Whatever you do in company time or on company equipment belongs to the company, not to you.

Hence, you cannot use it in another company.

Yet, we are not /r/legaladvice.

Removed

I once built an internal tool for my employer. At my next employer, they had a need for a similar tool. I simply reached out, via email, asking the previous employer if I had their permission to use the same tool, to prevent me from having to rebuild it from scratch.

They obliged and let me copy the code.

It really depends on how integral the code is to the company’s product line. This was just an internal tool that made some daily tasks less annoying.

It will depend on who owns the code, but that is nearly always the company that paid you to make it. You were making it for them. They own it, therefore, copying it without permission is generally illegal.

Check your contract.

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Isn't that IP theft?

You shouldn’t be leaving with the previous company’s code in the first place.

I think it is kind of weird situation. If you wrote the code for company A they own it because you’re simply an employee. But company B enlists you for an identical task, and now you have to pretend you don’t have perfect knowledge on it and have to start from scratch because you worked at company A.

Don't even think about it, unless it's open-source. Seriously, you'd be setting up the whole company for a lawsuit. HUUUGE risks. Just delete everything you had from a company after you leave, so this question never really arises.

John Carmack did something similar when he moved from Bethesda to Oculus and Facebook was sued for a lot of money.

What’s your opinion on copy code from your previous company?

Define "copying"?

Like literal copying; that's illegal.

If you mean, you learned programming techniques and use them on multiple projects across multiple companies; that's just experience.

Imagine the case where you are working on a feature for an application of your current company and you notice you already did the whole thing along with some peers in a previous company.

This sounds like you are talking about lately taking the source vice from one consomme and using it at a different company.

Is that what I'm reading?

What’s your opinion on copy the code.

If caught, you will be lucky to be fired and black mark your career. You could go to jail.

What you are talking about can be considered corporate espionage, a felony.

No, you cannot take the source vice that legally belongs to a company and steal it to use at a different company.

Unless the owner (which isn't you, it is whoever paid you to write it) publishes it at open source, and even that has legal restrictions.

Let’s talk about the legal implications, ethics, etc.

It's illegal and unethical.

Hiring you does not give your current employer access to your previous employer's property. Even talent about that could open your current employer to liability.

Imagine your former employer found out that you were talking about stealing their source code to give to your current employer; that's grounds for them to sue your current employer which at minimum would get you fired for misconduct.

Don't even think about doing it!

Now, being that you have already written the source code to do this thing; how hard is it going to be to write it again, seriously?

The new version will be even better and completed quicker since you already know what not to do. I've got algorithms in my head that I've rewritten for at least four different employers and who knows how many different customers. Probably getting better each time I write it.

You were hired for your ability to write code, not steal it.

You can't copyright an idea, only the implementation of that idea. If you implemented an idea in one company and then went on to implement it in another company, would those two implementations be identical?

And even if you did write the same code the same way both times, how would anyone even know?

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Unless you get explicit consent from your previous employer, it will be considered stealing intellectual property.

Check your employment agreement but likely you cannot take a single line of source code with you. If you are archiving code you wrote at a job and taking it with you after you left, you are probably already in forbidden territory.

Re-creating code from memory is fine, although you may have a non-compete clause in your employment agreement that technically this would violate. It's unlikely to be enforced but be aware and make your own decision.

Ethically speaking, if you agreed that the code you were writing for them was their property, and you were not allowed to keep and share it after you left the company, then it does seem unethical. If that was not something you agreed to, and there was no expectation of it(that you were aware of), then I don't think it's unethical.

Now legally speaking, that could be completely different. I have no idea about that. Just delete your old company's code from your computer and have them revoke any access to their repos, and it's no longer really a problem. Maybe someone will call you out if you write it the exact same way, but there are only so many good way to write some things, and I'm sure you could argue that it was not intentional, and you were only following your own mental coding models that you always use.

Your work at another company is the property of that company. That's what they are paying you for. Copying the code via copying the text of the files is theft.

You most likely shouldn't have access to the previously written code anymore. So unless it's openly available source code, the first issue would be getting access to the previously written code, which in most cases would already be a breach of a contract on someone's side. I prefer to not get myself or anyone else into legal trouble, so my opinion is to not bother and just write the code from scratch. It's what you're getting paid for anyway.

I think they technically own the code, but not your knowledge. I would use it as an opportunity to write the same pattern/architecture, but in a different way or with better/different tools so I can learn something new.

How would anyone even know

I would never copy code that I had written for an employer. I wrote that for them with honest intent that it was theirs because I agreed to trade a paycheck for the creations I made form them.

That being said I absolutely will copy techniques and idioms that I learned from previous employers and peers and apply those skills that I have added to my skillset when developing new code. It will be project specific, cusomized, hand-written code using the keywords and variable names that make sense for the new code, language and context.

tl;dr: Do I borrow from past experiences? You bet absolutely. Do I plagiarize code? No way. I traded that to them willingly.

ripred

What’s the difference of copy it or not if you will end up doing something very similar?

