Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 239: Hustle and patents and toxicity

Episode Date: December 7, 2020

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: Questions Really love the podcast. Keep it up! I’m in a senior role at a software company and have been here over 5 years. I have come up with a SaaS product idea after finding a problem in my company’s engineering process and started working on it. It solves a niche problem in general software development so it isn’t related to my company product. I would like to use this product at my current company both to help me manage the technical issues at my current company and to help validate and grow the idea. Should I have any concerns with what I’m doing? Can my company claim my idea as it’s own? What should I be doing now to protect myself? Any other things I should consider? Does it make sense to validate a new side hustle idea at a company while working full time at said company? Please help soft skills wizards: Junior eng at a huge conglomerate, quit mid-patent process (OK I HAD A PRODUCTIVE TUESDAY A MONTH AGO and I’m pretty good with mermaid.js). If they come back with a job offer post-departure, since I am the sole inventor on this patent, how do I properly handle this one? My manager was…. extremely toxic and every attempt that was made to move was botched either by CoViD-19 or my chain of command. I don’t think I could feasibly have a positive interaction with my former manager and working under him has had a significant impact on my mental health. But…. I loved my work. I loved some of the people I worked with. Sometimes it being a huge conglomerate had its upsides as well: I was able to bend the rules as long as the bureaucracy had prevented someone from implementing the visibility that would have demonstrated the rules were bent. If they give me an offer to return as a junior architect I would be very tempted to do so, but would be afraid of being anywhere near my former manager, director or VP.

it takes more than an unread stack of tech books as a monitor stance be a great software engineer this is episode 239 of the soft skills engineering podcast i am your host jameson dance i'm your host dave smith soft skills engineering is a weekly advice show where we answer your non-technical questions about the technical field of software development for the technical questions you have your monitor stand to turn to that's right is this a universal thing i'm assuming everyone is the same as i am but i've definitely used tech books and rarely have i read them as a monitor stand i used to read tech books a lot and i realized as you said that intro i realized that the last tech book i read i bought was four years ago and i have not read a single page so i'm just gonna

you absorb it through osmosis that's right i sleep near it yeah i haven't i have an untouched copy of documenting software architectures i think that's the last one i bought not even cracked a page it's not even working as a monitor stand right now what is it doing it's totally useless dave you want to thank our wonderful patrons i do thanks so much to those that are contributing on Patreon. Their names are Roman Denisov, Fizzbuzz Influencer, Code Lemur, Christian Polanco, Oladapo Fadiyi, Kiaran Sveinsen, Ragnar Hardison, Nick Hathaway, Travis Sanders, Dennis Bogdanoff, Brayden Kane, Stephen Armand Lee, John Grant, Chris Hogan, The Agile Ventures Charity, Nick

Cantor, and Philip John Basile. If you would like to have your name shouted out or whatever word you choose, you can go to softskills.audio and click support us on Patreon. And if you contribute any dollar amount greater than zero, we will give you access to our Slack community. Where we just have a fantastic time. Every week, something cool is happening there. And you are missing out on it. We had a parade. And instead of candy, we threw old, unread tech books.

Oh, jeez. Just took people out. Just clobber somebody with volume 4A of The Art of Computer Programming. All right. I'm going to read our first question. This is from an anonymous listener. Really love the podcast. Keep it up.

Thank you. We probably will. Yeah. I'm in a senior role at a software company and have been here for over five years. I have come up with a SaaS product idea after finding a problem in my company's engineering process and have started working on it. It solves a niche problem in general software development, so it isn't related to my company's product.

