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Ask HN: My company wants me to give up my own code / utilities is that legal?

by penguinlinux on 5/12/21, 3:31 PM with 4 comments

I work as a cloud engineer. With so many years of being in this business. I have developer many custom utilities do to a lot of stuff much faster with cloud providers. a lot of it are custom scripts python /bash / that helps me do a lot of my work more efficiently. These are tools that have grown over time that do help me a lot and mainly i use them myself just to make my job more efficient. During a presentation i had my boss saw my utility folder on my terminal and asked me about it. I showed it and then said I should put that into a git repo and make it accessible for everyone. I told him that I am not interested in doing that because this is NOT company code as it existed before and also the repo only makes sense to me and that I don't think i want to make this into a company asset to then maintain it for the company.

These are utilities that have grown through time a provide a lot of value for me but i don't feel comfortable sharing this. Is my employer allowed to ask me to submit this code and give it to them so that other engineers can use it and probably i have to then support it. ?

  • by mikro2nd on 5/12/21, 3:49 PM

    You ask "Is this legal?"

    I ask, "Where?"

    Because jurisdiction matters. A lot. Another big question would be whether you developed these utilities on your own time (again: jurisdiction matters!) or on the company's time.

    As it stands your question is basically unanswerable.

  • by mytailorisrich on 5/12/21, 3:40 PM

    If you develop software on company time for the purpose of doing your job you will have a hard time claiming that this is not company property (maybe not your current employer if you started in previous jobs).
  • by jfmatth on 5/12/21, 3:47 PM

    Did you develop them on company time?

    Do you use or contribute to OSS? If so, then i'm confused why you think sharing it within you company would be a problem?