This may be the answer. This isn't a matter of morality but social physics. Any large aggressor can divide and conquer a disorganized rabble.
You'd think that people who are ingenious enough to write these great games would be able to handle a rather simplistic power struggle in their own lives.
That's too bad. At my place we were just looking over Generals admiring it. I guess like the Pyramids and Ancient Rome they look nice on the surface, until you find out how they were built.
What it seems EA does is buy up places that have ALREADY succeeded and pumps the last life out of them.
The reason this article is so mind blowing to me is that when I quit my game job last week my boss (a technical guy who is feeling the same pain we all are) said, "Don't go to EA, they're even worse".
Companies MAY think that but it is only true to a certain degree. Computer code, in the absence of considerable documentation and care, is largely "write only". At companies like EA where effort is paramount, and documentation and order is not as important, losing the person equates to losing the code he wrote because the next person in is going to take longer to learn the leavers code than it too to write in the first place.
So they get into this viscious cycle where someone quits (because they want to have a life) and they have to hire two people to replace him. Some of those people quit and they are forced to pay more and more to attract people faster and faster to finish projects that are perpetually behind schedule due to the turnover rate. The stress put on the newcomers makes them leave even faster and the circle of life in programmer America goes on.
While it seems silly, why would we want that to stop? It's providing relatively high paying jobs to reams of people who, if things were done smartly instead, would not have jobs. So thank them for being so stupid. They are replacing wisdom with effort and paying for it.
Yes, this was my experience also but I'm not sure this isn't true everywhere in corporate America. It's a symptom of the hierarchical economic dictatorships we call corporations.
Why? Because their process is so bad it has to be micromanaged.
I'm serious. In my experience nothing was documented. No design documents, no requirements, not even a scribbled on napkin. There was no bug list database that people were working from. It's all done with people walking around and talking with each other and big meetings. This type of disorganization means you can't farm out modules to contracts.
Another thing is that the managers are confrontational type people. They need to get in your face and intimidate you. This doesn't work over the phone. These type people feel impotent if they have only a phone to give orders. And they need to see things right now by walking over to your desk and seeing them when they get a whim. They can't think in abstract terms nor do they trust anything they can't see and touch right in front of themselves. The consider that all programmers are consumate bullshitters and trust nothing you say. It has to be seen and touched to be real.
There is no way these kind of people can "let go" enough to have development done outside of their personal reach.
hahahaha. You need to get off your high horse about being "creative". Everyone is creative in their own way and this is coming from a person who has spent their entire lives in the arts and computer programming.
It's all based on supply and demand. Being "creative" means nothing if people don't want your creations. If there is a shortage of talent, it's price goes up. If there is a glut, it goes down.
Find an arena where talent is rare and demand is high and you can write your own ticket.
Exactly. If normalcy is crunch mode for you, it isn't crunch mode anymore, it's "unable to accomplish your task without cheating". I say cheating because uniformly, hiring managers never tell you the reality of the hours you'll be working because they are too ashamed of this fact to tell new prospects. Oh, they say things like "long hours" but do they come out and say "You'll be working 80 hour weeks including both weekend days starting the day you are hired and no end in site".
However, workers are free to make the decision to stay or leave.
The one thing this does deny the industry is that the REALLY good people won't stay. The people who stay are the hacks who cannot get a decent job elsewhere.The REALLY good people are the ones that will save you millions in labor costs. One bad decision early on in a project, multiplies the man hours required for correction geometrically later on.
But so be it. At least the sweat shops provide employment for naive n00bs!
This company wasn't EA but EA is the biggest stockholder and what she describes was the same at that company.
I might have been able to deal with the crunch mode for 2 months had it not been for the fact that the REASON for crunch mode was that the code base on this product was so crappy. The price of permanent crunch mode is that your developers have no time to learn anything new. These guys were stuck in 1980's coding philosphies and making a single change to the code would result in massive side effects. If they lost any critical programmers who had been there for a long time the product would be effectively dead.I might be ok working crunch mode on code that I'd written, but certainly not trying to fix someone else's pile of junk that should have been aborted at birth.
The management also treated the people abusively (yelling at them, calling their work useless, etc) . It's a ripe place for petty tyrants to get jobs in management. Dinner was provided when staying late which is nice but really just an "everyone wins" deal. Management keeps you there and you get a nice meal.