I would like to use this product at my current company, both to help me manage the technical issues at my current company and to help validate and grow the idea should i have any concerns about what i'm doing can my company claim my ideas its own what should i be doing now to protect myself any other things i should consider does it make sense to validate a new side hustle idea at a company while working full-time at said company oh this question is awesome i love this i've always wanted to do this to build a thing and use your current job as the as the funding slash test bed No, not so much that part. I've always wanted to spin off a niche software solution company for SaaS teams. I don't know why. I think I've used so many simple products now over the years that have turned into monthly payments that my company uses because I don't want to have to build and maintain that. and I'll be perfectly happy to throw 400 bucks a month at it, you know, to make sure it never

fails. And there's someone else looking into that. And I just think there's, there's probably a hundred company ideas in every SaaS company's portfolio of operations tasks that they perform every week and shouldn't be. So it says this is, this is not a necessarily a SaaS company that they work at. Their idea is just for a SaaS product. Oh, okay. Oh, we should do, SaaS stands for software as a service, just to, it's, it's like some kind of software that is hosted generally by this company that you pay some amount of money to use yeah and what's really great is um once you know what sass stands for you can basically substitute the first s for anything you want you know like baby mulching as a service was the last one yeah product as a service is is hot

infrastructure well not anymore really platform as a service sorry not product yes infrastructure as a service. Yeah, that's the one. I want to do SaaS as a service. Yeah. Like a company that has a product that creates SaaS company. I mean, that's sort of like Stripe, right? I guess you could say venture capital, like a venture capital as a service. It produces SaaS companies. You put dollars in and SaaS companies come out. Anyways, I'm really curious to hear your initial reaction to this idea? I am perplexed. Boy, it would depend a lot on the company you work for. If one of my engineers who works at my company, like who works for me, said, hey, by the way, I've been working on this thing on the side. Do you want to be my first customer?

Yeah. I just don't know how I would feel. Like on the one hand, I'd say, oh, this is awesome. It solves our problem. Yeah, I'll throw a couple hundred bucks a month at you whatever whatever it is on the other hand i'd be thinking i wonder what productivity loss i have paid for over the last year you know yeah the first thing i'll say is read your employment contracts again and then again and then again because it's very possible that you work at a company that already owns your sass product idea that's right so congratulations you might get a nice bonus this year yeah google is famous for doing this and lots of other tech companies do this, or companies in general, where literally anything you make at all, ever, on any time or

equipment, the company just claims ownership over it. And I don't know enough about earth law to know how enforceable it is, but it sure sounds scary when you read it. Every employment contract that I have signed has very nuanced but important verbiage, like the word related to or competes with that that specifically calls out products that are in like the same field so in other words if it's like in this case it would probably be out of bounds of your employment contract in other words not subject to ownership by the company for the ones that i've signed yeah but i mean google is famous for this that there's don't have a i mean they the explanation i've heard is they do everything or if they haven't done it yet they want to someday right right so like literally

anything could potentially compete with them i mean this is the company that does web search and self-driving cars so even if they did have those clauses in their employment contract it wouldn't matter it's like yeah that's related to us yeah anything related to software discontinuing products as a service sunsetting as a service don't even have to change the acronym yeah i i feel so first read your employment contract because good news you might not have a decision to make right i agree that this would weird me out because i would also be wondering constantly are they working on things that I would like them to work on? Or are they working on making their product better? Whereas if this was just like, yeah, go implement this at my company

or our company as an internal solution, then there wouldn't be that conflict of maybe they're actually selling this to some other customer and I'm just funding them to improve it at my company. You're paying for their customer support department. yeah on the other hand stuff spins out of companies and makes other companies confluent that's the company that that owns kafka isn't it i don't know i don't know the the details of the ownership actually but i'm pretty sure that kafka came out of linkedin and this company formed around it and at some point like they were working on this for linkedin and now a company exists i don't know how it exists or what the details are or if they're getting sued or mad or whatever but

it's it's happened before and i don't want to be the person that says your idea is dumb and you shouldn't believe anything and just put your head down and run that rat race till you die yeah but this is a tricky situation because it very easily could come across as hey can you pay me to to work on something that i will then sell to other people yeah exactly and i would say that i love that you've done this but i would probably not use my employer as the first customer or any customer because you'll always your employer will always wonder for example like if you're working on that service at work what is that exactly you know like let's say for example that an issue comes up with this product you've created and your company is a customer and they're encountering

