Applying to a company while personally working on a comparable project
- by Developer Art
That's going to be an unusual question but here it goes.
I'm entertaining the thought to send my docs to a place which develops a large web project of a social type. Social meaning people, communities, interaction and all that usual stuff.
The issue is that I myself am working on something that falls into the category of social in my private time.
Now the question. Is it wise to apply there under these circumstances?
I think there may be issues of intellectual ownership if I develop something similar that exists or will exist in that company's work. On the other hand, the web of full of social places (even this site is one of them), many of them utilize the same ideas and move in the same direction and it seems to work for everyone. It's hard to come up with something which hasn't been tried yet by somebody else so it's all basically reuse of the commonly available ideas and experience.
What I'm working on is not a functional equivalent, it's rather largely off. There may be some intersections, but on a large scale this is not an equivalent. And whatever features might coincide, they already exist everywhere on the web anyway.
Also technology stacks are entirely different so the issue with directly copying out parts of the code is probably not applicable.
I plan to say it up front that I'm engaged in a personal project of mine and let them see if it represents a problem for them.
What do you think? Am I making things up or is there really an issue?
