Does your employer own your side projects?
There’s a surprising amount of misinformation out there about whether software companies own the work that a programmer does in their spare time.
From my answer to the question on answers.onstartups.com:
Being an employee of a high tech company whose product is intellectual means that you have decided that you want to sell your intellectual output.
Read the whole thing here:
Want to know more?
You’re reading Joel on Software, stuffed with years and years of completely raving mad articles about software development, managing software teams, des
igning user interfaces, running successful software companies, and rubber duckies
Want to know more?
You’re reading Joel on Software, stuffed with years and years of completely raving mad articles about software development, managing software teams, designing user interfaces, running successful software companies, and rubber duckies.
About the author,
I’m Joel Spolsky, co-founder of Fog Creek Software, a New York company that proves that you can treat programmers well and still be highly profitable. Programmers get private offices, free lunch, and work 40 hours a week. Customers only pay for software if they’re delighted. We make FogBugz, an enlightened bug tracking and software development tool, Kiln, a distributed source control system that will blow your socks off if you’re stuck on Subversion, and Fog Creek Copilot, which makes remote desktop access easy. I’m also the co-founder of Stack Overflow.
New Sites
Last summer, we relaunched Stack Exchange as a democratically-driven network of sites on topics chosen by our users. Some of these sites are directly related to programming (for example, Game Development), but some are quite far afield, from English Language toCooking.
We call it the Stack Exchange network, and at StackExchange.com you’ll find a directory of all of them, along with some hot questions, statistics, leaderboards, and other tools so that you can follow the sites and tags that you’re interested in.
We learned a long time ago that the only way to get questions answered promptly is to have a critical mass of knowledgeable users, so we have an onerous process called Area 51 where sites are proposed, discussed, and voted on. If a proposed site doesn’t have critical mass, we just won’t create it. Even if it does get created, it has to maintain a certain level of traffic and quality or we’ll close it down.
So far, 13 sites have gone all the way through the Area 51 process and launched. Dozens more are already in beta. Hundreds more are in active discussion and will launch when they reach a critical mass of interested participants.
The development team has been knocking out new features at a constant pace. They built an amazing web-based chat system, and we’ve added literally hundreds of new features and improvements to the core Stack Overflow engine which we roll out continuously.
The Company
At the beginning of the year, Stack Overflow LLC was just three developers working from home. In the spring, we raised $6 million in venture capital from Union Square Ventures and a long list of celebrity angel investors, which allowed us to expand rapidly. We hired a team of great people, including several of the high-reputation users that you know from Stack Overflow.
We now have community managers, a sales team, two full time system administrators, and Very Important Administrative Overhead like myself, but most importantly, we have a great team of developers, in New York and around the world, building the next generation of cool features, like the important “wheel of blame” feature, which we can run at any time to calculate precisely who is responsible for anything that went wrong. (Contrary to popular belief, it’s not always Jason Punyon.)To make room for all these people, or, at least, those who live in New York, we rented a 7500 square foot, class A, super-elite batcave in New York and then fixed it up to be nice, with cool furniture including Aeron chairs and height-adjustable desks, and lots of glass to bring views and daylight deep into the batcave. And of course, we have private offices with a half dozen gigantic 453-inch monitors for each developer. And there’s an amazingly cool Star Trek couch. Does your company have a Star Trek Couch? *I didn’t think so.* We also have Rovio, a little robot that our remote developers can use to visit the office “virtually.” (There. I said “virtually.” Are you happy now?)
Overall 2010 has been a real breakout year for Stack Overflow, which is now the largest programmer website in the world (source: me) and the best, fastest-growing Q&A website in the world (source: also me). We’ve got an incredible team firing on all cylinders, so we’re really looking forward to 2011.
FogBugz and Kiln (coming soon to a city near you)
Thanks to the hard work of the Fog Creek team, including ten great summer interns, we have just released amazing new upgrades to FogBugz and Kiln.
To kick off the new releases, we’re about to start another one of our famous world tours. I’ll be flying to 20 (yes, twenty) different cities to demo FogBugz 8.0 to anyone who wants to come see it in person.
As an added bonus, I’m also going to bring along someone from the Kiln team to teach a one-hour course in distributed version control. If you’ve been wondering what all the fuss is about, this is a painless way to learn the basics of the new generation of version control.
Map generated by the Great Circle Mapper - copyright © Karl L. Swartz
Want to know more?
You’re reading Joel on Software, stuffed with years and years of completely raving mad articles about software development, managing software teams, designing user interfaces, running successful software companies, and rubber duckies.
About the author.
I’m Joel Spolsky, co-founder of Fog Creek Software, a New York company that proves that you can treat programmers well and still be highly profitable. Programmers get private offices, free lunch, and work 40 hours a week. Customers only pay for software if they’re delighted. We make FogBugz, an enlightened bug tracking and software development tool, Kiln, a distributed source control system that will blow your socks off if you’re stuck on Subversion, and Fog Creek Copilot, which makes remote desktop access easy. I’m also the co-founder of Stack Overflow.