the issue now what whose clock are you on in the middle of the day when you need to fix it yeah that's that's nasty i would i just would not i would probably not sell to my own employer Yeah, I like the idea of, I think understanding use cases or a problem domain is pretty, as long as it doesn't compete with the company, that seems pretty clear cut. But as soon as you say, hey, pay me money for this thing that you will use, then the relationship changes and you're not just, yeah, you're not just an employee of the company, you're a vendor at the same time. Exactly. And even if money doesn't change hands, it's still there's still a weird conflict of interest there, because, you know, if the company has an issue with that service, do they actually want to pay you to fix it? Yeah, maybe they do. But when you have three other customers and it breaks in the middle of the day, what are you going to do? Yeah. The relationship a company has with vendors is very different from the relationship it has with employees as well, where the company has some incentive to keep its employees happy and you have some incentive to keep the company happy. the balance of power is much more shifted towards whoever is paying the money when it's a vendor because they can they can just not pay you and there's still some cost but like

companies are used to trying to squeeze more out of their vendors or cracking the whip or switching vendors or like a more adversarial relationship and you may have just made it so that when they get rid of a vendor they also fire an employee or like it just feels scary to tie the vendor and the employee relationship together. This guy named Vincent Wu founded a startup called CoderPad, which basically lets you write code collaboratively in the browser and it gets used for interviewing. He started it while employed at a company. And I listened to an interview with him and his manager basically said like, sure, just keep working on this. And he also used it at Everlane. And I think the manager just was like fine with that and thought he'll probably quit someday if this

takes off but whatever okay i don't know how he pulled it off though besides just doing it like i don't know what the secret would be to replicate this yourself but this is a concrete example very similar to the one you're in where they literally built a product use it at work and then eventually quit to go work on it full-time that's awesome i mean i love i love that whole idea for you i just don't like the uncomfortable situation you're going to be in until you can afford to actually quit yeah i wouldn't do it because i'm risk averse and fear conflict and i think there's a chance that this will generate some conflict yeah i think you have to be willing to take on i mean if you're gonna go off by yourself to start a company there's quite a bit of risk involved in

that but realize that you're bringing that risk closer to your your stable day job if you do this that's true i would say the further you can get away from that the better not the better let me let me quantify exactly what i mean by that the you can de-risk this endeavor by decoupling it from your employer that way you can choose to leave your employer on your timeline not on theirs whereas if you make them a customer you've now intertwined these two timelines and given them a hand on your steering wheel that you probably don't want there oh yeah i didn't even think about the opposite yeah how do you quit if so they could fire you if they don't like you as a vendor anymore too but also what if you don't want to work there anymore i if you quit probably they

will stop paying for your product right it's possible i'm assuming that the benefit of this is like the sales pipeline is much easier because you work there already so you could just like tap your manager on the shoulder and say hey please expense this or whatever can i borrow your procurement card yeah hey look over that way for 10 minutes while i pull up the expense report software your relationship with the customers is like you sit next to them and work with them every day so there's some benefit there but i'd be scared of this i guess i would be too and i would be equally scared if it was free because you will always have to be prepared to answer that question what are you doing every day you know how is your time being spent but if you love

this idea enough to do it then just ignore us i guess yeah exactly but don't don't forget like starting a sas company is a 24 7 job it's not just when you're not at work like if you're making an open source project you can sometimes afford to just work in the evenings but a sas product usually has slas and 24 7 availability needs so are you willing to have like an eight hour response time when you go down? Yeah, that's a good point, especially if your customers are businesses. Exactly. So this might not work with your day job. And so that's just something to consider. Maybe you could pull it off. Maybe you can hire an assistant who can manage it and you're willing to take that risk and put a little of your money into it. Are you familiar with Pinboard?

No, never heard of it. It's a social bookmarking service that's been around quite a long time, and it's famously ran by one guy and you basically can save bookmarks in the cloud from long before that was a very common idea that lots of things did long before that was built into every browser yeah it's got it's got some other features it's a paid product and the owner is a fascinating person who is has a very different philosophy about the responsibility of a company to respond to its customers so he'll be like hey i'm gonna be gone this weekend the servers might go down and just like take off it's like yeah part of the brand of the company that that he's like yeah if i am asleep and something breaks it'll be broken like that's that's what you get when