But maybe this is just a symptom of game programming. Games go out of style rapidly. There isn't any motivation to create a flexible, reuseable code base or team because of the rapidly changing styles in games.A lot of the guys I was working with were very good debuggers but very limited in other ways. They were trapped working for this company because their skill sets were very old and they seemed to have no motivation to learn new things. DirectX was like the last new thing they learned and that's it.
I personally don't have extra motivation to work on games. I thought it would be an interesting industry to try. My experience is vast and flexible. As it turned out, I was way overqualified because they don't want skill, they want mostly effort, mostly. Actually, the one skill you should be very good at is using a debugger because that's what you'll be doing most of the time with the archaic practices that run rampant.
I'd say if you are young (19-25) and don't have a life, working games might be the thing for you.The salary was way up there 90k+ so its worth it if you are willing to sacrifice in other areas.
Nah. When that happens, we'll just pirate their technology like they've done with us. Why not let them do all the hard work and then come in and harvest them? I'm sure we can easily hire some of their top developers away from China.
I have been interviewing and many of the places do have outsource teams but still need in house people. I myself have had to manage outsource teams. A team in Russia or India has a few drawbacks that are insurmountable. Here are some examples:
1) If you have proprietary secret methods in your code, you have to realize that you will lose the secrecy if you outsource to another country since there is effective way for you to enforce a trade secret across International boundaries because all the oursource countries have corrupt and ineffective legal systems.
2) Without your physical presence you aren't taken as seriously. It's harder to communicate exactly what you want without a whiteboard and brainstorming session. Using a one-way channel such as spec documents or using the telephone is not as good because you cannot judge reactions and see where people are, or aren't getting what you are telling them.
3) MANY companies want long term employees so that the time and knowledge they invest in them doesn't walk out the door. This is a more serious consideration than I thought when I started interviewing recently. When you outsource you are basically wasting any long term investment you have in people. Every company I interviewed with was concerned about my "staying power" because I have a bit of contract work on my resume.
It is probably ok to outsource code-monkey jobs where there is nothing new being done, but if you have any investment in actual Intellectual Property you are making a fatal mistake by outsourcing (to another country).
Wow. This is really sad. I'm 46 and been programming since I was 15 years old. Not once have I ever been bored or regretted being a computer programmer. When the corporate bullshit gets to be too much, I just change jobs. There are always people looking for good programmers. If you like to travel you can find a niche like QNX where people all around the world want you.
I'd say if you like the act of writing, sitting at a keyboard, or perhaps like playing a musical instrument or writing music, that is a similar mindset to computer programming (though not exactly the same).
The one thing that makes computer programming different from every other job is that EVERY DAY you must struggle to learn something new. Because programming is a creative art, there is always something new coming at you, most often in the form of new libraries, languages, frameworks and situations invented (or some might say caused) by other programmers. When the real world has run out of complications, other programmers provide plenty of challenge. This can even get frustrating and be too much for some people. It's like constantly studying for finals.
The person who wrote this must be a COBOL programmer working at a mortgage company or very unmotivated because there is no way anyone can have learned even a small percentage of what there is to know about computer programming.
Doctors undergo a brutal internship where they work IN THE REAL WORLD before they are allowed to practice. Would you want a doctor working on you who hadn't had an internship (i.e. REAL WORLD job)?.
And to add to that, spend some time in a Hospital. You'll more likely die of pneumonia than your surgery. Pneumonia, rampant in hospitals because they follow the OLD tried and true methods they are taught at the University and can't come up with a simple solution to keep bacteria down, like, FRESH AIR FROM THE OUTSIDE for example??
So don't hold doctors up as anyone you'd want to trust. By the time you get to one it really is a crap shoot whether you'll survive or not. Take it from experience.
Except for doctors and lawyers, in my entire history of work (30 years) I never met a single person who was working in the area they majored in at the University.
What does that say about how much they learned in College?
Yes, well, AI has flopped in case you hadn't noticed, mainly because it has pursued a goal which is both unachievable and really undesireable (can be discussed in another time and place).
Algorithms to sift through 200 million sets of data have so many real world side effects (memory space, disk space, CPU availability) that experience in dealing with that size of data is more important that the algorithms used (which has probably already been written over and over again and available in a canned library).
What, are you going to write a SQL database server from scratch in assembly language or use one that is out there already?
Successful programming in the real world depends very little upon "inventing algorithms" and more upon using what is already available, debugged and tested and putting things together in a way that is efficient, effective and fast. Or you might say the "algorithms" involved are very high level, more like what we call Design Patterns out here in the real world.
