That is entirely possible, but not at all a problem. If something is being done in secret, so that the employee doesn't know that the other division is working on it, then there are no trade secrets that would be divulged by working on something similar.

That companies require you to get approval to work on something on your own time is fundamentally absurd. If I were a carpenter, I would not need permission to make a table. If I wrote ads, I would not need permission to write a book. That we think it reasonable for open source contributions to require company approval show that there is a severe overstepping of bounds on the part of the company.

Microsoft doesn't. You're only required to get pre-approval in case of conflicts of interest.

Every company that is based on california, or that employs you in california, is better.

No matter what the non-compete says, if you're in CA, you can use your own hardware and non-work time to develop anything that doesn't directly compete with your employer/dayjob and doesn't use trade secrets/IP from the company.

Amazon though is mostly based in Washington, where no such law exists, so sweeping non-competes are legal.

The above is the reason that there is a difference between various FAANG companies. Even if the company policy requires you to get approval, if it really isn't a work-related piece of code, you can simply tell them to pound sand and CA will have your back.

It may be reasonable for them to do this, but it may also be reasonable for individuals to decide the practice is not worth enduring for them to work at such a place.

VMware requires approvals even for own-time projects. They don't put up artificial barriers in my experience; there's a very simple process for declaring outside projects and approval is quick as long as it's not viewed as competitive. I thought their approach seemed reasonable for a big company with a large IP portfolio.

It was not always this way--VMware has become much more open source friendly over the last few years.

Not even open source - most googlers I know will not code anything even volunteer community projects outside of work because if they were involved google would claim it was theirs.

It's entirely possible that the big company's interests could encroach upon my open source project, too. Why do they get a pass?

>Truth is, excepting maybe Netflix, the rest of FAANG requires you to get approvals.

Is this really true? In my company (not FAANG, but a big one), you need approval only if what you do in your spare time has overlap with the work you are doing in your job. What the rest of the company is doing is immaterial.