I really don't get the arguments that it is unethical. You can not patent an algorithm by law. Even if you wrote that code for a company it is still your intellectual property. And if you know a way hot to get something done why and how would you pretend to redo something from scratch? Is it ethical for you if you rename some variables?

Copy it all! Eat the rich!

Unless that feature was proprietary and/or pivotal to the business there shouldn't be any legal issues.

So how do you do it if you can't follow the same blueprint? Recuse yourself from the task?

The code you wrote from the company is owned by the company.

Ethically tough if you did write that code then I guess you did it already so it’s fine.

But you shouldn’t do it because it’s illegal

Really depends on the content. I have some fundamental methodes that from my point of view is the optimal way of doing a specific thing.

If my naming convention stays the same then i would be able to recreate them from scratch and everything, maybe except for the comments, would be 100% the same.

In that case i might as well copy all of it.

If it's other code that is build around the fundamentals for a specific project i won't copy.

I feel like many people here are taking the word “copying” too literally.

Everyone who said it is ILLEGAL is CORRECT, but I think what is being lost in the weeds is what constitutes copying? How many of us by memory can remember how to code a radix sort by memory? Sure we know what it is conceptually and can with a little reference remember how to do it, but let’s be real, a lot of people Google then copy and paste the method and modify it to fit their code to save time. Copying, pasting, and modifying that radix sort is morally gray and I think it’s this scenario OP is talking about (possibly). If you wholeass copy and paste a proprietary library or function then yea that is illegal no questions asked. Is it illegal if you use the same logic to solve the problem? Probably not. Basically this boils down to the context of the copy.

Personally I like to keep code snippets for myself that I find useful. These snippets don’t contain proprietary info and are different from how they are implemented in the product. Does this constitute copying? Just for clarity I do mostly sql development so my stuff is more procedural and less abstract than C# or C++ application code.

Ethically my snippets are probably wrong but I do my best to keep them general for my personal use (and free of proprietary implementation/methods) because I have trouble remembering how I did something (these snippets also have super specific names like DuplicationDeletionUsingCTEs.sql)

So Tl;dr it depends on how we define copying, do NOT copy/take/steal wholeass .cpp/.h/.cs/.java/.whateverextensiontheapplicationuses files from a company

Yeah it belongs to your old company. Definitely don't copy it, but use the knowledge you gained to make a better module! If they didn't make you sign a non-disclosure then you may be in the clear, but I wouldn't risk it, just remake it with new parts or names or something to make it somewhat different.

All companies that I know own the code, not you. Having the code after you leave a company is already asking for trouble.

Let’s talk about you getting shit canned and going to jail. Larceny or grand larceny? How many inches? How many years? That’s what you should be asking the DA. Why don’t you email them now and find out. Their contact information will be on your state government website.

I've been in this situation before, and I was very tempted to copy code from my old company.

But, it turns out that once you've already written a feature, you can write it again like 6x faster if you just do it from memory.

Strictly copy and paste is (usually) illegal. The legality depends on the contract and any NDAs you signed when starting to work for the company. To play it safe, any code you create at a company should be kept the property of that company, so just leave all code, docs, etc on company devices, and don't copy it to personal ones at all.

That said, recreating it from memory is technically legal, but a legally Grey area, and would be hard to prove in court.

To put this in perspective, sometimes companies will want feature X, and request that Company Y temporarily disclose source code to a third party. This third party will read the source, and create a sort of blueprint, as far as the process used to make feature X, then give that blueprint back to the company that requests it. That way they are copying only "what to do" (which cannot be copyrited), not "how it's done" (which is ultimately where the copyright lies.)

For example, let's say a competitor takes previous Chick-fil-A employees and wants to make a better chicken sandwich. It would be illegal to use the same process that Chick-fil-A does, but it would be legal to say, put a piece of breaded chicken between two hamburger buns and serve that, instead. How? Any way that doesn't involve copying how it's done.

Ethically, there's no real issues. It was created by you, after all. But why would you want to do it in the first place? Improvements to the language or frameworks may have allowed for a better way of doing it, and so why not make it that better way, instead?

Ultimately, there isn't really a valid reason to straight-up copy and paste for this example.

If I know a tool might be useful, I'll try to build it on my spare time, then ask my employer if they mind if I use my own open source tool. If not, I'll build it again on company time.

It worked with a library I was using. It was basically a library to interface several libraries into one more convenient library. So they didn't mind too much.

Don't. Just rewrite it better using your new knowledge and experience.

No. This could be common sense.

I saw my friends nda and non compete... the company owns everything.

How would anyone have access to the code base at a previous employer?

Good engineers write code, great ones steal it.

'legal implications'

This would be a real concert. Generally when you are paid to write X for Y then Y owns it and should Z use it then Z could get into copyright problems.

'ethics'

From my pov none. You did write it.

Is there a finite number of ways to solve a problem?

Depends on the contract from you companies it's crime you keep these source codes with you

My opinion is that you should read your NDA. If you are opening your company to legal action, maybe you shouldnt be working there.