I interviewed at a company once that was in close proximity to JPL in Pasadena. The interviewer was pretty obnoxious and had me solving "computer" puzzles that required quadratic equations. I was certainly able to keep up however I despaired during the interview because I realized this was a completely ridiculous standard.
During my visit I noticed this person was also very disruptive to the normal staff. He was pontificating in the cubicle area about this and that and everyone was listening to him instead of doing their work. He probably had management intimidated with his academic credentials.
That company (FreePC) disappeared a few months later.
You: I cannot. This gives away rights to everything i imagine and think of.
Employer: Then we cannot hire you.
You: Well, I guess you'll have to find someone who isn't a fount of creativity. Maybe you'll get more for your money out of a code walloper. But I'll tell you what, the kind of person who would sign that agreement is never going to have any big ideas, at least with me, you've got the shot at owning them outright (if you treat me right) or get first shot at owning them if I want to personally profit.
Federal judges have the power to put you in jail over contempt for as long as it takes for you to follow their rules. You hold the key to your own release.
It's bullshit for sure, but that's how it works.
A person's inner creativity and wellspring of ideas is not subject to ownership. There is no way to allocate what percentage of the "new idea" came about from the employee's environment, training, experience, relationships, past lives, channel to god or whatever.
Ownership of ideas is forbidden and if you think about the ramifications you'll see why.
If I think of a new color, does that mean no one can use it without license? How can you prove you own an idea anyway? What happens if the idea you had you half thought of at a previous company. Do the two companies have to fight it out now? And how do you know the "idea" is really an invention? Virtually ALL ideas, don't work as initially thought. The real world always throws in a monkey wrench. Geez. I could think, "I know how to get into space cheaply. Come up with a super strong material as a thread and hang it from a satellite and make a space elevator. Ok, I own that idea, no one else can do it without paying me".
Companies just have to make it worthwhile for someone to divulge the idea, or do without it.
It's insane. Companies think that anything can be agreed to by contract but that just isn't so.
It's a pity the judge is probably so devoid of ideas and creativity himself that he views these things as valuable in and by themselves.
Exactly, to which I might add, being part of the "body" shields you from being singled out as the perpetrator of some evil. Being in a corporation lets you act selfishly, and evily, and yet not be seen as the one responsible, note, the ONE responsible.
No ONE was responsible, it was the collective we are know as, the corporation.
If becomes too easy to point the finger internally which clouds the ability of anyone seeking to get an indictment.
The primary falicy in ALL of this is, that ideas can be owned. They cannot. Copyright and Patent law do not allow this. The ip in question must be patented or copyrighted as a tangible form.
Why Alcatel cannot own his ideas? What would happen if someone else came up with the same idea independently (more often the case than not). Could Alcatel go to the patent office and say "We thought of that first".
Sorry, it doesn't work that way. You cannot own an idea, only a tangible expression of that idea.
The crux of this case was not so much ownership of ideas, as, Evan's obligation to divulge his ideas. "We have ways of making you talk".
And the last question is, "aren't you entitled to a jury in civil lawsuits?". Why was a judge alone ruling on this?
Not true in California. I have my own corporation as you describe.
I was about to sign a contract as corporation-to-corporation and not only did the company want rights to anything I developed while working there, they rejected my list of "prior inventions" saying, "well, these are not really inventions, they are just copyrights". (they were all computer programs).
They also had a "non-competitive" clause that said I couldn't work on "any inventions related to the internet" for one year after working for them!
Totally ridiculous. I passed on that.
One thing I do agree with is, if I use one of my prior inventions in my work for them, they gain non-exclusive, world-wide rights to use it. That would only be fair since they are hiring me for my expertise and possibly past inventions.
I don't know how someone could prove you thought of something while you worked for them, UNLESS, you had put your thoughts out in tangible form, in which case, they have an invention/copyright claim on what you did as work for hire.
I would say, best to just shut up about new ideas you have. Keep them to yourself until you bail. I'd have to examine the details of this case to be sure the claim wasn't that he came up with the ideas "while he was working for us" vs. "immediately after he quit working for us".
Slashdot Mirror
This may be the answer. This isn't a matter of morality but social physics. Any large aggressor can divide and conquer a disorganized rabble.
You'd think that people who are ingenious enough to write these great games would be able to handle a rather simplistic power struggle in their own lives.
That's too bad. At my place we were just looking over Generals admiring it. I guess like the Pyramids and Ancient Rome they look nice on the surface, until you find out how they were built.
