An important lesson I learned:

When upskilling yourself and taking notes, make sure you do it on your personal laptop because when the time of contract termination arises, you will have to sign a waiver that you can't keep any of the data you saved on company infrastructure (including cloud). And then you lose all your notes and possibly knowledge. lol.

I find this concept so annoying. Even in college they said that anything you write down is property of the university.

I just use text files

Molodetz.nl + home server at parents. Would survive a fire.

When upskirt

well they also have to pay lawyers and file court documents (and pay for them) and then go to court to then prove that those notes are theirs and not yours

and the courts won't penalize you very much (they'll throw it out actually because that's a joke) unless you made profits off that information

and just cuz they write something into a contract doesn't mean it's moral, or even legally binding. that's the kicker. they will write things in there that are actually not legally enforceable... and they won't tell you because you believing it is in their best interest

if you want a book to really help you with the stress of this nonsense, because I used to actually get really stressed about the irrational and self-contradictory prison-cage of these contracts, this explains our current world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Also we already have a word for "upskilling".

It's "learning"

But I do empathise with your data loss tho

@jestdotty Well, interesting. Back in college Law we learned that you have to put clauses in contracts so that court can use that in a case. We then also learned that the law is not black and white and is weighed on a case-by-case basis (this is why the statue of justice has the weight scales and the sword of justice). As well, that it is better to put clauses in a contract to protect yourself from trouble later on. Though, hm... not legally enforcable? Seems strange. I'll have a look at the book.

Now that I remember the lessons, I also remember that a contract was.. not by definition legally binding? It has to be at least signed, and even then. Yes, law is complicated.

@CaptainRant well for example my contract said I can't go work for a company doing the same stuff. but legally non competes apply within 150 miles here... and they can't bar me from being a web developer at another webshop. that would be ridiculous

and for non competes to be enforceable they also typically need to pay you severance. so for example my contract said I couldn't work somewhere with the same skills for 2 years. for that 2 years to apply they have to give me severance for that to be legally binding. otherwise the court throws it out because you can't just make a former employee unhirable anywhere else when all they're doing is using generic industry standard tools. the non compete was too broad and utter bullshit. I read it and it made it sound like I was to be a slave and if I ever left I would have to work as like a waiter that meet my bills and can't do a tech job for 2 years, and there was no compensation for it at all

anyone remember when the author's previous employer declared that they own NGINX because he wrote it on a company laptop? What was the end of that story?

@jestdotty I've seen that annoying clause repeatedly. It is indeed often bullshit. A former friend of mine won a case against a company that way. I read similar crap, like: "Not allowed to use time outside of work for anything other than work", so not allowed to do any type of hobby or venture related to similar technologies. lmao. Anyway, that was ridiculous and I'm glad I don't work there anymore.

Definitely depends on the company, but having a personal, external HDD is a good option.