolons, but the first line is lacking one. But they got the quoting right, which is a feat in itself. Makes me wonder where this gem originates from?
Admin
This is one of the things that really bugged me the last time I was on the job hunt. So many companies seem to assume, or worse, expect, that when I'm done with a busy day of dev work, I like to go home and do... more coding. Not saying there's anything wrong with folks who choose to do that, but some of us, especially those a little further along in life, prefer to spend our downtime with family or other hobbies.
Admin
What's wrong with that candidate?
Recruit them!
Their code will be such a spaghetti mess that it'll disgust the entire company from spaghetti, which will promote a healthy diet.
Of course, their code might end up so evil it would wake up Cthulhu, but in web development that's a normal occupationnal hazard.
Admin
Not to mention that even people who do hobby programming don't necessarily publish it on GitHub, or indeed at all.
Admin
When I was green and in my first job, one of the engineers told me that his preferred way to weed through programming candidates was asking for code. He wasn't an expert programmer, but his logic was sound. If you have a candidate who says he can't supply code because someone else (current or former employer) owned the code, it said the candidate couldn't be bothered with self-education and love for programming itself. I took this to heart. Years later when I landed a position I was asked for code and I simply dropped the source for an entire website, front end and back end in their laps. Within the hour they fired one programmer and hired me.
My sister-in-law is actually a former girlfriend back in the early 80s. She's a gifted artist. While she's done commercial illustrations, she still paints and draws for herself. I still treasure the humorous painting of me she did when we were dating, and the portrait of my late wife and me she gave as a gift. I think programming is as much an art as it is a science. And I think it's good to do art for art's sake.
Admin
Indeed. I have nothing on Github, but I do have 112 project folders on the computer I'm using right now that are full of programming projects either completed or in some state that satisfied my curiosity about something.
Admin
And when they hire you, you have to sign a contract saying everything you produce, even off work hours, belongs to them. You somehow have to produce stuff on your own time to show to others, but everything you produce does not belong to you so you are forbidden from showing it off, gotta love corporate logic.
Admin
My current employer doesn't require that, and I'd certainly refuse such a clause.
OTOH we have an in house process where I can ask if it would be a conflict of interest for me to work on a specific project.
Admin
I have newer seen a contract like that, nor do I think it would be legal. And even if it somehow were what sort of lunatic would actually sign it?
Admin
I have, although it was issued to everyone after some years of the company not having overt contracts. (In France, there is an implied contract specified in the Code du Travail that is more favourable to the employee than is required by the law, in an effort to make employers produce actual contracts. This was not, at the time in question, the case in the UK where this company was located.)
They wrote a contract that had a clause that, interpreted strictly, required the employee to commit a crime (destruction of tax records) in order to comply with the contract (it said that the employee was not permitted to keep records of his employment...). It also had an IP clause that gave the company the first rights over all copyrightable material the employee produced, even if it was completely unrelated to the company's business. (Some joker(1) did suggest writing a hard-core erotic novel and submitting it for approval - the managing director was notoriously uptight and religious, to the extent of promoting alpha courses on the internal company bulletin board.)
I was, at that moment, in the happy situation of having just given notice to quit, to the extent that the deadline for signing the contracts was after the end of my notice period, so I could just sit back and watch the fireworks...
(Observation: the company did relent on both those clauses, and reduced the IP clause to cover just stuff that fit into our respective jobs, so just code for the programmers, just ... something ... for the chef, etc. Since nobody's job was "novelist", the hard-core erotic novel would have avoided all scrutiny, for which the IP reviewers were probably grateful.)
(1) No, not me, although the idea had occurred to me.
Admin
Yes, this.
I'm in exactly such a situation now. I just lied when I said I have no external creative interests apart from with [company I am technically "employed" by].
What can they do? They operate from a country that has different employment laws from the one I live in. If they try and enforce it I will defy them with every atom of my being.
Admin
so dope
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Admin
A large multinational bank, who's name shall remain nameless, attempted to take ownership of an exceptionally popular open source java unit framework as one of the contributors was consulting there and had fixed a bug he encountered.
They backed down eventually on an altruistic basis, much to the displeasure of the legal team.