What it seems EA does is buy up places that have ALREADY succeeded and pumps the last life out of them.
The reason this article is so mind blowing to me is that when I quit my game job last week my boss (a technical guy who is feeling the same pain we all are) said, "Don't go to EA, they're even worse".
This is just too good for words.
Companies MAY think that but it is only true to a certain degree. Computer code, in the absence of considerable documentation and care, is largely "write only". At companies like EA where effort is paramount, and documentation and order is not as important, losing the person equates to losing the code he wrote because the next person in is going to take longer to learn the leavers code than it too to write in the first place.
So they get into this viscious cycle where someone quits (because they want to have a life) and they have to hire two people to replace him. Some of those people quit and they are forced to pay more and more to attract people faster and faster to finish projects that are perpetually behind schedule due to the turnover rate. The stress put on the newcomers makes them leave even faster and the circle of life in programmer America goes on.
While it seems silly, why would we want that to stop? It's providing relatively high paying jobs to reams of people who, if things were done smartly instead, would not have jobs. So thank them for being so stupid. They are replacing wisdom with effort and paying for it.
Yes, this was my experience also but I'm not sure this isn't true everywhere in corporate America. It's a symptom of the hierarchical economic dictatorships we call corporations.
Why? Because their process is so bad it has to be micromanaged.
I'm serious. In my experience nothing was documented. No design documents, no requirements, not even a scribbled on napkin. There was no bug list database that people were working from. It's all done with people walking around and talking with each other and big meetings. This type of disorganization means you can't farm out modules to contracts.
Another thing is that the managers are confrontational type people. They need to get in your face and intimidate you. This doesn't work over the phone. These type people feel impotent if they have only a phone to give orders. And they need to see things right now by walking over to your desk and seeing them when they get a whim. They can't think in abstract terms nor do they trust anything they can't see and touch right in front of themselves. The consider that all programmers are consumate bullshitters and trust nothing you say. It has to be seen and touched to be real.
There is no way these kind of people can "let go" enough to have development done outside of their personal reach.
Yeah brother, I heard dat!
:(
I've done that before and it's great.
I'd really love to take one of those travelling contractor jobs, you know, high pay, a new city every few months, a new girl in every city.
I really would, but my wife won't let me.
hahahaha. You need to get off your high horse about being "creative". Everyone is creative in their own way and this is coming from a person who has spent their entire lives in the arts and computer programming.
It's all based on supply and demand. Being "creative" means nothing if people don't want your creations. If there is a shortage of talent, it's price goes up. If there is a glut, it goes down.
Find an arena where talent is rare and demand is high and you can write your own ticket.
Exactly. If normalcy is crunch mode for you, it isn't crunch mode anymore, it's "unable to accomplish your task without cheating". I say cheating because uniformly, hiring managers never tell you the reality of the hours you'll be working because they are too ashamed of this fact to tell new prospects. Oh, they say things like "long hours" but do they come out and say "You'll be working 80 hour weeks including both weekend days starting the day you are hired and no end in site".
However, workers are free to make the decision to stay or leave.
The one thing this does deny the industry is that the REALLY good people won't stay. The people who stay are the hacks who cannot get a decent job elsewhere.The REALLY good people are the ones that will save you millions in labor costs. One bad decision early on in a project, multiplies the man hours required for correction geometrically later on.
But so be it. At least the sweat shops provide employment for naive n00bs!
I don't think they'll be shipped away. They would have already done that if it raised their profit margin.
This company wasn't EA but EA is the biggest stockholder and what she describes was the same at that company.
I might have been able to deal with the crunch mode for 2 months had it not been for the fact that the REASON for crunch mode was that the code base on this product was so crappy. The price of permanent crunch mode is that your developers have no time to learn anything new. These guys were stuck in 1980's coding philosphies and making a single change to the code would result in massive side effects. If they lost any critical programmers who had been there for a long time the product would be effectively dead.I might be ok working crunch mode on code that I'd written, but certainly not trying to fix someone else's pile of junk that should have been aborted at birth.
The management also treated the people abusively (yelling at them, calling their work useless, etc) . It's a ripe place for petty tyrants to get jobs in management. Dinner was provided when staying late which is nice but really just an "everyone wins" deal. Management keeps you there and you get a nice meal.
