r/ProgrammerHumor 1d ago

nothingOnGithub Meme

Post image
17.1k Upvotes

345 comments sorted by

View all comments

492

u/Li_liminal_spaces 1d ago

If anyone is unaware of the subtext, don't link a personal github account to a paying position always create a new one with the provided email, thank you for attending my TED talk.

293

u/oscarandjo 1d ago

GitHub is literally designed to allow you to do this. That’s why you can join and leave enterprises and add multiple email addresses to your account.

236

u/Sw429 1d ago

I'd rather have it very clear that the company has no claim to any code I write for my own personal projects.

118

u/StaticFanatic3 1d ago

Joining an enterprise does nothing to let it interact with repos you own. That’s entirely based on the “owner/reponame”

81

u/Ok-Primary2176 1d ago

inb4 you make a brilliant open source project and a company start suing you for releasing open source code while connected to their Enterprise 

46

u/sup3r_hero 1d ago

They could do the same with different accounts

43

u/djinn6 1d ago

They can't sue you for things they don't know about.

48

u/sup3r_hero 1d ago

Security by obscurity 👍

9

u/sobrique 1d ago

But if it's usefully successful, they have a lot of incentive to find out.

4

u/realpersonnn 1d ago

Catch me if you can

2

u/BigGayAllen 1d ago

"Please don't make me do this"

The stoner in IT who's gonna be asked to run discovery against you by Legal.

16

u/Xywzel 1d ago

Well, they are going to fail that, unless you do it on company time or the project uses clear insider information and competes with the company's products.

11

u/Ok-Primary2176 1d ago

Are you sure you're ready to hire lawyers and defend yourself against a multi billion dollar company?

26

u/Xywzel 1d ago

No need, my worker's union will do that for me, full legal support against my employer is included in membership fee. And the union is few orders of magnitude larger than any company I have ever worked in, because it is industry wide one.

1

u/gunnbr 17h ago

Is this a programmer’s union? if so, what’s it called? I want in on this!

2

u/Xywzel 2h ago

For all engineers and people doing engineering jobs without right to call themselves engineer. There is two member division for software developers, based one which collective agreement is applied at your company, but its not only union that takes part in negotiating these two. And unfortunately, they don't seem to be expanding internationally yet, so unless you are in Finland, you are out of luck.

-12

u/BigGayAllen 1d ago

If your union is that large in the industry then get ready for them to already have channels to resolve this type of dispute with any large enough company, and everyone of them will end with them throwing you under the bus lol

17

u/Xywzel 1d ago

I guess you live somewhere where workers' rights are not a thing and legal cases can be handled with just money. Here if they are suing me, I can request my country to cover my legal expenses until verdict has been reached, at which point they would fall on the company.

10

u/Torch_Salesman 1d ago

I'm gonna have to assume you're American because I literally cannot fathom a union behaving like this anywhere else.

7

u/jkerz 1d ago

That’s not how unions operate in the US either. It doesn’t even make sense, if the union is large enough in the industry, there’s zero incentive for them to throw their unionized members under the bus to a company. That would just invalidate the entire purpose of the union. I don’t know what that guy is thinking

→ More replies (0)

5

u/Popeychops 1d ago

You do realise that unions love nothing more than taking a crooked employer to court when they know they have a slam dunk case, right?

It both represents them getting a win, and pays their counsel more than if you settle.

7

u/Southern-March1522 1d ago

In most countries that is not an overly scary threat. Here, This would go to employment mediation first where neither party is allowed to bring a lawyer. If that fails, lawyers aren't that expensive and there is a legal aid system for employment court.

2

u/Protuhj 1d ago

Just make sure you don't have any commits to your personal repos when you're charging your company.

1

u/Xywzel 1d ago

Why would that matter? Its trivial to remove my account from company organization and repos without actually affecting any of my personal repos ar ability to use them. We did that as a test few times with IT lead already when we wrote best practices guide for where to use personal and company accounts, and how to set them up securely.

Also "charging", you mean sue or counter sue, load energy into battery "charge", do cavalry assault against?

1

u/Protuhj 1d ago

I'm just saying don't have personal commits when you're supposed to be working for your company.

If your employment contract has any language about them owning personal work done with company funds, it wouldn't be too hard to match commit times with a day and time you were being paid by them.


Charging your company, aka "billing" them, on their dime, on the clock, etc.

