I’m working on a side project in my free time—completely unrelated to my day job—and I’d like to gather user feedback on the proof of concept. I’m also planning to invite people to join a waitlist for its potential launch. The project doesn’t use any company resources or knowledge, but I’m wondering: Should I check with my manager before posting about it publicly (e.g., on LinkedIn)? If the project starts to gain traction and I decide to monetize it, do I need to formally disclose this to my manager? If so, how should I approach that conversation? Thanks in advance for any advice you can share!

In most cases, I would not share this with my manager. What you do on your own time is totally up to you, and you're under no obligation to share the project with your manager. However, if you feel like your manager will see your LinkedIn post and start to cause trouble, you may want to get ahead of it. Or, alternatively, if you have a great relationship with your manager, you may want to share the idea with them simply to get their feedback. I would not worry about the monetization problem until you have it -- that's a problem of the privileged few side projects :) At Meta, I believe the threshold at which point you had to disclose was a few thousand dollars/year. So if you're making less than, say $2000/year, I wouldn't feel the need to disclose it. If you're at a Big Tech company, there's probably some internal wiki you can look up to see the company policy.

Should I Ask My Manager Before Posting About My Side Project on LinkedIn?

Mid-Level Software Engineer at Taro Communitya month ago

Mid-level Engineer

Side Projects

I’m working on a side project in my free time—completely unrelated to my day job—and I’d like to gather user feedback on the proof of concept. I’m also planning to invite people to join a waitlist for its potential launch. The project doesn’t use any company resources or knowledge, but I’m wondering:

Should I check with my manager before posting about it publicly (e.g., on LinkedIn)?
If the project starts to gain traction and I decide to monetize it, do I need to formally disclose this to my manager? If so, how should I approach that conversation?

Thanks in advance for any advice you can share!

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33 Comments

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Discussion

(3 comments)

1
Rahul Pandey
•Tech Lead/Manager at Meta, Pinterest, Kosei
a month ago
In most cases, I would not share this with my manager.

What you do on your own time is totally up to you, and you're under no obligation to share the project with your manager. However, if you feel like your manager will see your LinkedIn post and start to cause trouble, you may want to get ahead of it.

Or, alternatively, if you have a great relationship with your manager, you may want to share the idea with them simply to get their feedback.

I would not worry about the monetization problem until you have it -- that's a problem of the privileged few side projects :) At Meta, I believe the threshold at which point you had to disclose was a few thousand dollars/year. So if you're making less than, say $2000/year, I wouldn't feel the need to disclose it.

If you're at a Big Tech company, there's probably some internal wiki you can look up to see the company policy.
- 0
  Mid-Level Software Engineer
  •Taro Community
  a month ago
  Thanks, that was really helpful!
0
Elliot Kang
•AI/ML Eng @ Series C startup
a month ago
To add onto this: just don't do any of this work on a company laptop if you plan to commercialize