But maybe this is just a symptom of game programming. Games go out of style rapidly. There isn't any motivation to create a flexible, reuseable code base or team because of the rapidly changing styles in games.A lot of the guys I was working with were very good debuggers but very limited in other ways. They were trapped working for this company because their skill sets were very old and they seemed to have no motivation to learn new things. DirectX was like the last new thing they learned and that's it.
I personally don't have extra motivation to work on games. I thought it would be an interesting industry to try. My experience is vast and flexible. As it turned out, I was way overqualified because they don't want skill, they want mostly effort, mostly. Actually, the one skill you should be very good at is using a debugger because that's what you'll be doing most of the time with the archaic practices that run rampant.
I'd say if you are young (19-25) and don't have a life, working games might be the thing for you.The salary was way up there 90k+ so its worth it if you are willing to sacrifice in other areas.
The Baker Shot which was 20 kilotons only produced a "wall" of water about 60 meters high at ground zero.
This is a really stupid, and over exaggerated article.
Nah. When that happens, we'll just pirate their technology like they've done with us. Why not let them do all the hard work and then come in and harvest them? I'm sure we can easily hire some of their top developers away from China.
This is not true.
I have been interviewing and many of the places do have outsource teams but still need in house people. I myself have had to manage outsource teams. A team in Russia or India has a few drawbacks that are insurmountable. Here are some examples:
1) If you have proprietary secret methods in your code, you have to realize that you will lose the secrecy if you outsource to another country since there is effective way for you to enforce a trade secret across International boundaries because all the oursource countries have corrupt and ineffective legal systems.
2) Without your physical presence you aren't taken as seriously. It's harder to communicate exactly what you want without a whiteboard and brainstorming session. Using a one-way channel such as spec documents or using the telephone is not as good because you cannot judge reactions and see where people are, or aren't getting what you are telling them.
3) MANY companies want long term employees so that the time and knowledge they invest in them doesn't walk out the door. This is a more serious consideration than I thought when I started interviewing recently. When you outsource you are basically wasting any long term investment you have in people. Every company I interviewed with was concerned about my "staying power" because I have a bit of contract work on my resume.
It is probably ok to outsource code-monkey jobs where there is nothing new being done, but if you have any investment in actual Intellectual Property you are making a fatal mistake by outsourcing (to another country).
Wow. This is really sad. I'm 46 and been programming since I was 15 years old. Not once have I ever been bored or regretted being a computer programmer. When the corporate bullshit gets to be too much, I just change jobs. There are always people looking for good programmers. If you like to travel you can find a niche like QNX where people all around the world want you.
I'd say if you like the act of writing, sitting at a keyboard, or perhaps like playing a musical instrument or writing music, that is a similar mindset to computer programming (though not exactly the same).
This is not true for me.
The one thing that makes computer programming different from every other job is that EVERY DAY you must struggle to learn something new. Because programming is a creative art, there is always something new coming at you, most often in the form of new libraries, languages, frameworks and situations invented (or some might say caused) by other programmers. When the real world has run out of complications, other programmers provide plenty of challenge. This can even get frustrating and be too much for some people. It's like constantly studying for finals.
The person who wrote this must be a COBOL programmer working at a mortgage company or very unmotivated because there is no way anyone can have learned even a small percentage of what there is to know about computer programming.
Doctors undergo a brutal internship where they work IN THE REAL WORLD before they are allowed to practice. Would you want a doctor working on you who hadn't had an internship (i.e. REAL WORLD job)?. And to add to that, spend some time in a Hospital. You'll more likely die of pneumonia than your surgery. Pneumonia, rampant in hospitals because they follow the OLD tried and true methods they are taught at the University and can't come up with a simple solution to keep bacteria down, like, FRESH AIR FROM THE OUTSIDE for example?? So don't hold doctors up as anyone you'd want to trust. By the time you get to one it really is a crap shoot whether you'll survive or not. Take it from experience. Except for doctors and lawyers, in my entire history of work (30 years) I never met a single person who was working in the area they majored in at the University. What does that say about how much they learned in College?
Yes, well, AI has flopped in case you hadn't noticed, mainly because it has pursued a goal which is both unachievable and really undesireable (can be discussed in another time and place).
Algorithms to sift through 200 million sets of data have so many real world side effects (memory space, disk space, CPU availability) that experience in dealing with that size of data is more important that the algorithms used (which has probably already been written over and over again and available in a canned library).
What, are you going to write a SQL database server from scratch in assembly language or use one that is out there already?