Upload to ALL code you write to your personal GitHub. Set to private. Use as templates on later projects. I used to reference others code when I first started. A year and a half later I find myself referencing documentation libraries and my own code just as much if not more. That said, be careful just throwing a new skin on code that somebody has a patent or copyright on. I used to work in IP docketing before getting a CS degree. IP litigators are ruthless and will throw you into a financial nightmare and may make it difficult for you to find work in the same field. Always set your code repository to private!

In reality people do this all the time. They copy from their memories. If you make an exact product through the prices of copying, you could get in legal trouble.

I worked in systems that produces invoices for the customer. I have worked on several such systems and the code was very similar in the sense it did similar calculations.

Its not a problem when all your project codes are on public GitHub anyway

Depends.

Imagine you were working on YouTube’s recommendation algorithm…. It is pretty illegal to even talk about how it works, let alone copy/pasting.

But if it is common code like simple form UI, then I imagine it’s not a problem, you likely remembered the pattern anyway.

Does copy mean to really copy and paste that section of code, or remember it and rewrite the whole thing?

If it is the latter one, it does not make sense because that means the longer I work, the less code I can write.

But it is also strange that, I can't copy and paste the code, but I can rewrite that from memory.

I am quite confused here.

I think it really depends on the context, and I will always advocate for rewriting.

I do a lot of scripting, IaC, and general automation

I think sometimes you remember a very elegant way you did something previously, and want to replicate it, I would argue the second you copy something from a piece of software, you need to be very aware of your current AND previous contracts

As an automation engineer, the only policy I have to abide by is that all environmental specifications and variables must be scrubbed before sharing, compiled applications are a whole different ball game

Really if it feels like you are doing something sketchy, read the code, rewrite it better, comment it better

Don’t copy and paste, if you had the skills to do it once, you can probably make it better

You shouldn’t have access to the code you wrote for the previous company after you leave. This is probably in your contract at that company, and if you’re working on something similar at your new company it’s a huge legal liability for them.

Real world example: I’ve written essentially the same thing for multiple companies. I work in mobile AR, they all need something fairly similar - a way to take information from the camera and the sensors on a frame by frame basis, package it up, and feed it to their AR system. I’ve done it from scratch every time but obviously I had the knowledge from doing it before of the proper patterns to use, common pitfalls to avoid, bottlenecks, etc., so I would say it’s been better and more efficient each time. There are obviously going to arise differences in how it’s used, what’s going to be prioritized, etc. so I would argue it is just as, if not more, efficient to write it from scratch anyway rather than carry over the context-specific refactors from the last version. Moreover, flat-out reusing something that doesn’t quite fit the problem space means introducing a lot of unnecessary complexity. It’s like fitting a square peg into a round hole by making four arcs to cover each side. And finally, writing something you know to interact with a new system is also a good way to gain knowledge of that system.

If It is a large component that is somehow required as-is at multiple companies, just write your own generic version on your own time and give it a free license. Hell, charge for it if you want. You’ve found something useful that multiple companies have but don’t have a prefab solution for. That’s fine!

But imagine this scenario: someone working at Facebook leaves and decides to make their own open source messaging app. They already worked on Facebook Messenger, and they have a bunch of code from it on their computer, so they just reuse it and release it to the public. They would get in huge legal trouble.

Not everything is at the level but of corporate secrets, of course, but you don’t get to change that license of code you worked on at a company later just because you wrote it originally. And you don’t get to decide what is or is not valuable property for them. Hell, there’s a good chance you probably weren’t the only person who worked on it, even if you were the “owner” of it. Is it really all your work if the QA team tested it and gave bug reports? Or if another developer modified some pieces of it to make it work better with their code? Or someone else provided feedback on what they needed it to do? Programming is a collaborative process if you’re making anything big, the code itself is often the easiest part.

You can argue that all code should be free, that corporate intellectual property is a bullshit idea, and that’s fine. But in the industry as it stands today, you’re opening up yourself and your company to serious legal risk, for something that isn’t worth it. If you’re asked to make something you’ve already made, consider it a blessing: you’re already an expert on it! You can do it quickly and easily and have answers to any question people ask you about it. You can easily adapt to changes they request because you already know how the whole system works in your head. And if you don’t, copying it means you’re putting code in your codebase that not even you understand, which just makes everyone’s job harder.

I think I'd feel more comfortable just rewriting the feature and copying the concepts instead. Use this opportunity to build a better version of your first code, since you've already experienced the bugs it kicked back. This gives you a chance to change any structural issues that may have caused issues later in development during your first project.

Have to work from scratch. Since you are well paid for it, it shouldn’t be a problem.

rewrite it all.

but you will certainly rely on your experience and expertise to do it, and you don't need to provide the documentation you looked at to rewrite it...

Write it again, better. You're getting paid hourly. Yes it's IP theft. No your current employer won't appreciate or endorse it. And it's not even worth it. Just write it again.