Most tech contracts in the US stipulate that the company owns any IP you produce under some conditions. You can use this to give your employer a weird IP portfolio. Personally, I'm looking forward to Google owning an extensive collection of "Welcome Back, Kotter" fan fiction.
"Oops, I used my work computer for this by 'accident', better put '© Google' on 'The Sweathogs meet Dracula'."
@pganssle that sounds like you are given a fair degree of flexibility, providing your output conceptually fits the banner of some product. The contract might get weird but above all you can act autonomously which is great
@binsrc
Google used to allow their employees (maybe not contractors, but their full time staff) to reserve a percentage of their time for individually selected research projects. That was an interesting programme.
Then they became open capital, watched and with pressure from big shareholders, and it's been downhill from there.
@design_RG @binsrc Yeah, I have only worked there for about 6 months. We still have "20% projects" but it's not an unlimited work-on-what-you-want thing. I'm not sure if it changed or it never worked that way. Both possibilities seem plausible.
I think managers have a lot of discretion about what their staff does, so it probably varies across the organization.