The argument from the companies perspective: They hire you not as a implementor but as an inventor. In exchange for a salary they have hired you to provide the full value of your experience and imagination to the company. This extends beyond 'working hours' (after all, you're on salary). It is simply a way of ensuring that the companies gets it maximum value for what you invent while being compensated by them.

Salary should not be a way for companies to exploit their employees, though it often is because employees are spineless. The theory behind salary is that the value you provide the company is not directly correlated to the amount of time you spend at your desk, and therefore you negotiate a compensation package commensurate with a "fair cut" for the value you generate.

Again, salary is not given so that the company has free-reign ownership over your body and mind and it should not be a mechanism whereby the company gets an hourly employee on the cheap (some bosses seem to think that salary translates to infinite and unlimited uncompensated overtime -- of course, the 40-hour-week limit isn't necessarily applicable, but things have to stay within reasonability). What you do on your own time without company resources is your property, plain and simple. Companies are not buying your whole imagination and salary does not EVER mean that they own everything you thought up while on payroll. If Google feels threatened by this web server, they can probably obtain an injunction based upon non-compete agreements that stops the publication or use of the thing for a year or whatever, but they have no right to totally misappropriate it and steal it from the original author, and saying "well, he's on salary, so we own the entire output of his energy and imagination" is such a horrible and disgusting cop-out.

I've worked for some people who've thought that salary meant person-ownership and got out as quickly as possible. I was astonished to see most co-workers minimize it with things like "Well, you know, the economy is tough, we're lucky to even have work, they'll reward us with bonuses and more down the road". I just don't understand how people can tolerate that kind of thing. People who do that to their employees are so obviously amoral I don't see how one can expect a fair recompense later on.

> This extends beyond 'working hours' (after all, you're on salary). It is simply a way of ensuring that the companies gets it maximum value for what you invent while being compensated by them.

I'm sorry to say it, but unfortunately for us all Marx is beginning to become more and more relevant, again (I, for one, had hoped/thought that we had left him and the problems he described in "Das Kapital" behind us). What you're basically saying (and Marx was trying to explain) is that a company like Google isn't happy with what it gets (in terms of profit) when it employs an engineer for only 8 hours/day, they want him to be on the company payrolls 24 h/day, a thing that even Marx himself wouldn't have thought possible.

I mean, it may happen that the above-mentioned engineer has a brilliant idea in his sleep (we've all had our "dreaming in code" moments, no?), but, according to what you're saying, Google is entitled to appropriate that dream's contents as being their own.

> I'm sorry to say it, but unfortunately for us all Marx is beginning to become more and more relevant,

Interesting perspective. I have been discussing this with someone recently how salaried work combined with large debts (mortgages, health care bills, student loans) and health insurance tied to a place of employment result in a virtual slavery.

This is probably not relevant to most HNers, who seem intelligent, highly qualified, and would have immediate multiple job offers should they decide to switch employment. But that is definitely not true for the majority of American workers. An employer who provides health insurance to an employee, runs a simple credit check (justified as a screening requirement or a condition of employment), and is aware of the job market situation, can easily get an idea on exactly how much pressure they can subject that employee without them jumping ship.

Hypothetical scenario. An employer hires Jon and Jake.

Jon is married, has 2 kids, $70K in student loans, his family is on his health care plan. The credit and local property search shows that they own about 30% of their $350K house, wife is unemployed.

Jake is not using company's health insurance plan. He either has individual insurance or is on his wife's (who is employed) health plan. His credit check shows that he has no loans whatsoever.

The job market in the particular sector at the particular time is not that great.

The infamous "crunch time" comes and someone needs to put in weekend hours. Everyone is stressed. Who would management ask to work on weekends without too much risk of them walking out?

You're ascribing enormous competence and foresight to the people who are themselves virtual slaves to the company. :)

> I'm sorry to say it, but unfortunately for us all Marx is beginning to become more and more relevant, again ...

No, it's not. Marx's ideas is that there's a violent takeover of all property by everyone, and then the state controls everything. He theorized that after some time of this violent control by the revolutionaries, the need for the control would naturally dissipate and we'd live in a harmonious utopia.

This has now been tried, and didn't go like he predicted. In fact, it produced much worse outcomes for just about everyone involved, but especially the most skilled and industrious people.

If Google's deal is bad, save some of that large paycheck for a year or two, and then quit and take a go of it on your own. You can do that because you're free. Under Marxist systems, you're not free to disagree with the people.

You gotta be careful talking about Marx in rosy tones without noting how vastly terrible every implementation has been in real life. The banner of Marxism has done more harm in the last 100 years than just about anything else. It out-competes fascism by a drastic margin, which is really saying something.

And you were complaining about someone else's hyperbole in an earlier comment?

Socialism and Fascism (aka. Governmental control) are orthogonal - your economic model is independent of the government's control. In the Soviet Union you had both, in the US you have neither (although there's a lot more fascism these days). In most of Europe (eg. Sweden) there's socialism, but not a lot of fascism.

> And you were complaining about someone else's hyperbole in an earlier comment?

That's just it - people toss Marx's name around casually. I wonder if they've actually read his stuff? Or studied history? I can't find a semi-prominent ideology that's done anywhere near as much damage the last 100 years.

If you said, "Nazi ideology destroyed much of Europe and cost millions of lives," that's not hyperbole. If you go through and point the vast amounts of atrocity under communism, things like a full 1/3rd of the population being tortured to death in Cambodia under the Red Khmer ("Khmer Rouge" in French), the Cultural Revolution in China which killed three times as many people as the Holocaust, the massive armies of slave labor used in Russia... it's not hyperbole, that stuff all happened.

> your economic model is independent of the government's control.

This is not the generally agreed upon consensus of anyone - Marxist, free market, mainstream or alternative economics, political science, civics... I can't think of anyone that thinks that way.

> In most of Europe (eg. Sweden) there's socialism, but not a lot of fascism.

Sweden's a mostly free market country with welfare programs. That's not socialism, unless you've redefined socialism to mean "anything the government does," which doesn't seem right.

Denmark is the most socialist country in Europe, but:

(1) Most of that is the government-controlled energy industry.

(2) They have the second lowest growth rates in the developed world, and their model is in danger of collapsing if and when alternative energy obsoletes their energy deposits, unless they somehow stimulate entrepreneurship and growth in the state-owned system (which has never been successfully done).

Even then, it's a mixed economy, not pure socialism. The last pure socialist country left is North Korea. The next closest countries to the socialist model are probably Cuba and Libya.

And people toss the Soviet Union around casually as an example of how Socialism/Communism goes wrong, when it was largely Fascism to blame. North Korea a Communist country? In name only - it's actually a Fascist dictatorship.

Perhaps "independent of the government's control" is a poor choice of words, but you have totalitarian countries with both Capitalism and Communism, as well as relatively free ones with elements of Socialism and Capitalism. Are they pure Socialism? No, but then the US isn't pure Capitalism either. A system where the government allocates large chunks of the available capital is Socialist in my book.

Googling for "site:delong.typepad.com karl marx" will get you some succinct interpretations of Marx's very large body of thought from a professional who knows his stuff and has a perspective reasonably amenable to the average HNers.

In practice, Google only really gets 3-5 hours/day out of an employee, as that seems to be the maximum that humans can sustain high-level creative work. The problem Google wants to avoid is when those 3-5 hours/day happen outside of the 8 hours/day that the worker is physically present at the Googleplex.

Understood. Until they don't need you anymore. Then they boot you out, leaving you with no ideas. And that's why these things bother me - you don't have a backup plan under contracts like this, and in this day and age you certainly need one (or two.)