you pay me your three dollars a month or whatever right so he's kind of selected customers who are okay with that and i think it's actually worked for him as a marketing an unwitting marketing technique too because it's just interesting and makes people hear about it that's funny but i don't think that would fly if a company is paying you money yeah maybe not that reminds me of the cards against humanity black friday deal where they doubled the price for black friday only oh yeah yeah it's that same kind of vein of like it's like unmarketing it's weird yeah yeah but it works sometimes if you're lucky i think he would be fine if it didn't work too though right i think he i think he believes it right he's like this isn't about marketing guys it's about me getting

a good night of sleep every night yeah yeah that's all part of the marketing okay well have we answered the question yeah i think so do you want to read our next one sure this one comes from an anonymous listener who says please help soft skills wizards i'm a junior engineer at a huge conglomerate i quit mid-patent process okay i had a productive tuesday a month ago and i'm pretty gird with mermaid.js what okay continuing on if they come back with a job offer post-departure since i am the sole inventor on this patent how do i properly handle this one my manager was extremely toxic and every attempt that was made to move was botched either by covet 19 or my chain of command i don't think i could feasibly have a positive interaction with my former manager

and working under him has had a significant impact on my mental health but i loved my work I loved some of the people I worked with. Sometimes it being a huge conglomerate had its upsides as well. I was able to bend the rules as long as the bureaucracy had prevented someone from implementing the visibility that would have demonstrated the rules were bent. If they give me an offer to return as a junior architect, I would be very tempted to do so, but would be afraid of being anywhere near my former manager, director, or VP. So unless something very strange has happened, the company already owns your patent. like yes i i can't think of and maybe it's a different country or a planet but in the u.s

you like sign your life rights away to any patents or inventions you create while at the company that's usually right you would have to be very very very sure that this patent went with you and did not stay with the company i'm assuming that that's sort of the like is this a reason to hire you back or is it is this like a mark of you're good at your job and that's why they want to hire you back it's probably a different thing but they already own it probably so they're probably not going to say we need to hire this person because we need their patent because their names on the patent no almost 95 confident that your employment agreement here we are it's employment agreement today i did it on purpose dave oh look at you what a planner yeah 90 chance

your employment contract specifically mentions patent reassignment which means any patent you're granted while you're here you agree to reassign it to the company which means their name is on it in addition to yours so it's not it's usually actually i think i think reassign means oh crap here i am dabbling in terrestrial law when clearly i'm only my jurisdiction is super orbital let's just say yeah but i think reassign means that your name comes off their name goes on and you are listed as an inventor but have no ownership over the patent and so they have no incentive to bring you back it says quit mid patent process so i could see that confusing things enough to make it fuzzy if if you care that much about the patent though you probably need to talk to a earth patent

lawyer yeah who can answer these questions definitively but i would be shocked if this huge conglomerate let you start a patent process while you worked there for a thing you invented while you worked there right and did not end up owning it which by the way undoubtedly they paid all the legal fees and the patent application fees so let's not forget that little tidbit yeah probably companies aren't usually in the habit especially gigantic ones of paying for things and then not owning them yeah patent thing i feel like is is kind of a red herring but should i go back if i hated my last manager no not to the same manager but right yes if it's a different management chain that's the beauty of working for huge companies yeah it's a different

company. Yeah, it's very easy to get away from someone. You know, if there's only 20 people in the company and one of them is extremely toxic, well, you might be out of luck. But if there's 20,000, you may never see that person again. Yeah, that's part of why big companies like internal transfers because it lets people stick around that might otherwise have left because they effectively get a new job without losing all of their company-specific knowledge and context. Now, I have to assume this question asker already knows this because clearly they have managed to figure out how to navigate the bureaucracy and bend all the right rules to be happy at work so they must know that you can transfer yeah maybe they left under bad circumstances

i don't know i never understood why people left jobs and then went back to the same company before because every time i've left a job it's been because i just really didn't want to be there anymore like ever again yeah the idea of going back feels gross but i also hadn't ever worked at a giant megacorp before this so did i tell you i've gone back to a company yeah i think you have yeah let me let me see if i can tell the story and you tell me where i'm wrong okay so young young dave fresh out of space lawyer school right arrives at an exciting job offer for a new company I just want to clarify that it was basically Harvard for space lawyers. Yeah, Harvard for space lawyers.