Successful programming in the real world depends very little upon "inventing algorithms" and more upon using what is already available, debugged and tested and putting things together in a way that is efficient, effective and fast. Or you might say the "algorithms" involved are very high level, more like what we call Design Patterns out here in the real world.
Three lines?? Hmmm, it should only be one line required: access-list 2000 permit tcp any host x.x.x.x eq 80 badabing
I interviewed at a company once that was in close proximity to JPL in Pasadena. The interviewer was pretty obnoxious and had me solving "computer" puzzles that required quadratic equations. I was certainly able to keep up however I despaired during the interview because I realized this was a completely ridiculous standard.
During my visit I noticed this person was also very disruptive to the normal staff. He was pontificating in the cubicle area about this and that and everyone was listening to him instead of doing their work. He probably had management intimidated with his academic credentials.
That company (FreePC) disappeared a few months later.
Employer: You have to sign this.
You: I cannot. This gives away rights to everything i imagine and think of.
Employer: Then we cannot hire you.
You: Well, I guess you'll have to find someone who isn't a fount of creativity. Maybe you'll get more for your money out of a code walloper. But I'll tell you what, the kind of person who would sign that agreement is never going to have any big ideas, at least with me, you've got the shot at owning them outright (if you treat me right) or get first shot at owning them if I want to personally profit.
Federal judges have the power to put you in jail over contempt for as long as it takes for you to follow their rules. You hold the key to your own release. It's bullshit for sure, but that's how it works.
And that is why it is insane.
A person's inner creativity and wellspring of ideas is not subject to ownership. There is no way to allocate what percentage of the "new idea" came about from the employee's environment, training, experience, relationships, past lives, channel to god or whatever.
Ownership of ideas is forbidden and if you think about the ramifications you'll see why.
If I think of a new color, does that mean no one can use it without license? How can you prove you own an idea anyway? What happens if the idea you had you half thought of at a previous company. Do the two companies have to fight it out now? And how do you know the "idea" is really an invention? Virtually ALL ideas, don't work as initially thought. The real world always throws in a monkey wrench. Geez. I could think, "I know how to get into space cheaply. Come up with a super strong material as a thread and hang it from a satellite and make a space elevator. Ok, I own that idea, no one else can do it without paying me".
Companies just have to make it worthwhile for someone to divulge the idea, or do without it.
It's insane. Companies think that anything can be agreed to by contract but that just isn't so.
It's a pity the judge is probably so devoid of ideas and creativity himself that he views these things as valuable in and by themselves.
Exactly, to which I might add, being part of the "body" shields you from being singled out as the perpetrator of some evil. Being in a corporation lets you act selfishly, and evily, and yet not be seen as the one responsible, note, the ONE responsible.
No ONE was responsible, it was the collective we are know as, the corporation.
If becomes too easy to point the finger internally which clouds the ability of anyone seeking to get an indictment.
The primary falicy in ALL of this is, that ideas can be owned. They cannot. Copyright and Patent law do not allow this. The ip in question must be patented or copyrighted as a tangible form. Why Alcatel cannot own his ideas? What would happen if someone else came up with the same idea independently (more often the case than not). Could Alcatel go to the patent office and say "We thought of that first". Sorry, it doesn't work that way. You cannot own an idea, only a tangible expression of that idea. The crux of this case was not so much ownership of ideas, as, Evan's obligation to divulge his ideas. "We have ways of making you talk". And the last question is, "aren't you entitled to a jury in civil lawsuits?". Why was a judge alone ruling on this?
Not true in California. I have my own corporation as you describe.
I was about to sign a contract as corporation-to-corporation and not only did the company want rights to anything I developed while working there, they rejected my list of "prior inventions" saying, "well, these are not really inventions, they are just copyrights". (they were all computer programs).
They also had a "non-competitive" clause that said I couldn't work on "any inventions related to the internet" for one year after working for them!
Totally ridiculous. I passed on that.
One thing I do agree with is, if I use one of my prior inventions in my work for them, they gain non-exclusive, world-wide rights to use it. That would only be fair since they are hiring me for my expertise and possibly past inventions.
I don't know how someone could prove you thought of something while you worked for them, UNLESS, you had put your thoughts out in tangible form, in which case, they have an invention/copyright claim on what you did as work for hire.
I would say, best to just shut up about new ideas you have. Keep them to yourself until you bail. I'd have to examine the details of this case to be sure the claim wasn't that he came up with the ideas "while he was working for us" vs. "immediately after he quit working for us".