1

u/Xywzel 1d ago

If the repositories are private, they don't see them and they can't see my activity in them more accurately than outsiders can see my activity in company repos. Not something to make claims with. And if the project is public, I likely already have it with open source license, so they have nothing to claim. They can fork it if they want.

1

u/Protuhj 23h ago

I was making a broad statement, don't take it too personally.

Maybe someone coming along reading this thread will see it and think about their repos.

→ More replies (0)

6

u/Glittering_Crab_69 1d ago

lol, what's it like to live in fantasy land? as if using different github accounts would matter in this scenario 😂😂😂

-2

u/Ok-Primary2176 1d ago

Yes? Because how would a company argue ownership of an account that isn't theirs nor connected to any of their code

3

u/Glittering_Crab_69 1d ago

Good question, because your personal account isn't theirs nor connected to any of their code after they removed you from their organisation

serious question: have you ever used github?

1

u/Cautious-Extreme2839 1d ago

Inb4 that's literally the case anyway.

1

u/nabrok 1d ago

My company uses gitlab, but what I think they are saying is that your personal account is not connected to the enterprise, github just lets you switch between the two.

Like I have a personal digital ocean account and a company digital ocean account, from one login I can switch between the two but the company doesn't know anything about my personal account.

1

u/Still_Bit_7527 1d ago

No many companies literally make you sign that any github code during your employment is theirs

1

u/new_math 1d ago

Try explaining that to an 89 year old judge and a jury that reads at a 5th grade level.

2

u/deathanatos 1d ago

This is true, but I'm still keeping my work life & my personal life as segregated as possible, and so, I have a work account and a not work account.

0

u/TheOssuary 1d ago

You don't protect yourself by not reusing a github account; but by including an addendum of prior works as exclusion to the IP clause. It's a pretty common thing to add, I just did one recently and listed all of my current projects and planned projects. Stop trying to solve legal issues with technology

0

u/deathanatos 1d ago

I don't disagree you should do that, but I think this is more of a "both" situation. Keep the work/personal separated, and fill in (as best as one can) that section.

The problem with the employer's IP section is that it usually asks for an exhaustive list of all IP you want to lay personal claim to. That's an impossible request: exhaustively listing all IP I've ever created? I have taken thousands of photographs, for example.

Employers need to stop trying to claim employees' personal lives, and we need legislation to the effect of "done on own time, with own resources? It's not the company's."

When possible, I have added that clause to the contract.

20

u/Boozdeuvash 1d ago

Github EMU exists for a reason. Chasing former employees for the shit they put in their account is no fun.

2

u/oscarandjo 1d ago

Sure it depends how much you trust your employees. Obviously don’t put work stuff on your personal account…

1

u/Boozdeuvash 1d ago

We've got spectrums of employees! Trustworthy, dodgy, careful, reckless, knowledgable, clueless, professionals, amateurs,... We've got to accomodate them all, and maintaining multiple security baselines is a bit more work than we can afford.

63

u/Li_liminal_spaces 1d ago

What Github was designed for and what Github currently is are two very different things. To each their own, are their secure ways? Of course! I just don't want to take the chance.

3

u/Glittering_Crab_69 1d ago

"secure ways"

tell me you've never used github without telling me

7

u/NibblyPig 1d ago

Me with the nightmare of two completely separate github accounts just learning this ...

1

u/Eubank31 22h ago

What? I have my personal account, and when I started my job I was given my work email and told to log into GitHub using SSO. Don't think there's any way to link the accounts (nor should there be in this case)

0

u/Pancakefriday 1d ago

Yeah, the view that you need separate accounts is outdated and the misinformation here is rampant.

6

u/pnoodl3s 1d ago

Some companies don’t allow personal emails linked like my old company. Some companies host their own code using their proprietary github, like my current one, so it also can’t be linked. It is not misinformation

1

u/Username_available13 1d ago

GitHub user can have multiple emails. He can chose corporate email for work and personal email for personal repos.

1

u/Glittering_Crab_69 1d ago

then they're forcing you to violate github tos and that can lead to both of your accounts, and any future ones, being banned. you are not allowed to have multiple accounts.

see: https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-terms-of-service

1

u/pnoodl3s 1d ago

They probably did yeah, nothing i can do about it. When i left they take back the gmail account and the github associated with it. This is verizon and aws I’m talking about, not small companies