They endowed a chair for Dave, the Dave Smith chair of sitting very comfortably. And you went and the chair was not comfy at all. Right. So then you went back to your well-known and comfortable space lawyer job. Is that about right? i mean like aside from everything yeah that's pretty much right it's not nearly as exciting i mean i had been in a company for about five or six years i quit that company because i thought i didn't like it and then i went to another company for only six

months and realized no i actually did like that company and so i went back oh it's such a universal thing though that sometimes you just don't appreciate what you have until you don't have it anymore sometimes the contrast is what really brings out the the qualities of a thing absolutely but you know so it's doable and i've worked for companies who actually have a name for people who leave and come back they call them boomerangs ah it's kind of a term of endearment and they even reinstate a bunch of things like if they have badges that change colors after certain tenure milestones you get to keep all of your tenure under your belt so you have less time to accrue to get that colored badge that you want climb those leaderboards that's right i could see it

as a mark of pride for the company too of like it's we don't just trap people here and they're scared to leave like we someone left and they realized oh it really is good here that's right if i were this question asker i would be potentially concerned about if my relationship with this management chain was so bad i would be concerned about that potentially sabotaging me Depending on how big the company is or how close your new position would be to them, it's possible that if you battled quite a bit with them, they might see your name come in and say, let's not do that because of these reasons. So in my mind, this is part of the argument for why it's helpful to leave. Even if you really don't like something, you can try to change it. you can do things that will make you happy, but you don't need to blow it all up because

in this case, just being upset and leaving would have left you in a better state than battling with them. Does that make sense? I think so. Yeah, I think those are my answers. I got to ask one more question about this one. At the very end of the question, it says, if they gave me an offer to return as a junior architect, I would be very tempted. I've never heard the term junior architect. Have you? I don't think so. It's not a term in my company. I can assume that means that you're on a kind of technical leadership track but kind of on the lower rung on that ladder maybe but those two words words seem to be antithetical i mean junior and architect architect to me implies a level of experience that's greater than what junior would imply maybe it's like a

mentorship or being mentored role or something like that yeah but i would expect a junior architect to be an an engineer that hasn't moved into architecture yet or as part of their engineering job i just got this idea you said move into architecture and the connotation i carried away was like becoming an actual architect who like designs buildings you know sorry that was weird what's that book that people love to quote that the idea of patterns a timeless way of building have you heard of this book no i think it's the source for the idea of software patterns because it talks about real physical building architecture patterns of like a door that looks this way or something like that yes i think i've seen that is that the one that talks about door

handles and how to make it so that people know whether to push or pull is that the one no that's affordances i think that's from the design of everyday things this one is more like high falutin where i've seen it come up a lot in talks where people talk about the the philosophy of software patterns or something like that okay so like pattern patterns yeah so it's a thing the the the connection between physical architecture and software architecture precedence ah okay okay yeah i don't know maybe that's just the title of the company yeah it's also unclear to me if they have an offer or if they're seeking one or if they're just saying i wouldn't say no if it was this title and it right this other part far away from this bad experience yeah that's what i think yeah two

question then how do i handle the patent sorry too late you don't get to handle it at all and if i go back can i should i go back and i'd say yeah you can probably avoid that manager although it does say manager director or vp so there might be like an entire it's not just one person if you imagine like an orc chart as a as an as a pyramid it's not just one dot in that pyramid it's an entire sub triangle within that pyramid a subtree if you will so why did i say pyramid when i miss an opportunity to say tree lame i've been thinking about pyramid schemes a lot i guess so we'll call them tree schemes b tree schemes yeah self-balancing tree schemes yeah i think i think my wisdom is used up mine too it's all drained out all right what can people do

if they want more dubious legal dubious earth legal advice but very well researched and understood space legal advice that's right well if you want that you can go to soft skills.audio and click ask a question where you can type in words and we will answer with other words and we will not be held accountable for following whatever those words say listen if you want to come out to the moon then we can have a conversation yes and it will be legally binding that's right professional advice yeah all right thanks for listening we'll catch you next week I'll see you next time.