At the very least you should inform the company about the upcoming conflict of interests on the horizon. Let them know you won't be able to start work on that project until you've both figured out your legal ground.
As common advice goes, seek a lawyer's advice. Alternatively talk to the company lawyer whose job may also involve sorting out things like this so you can save on fees.
Be aware that the company lawyer represents the company's interests, not yours. Any advice they give you will be slanted from the point of view of what's best for the company. (Any reasonably ethical attorney will also disclose this conflict of interest, and many may refuse to provide legal advice in this situation for this reason.)
Something I also wanted to say. Consider changing your scenery. It might give a boost to your morale and supply you with new and better ideas. Perhaps find a job on another continent for a change.
I was there some years ago. I realized that the root cause of the problem was focusing on the wrong things (at least they were wrong for me).
Tools are just that - they are tools. Granted, there are many of them, new and shining, coming in all packages, but that gets tiresome after you've spent a substantial period of time with them. They are all essentially the same and sooner or later you lose interest in them.
What never gets boring is using tools to create things that affect people's lives. And I gather from your message that you've missed that joy.
My advice is simple. Think of some thing that would be helpful to (non-technical) end users. Come up with some kind of service that would solve even a small problem for them. Then see your eyes light up as people are adopting your offering and giving you their thanks.
In short, your work must have a meaning. You should know that somehow what you do improves the world we live in, even if in a small and seemingly insignificant way. For as long as you're just finishing tasks prepared by somebody else for somebody else's meaningless projects, you're not going to be happy. As with all creative professions, in programming too you have to take matter in your own hands.
You've just realized (subconsciously) that your work has been meaningless. You basically need to find your path. What you could do:
- Forget about the tools, just pick up something you're comfortable with and create something useful for people
- Change jobs until you find a project you can personally identify with and where you'll see you work affecting the outside world in a tangible way
- Change profession or role to the one where your need for meaning will be satisfied
That's hard I know. I wish it weren't but it's just the way things are in life.
From what I heard French are obliged to surrender encryption keys at the request of authorities or go to jail for a few years for denying their request. The only thing that may be left is to pack your things and go.
You don't have to surrender the key, but you are required to at least decrypt things for the authorities.
However, I the twist seems to be in the word "susceptible": any encryption key is susceptible to be somehow used to commit a crime, while on the other hand a jury would probably "deny a request" of the authorities if they can't show enough evidences.
(Russian here). I so much understand you brother (or sister). We've got an even harder wave of prohibitive laws and the local IT industry has been brought to its knees. Companies have been leaving, people have been leaving. I haven't seen any appealing job openings for close to two years. I myself am thinking of emigrating, even thought about France, but now I'm not sure it was such a good idea.
>> So much potential is wasted...
That's the most tragic thing indeed. You can import food, clothes, cars and so on but you can't import talent. When it goes, it's final.
Thank you for this comment. I guess you can understand how depressing it sounds, I go back in France every 2/3 months and everything is worse everytime I go there, and I can do nothing about it. It's really crashing at high speed.
I also have a friend in Moscow I discuss with regularly. I can speak basic Russian but I don't mention it normally because it's really a Tarzan-like level, the language is really beautiful. I really hope things are going to improve there also. France is definitely not the place to go for IT, I'm sorry for that.
I'm sorry you're going through that kind of feelings, they're pretty heavy to live with on a daily basis. A month under that stress counts almost as a year.
I've always liked France and its culture, and I speak French on some level, I guess that's why I take personally all bad things that I hear from France, as if they concerned mon pays natal.
If you'd like we could exchange privately, I could attempt to cheer you up (from the position of a person living in a place that has fallen much lower than yours), though I realize there's not much I can say to remedy the gloom you're seeing around you.
Thanks, we could have some discussion sometimes, you can reach me at my email address (on my profile), I cannot guarantee that my Russian will be good enough for a conversation but I will try !
Never left them in the first place. Great products actually.
Also lots of hardware available, everything is upgradeable. Not like MBP with soldered RAM, soldered SSD, weak ventilation system, no LAN and just 2 USB ports. Can buy a laptop or assemble your own desktop workstation.
Linux I don't know. It still looks ugly and no great apps available for it. Visual Studio for Linux? Adobe tools for Linux? Of course not. Just amateur toys and fonts with ragged edges. Thanks but no thanks.
Drop the prices for Azure VMs to the reasonable level similar to that of the other hosting companies. Right now the first tolerable configuration A1 costs $57 and this can be had for $15 elsewhere.
Please also make your payment processor accept virtual credit cards so I can actually pay you money with the means I have (not in a possession of a real credit card). PayPal will also do nicely.
No, the disk is fine. I just wish that VM cost $20, perhaps $25, but not $57 which it costs now (I've corrected my original post, it was not $67 but $57 as I remembered wrongly).
I wish to publish a relatively simple app for a reasonable price and I'm sadly skipping Azure from my consideration. I'm seeing VMs similar to A1 cost about $12-15 with many hosting companies. And for $20-25 I can get your level A2 which costs $115.
I realize you may not be in a position to influence pricing. I just would like to point out that the pricing of Azure VMs is not simply uncompetitive, but plainly prohibitive. I hope Microsoft does something about it.
Saying it as a veteran Microsoft developer since the 90s.
I think the lowest entry point for this is an A0, which offers an admittedly very small (half an A1) VM for 9.98 euro a month. Good to start off with, and if you build your application slightly differently you can actually run it on two machines, total power is the same, with only the communication overhead between them which luckily isn't that high if you put them in the same region. I find that I can run a very decent amount of software on Azure for a very very low price, but sometimes I needed to make certain architectural changes (for example using Cloud Services + Table Storage + Service Bus instead of VM's and SQL Server makes the whole system very cheap).
A very nice thing that NServiceBus does on Azure is giving the opportunity to have multiple endpoints hosted in the same Cloud Service [1]. Taking this mindset, for small applications, you can build it so when needed (and presumably when money is also less of a thing since you need more), you can scale out easily, but when just starting up you can do it super cheap. This depends a lot on your application though, but for example the Topshelf framework [2] can help a lot.
I'm not affiliated with either Microsoft or NServiceBus, but I am an avid user of both and really love the ecosystem, including the pricing ;)
I'd be more curious to see a salary range analysis. It would quickly turn up that of hundreds of Germany startups perhaps a ten or so pay some reasonable money while the rest stick with the 40-50K range and set for cheap workforce only.
As common advice goes, seek a lawyer's advice. Alternatively talk to the company lawyer whose job may also involve sorting out things like this so you can save on fees.