I'm an engineering student and wrote a software for my company that helps to create technical documents

if you were to leave the company right now and rewrite the program from scratch then you would own it. however they might be able to argue in court if they really want. you essentially left the company and wrote a copy of their software based on memory. seems like a legal gray area.

>wrote a software

If you're in the US, your employer is going to try to claim rights to it. Do NOT, under any circumstances, share what you've made with a supervisor. If you're gonna make,money off of it, you have to find a way to do it without your employer knowing you made it.

If you wrote it for the company you work for it’s the companies property

Implementations of ideas are not susceptible to IP laws in the USA. He just need to prove that his code isn't the same owned by the company, although there is still the matter of who actually owns the original code.

Talk to an IP lawyer.

Is this really legal in America? wtf how can your company own something you made in your free time

welcome to burgerland -- corporate dystopia WIP

Btw I'm a yuropoor, not a burger.
I mostly made it at work. I started it in my free time to have a prototype to show so I could justify spending company time on it.
I'd probably prefer doing it with the company for a share of the profits cause it'd be much easier.
If they don't see the potential, though, I wouldn't want to abandon the idea.
Yeah, I think I will.

Your company might own the rights to your software. You fell for the corporate meme. Enjoy it.

If I hadn't worked there the software wouldn't exist cause I wouldn't even know about the demand for it. So I didn't lose anything.

upload it in gitlab and go full open source

fucking paid software

Trust me, we hate it too. I have an anonymous Gitlab account that I use for most stuff, and a different account for padding my resume.

It's absolutely fucking criminal. Imagine if companies could seize the creations of radio hobbyists, songwriters, painters, car ricers, etc

What the fuck is it about programming that makes it any different? Why should a programming hobbyist have to fear their employer?

>The user has to enter some technical stuff and then the documents are generated automatically.
Sounds like API documentation generators such as doxygen, javadoc, sphinx, etc., where you annotate functions/variables and it generates documentation from your source code.

What kind of technical documents? I'm actually working on a system for managing technical documentation using a certain specification called S1000D (mainly popular in aviation). Always interested in overlap with what others are working, although I'm more in to FOSS.

This is exactly the argument they will use to claim ownership of not just the code you've written up to now, but any software you write derived from the same idea, even after terminating your employment.

They can’t. They can claim that they do, and they have more lawyers than you.m, so most ppl just take it.

it just sounds so unrealistic to me, feels like total slavery

We make automated manufacturing systems. The documents are not just for documentation purposes but also used as guideline for the machine programmers and for acceptance testing.

this

English is not my first language, lads. What's the problem? A piece of software?

It's similar for us, "documentation" also includes testing, configuration management, and management of parts/FINs to a degree. We also have a big focus on "IETP" (Interactive Electronic Technical Publications) which is basically a program for desktops and mobile tablets that are used for interactive fault isolation/maintenance.

Ask your company if they are willing to fund / assist in the further development and commercialisation of your idea.
Tell them that you see a market opportunity.

Or you could be a douche and try to do all of that outside of your work. Lower the quality of your work / this specific product within the company and try to prevent anyone there from realising this huge opportunity. I doubt you'd have enough motivation to achieve such a thing though.

> What's the problem? A piece of software?
No. Your language skills.
Also, based on a number of pieces of information you have presented in this thread I doubt your idea has as much of a market potential as you suspect but I'd like to be pleasantly surprised.

I don't want to go into detail too much on the off chance that someone from my company reads this.
The software already saves a lot of time at our company. That's a fact.
Considering that they were using Word and Excel to manually create those documents means a similiar software probably doesn't exist, at least not publically. A short Google search didn't return any results either.
Of course I would have to do some market research and I'm not saying it would make me filthy rich but there's definitely a market for it.

Besides it's not really an idea. It's just automating a process. It involves a few tricky algorithms but other than that it's pretty trivial.

in america, anyone can claim to be an engineer

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Fuck off hippie, some people actually like making money

>some people like making money
>hurr durr corporations bad because they make money

Pick one

When did I ever claim corporations are bad cousin?

You should make money off of your product

Sounds like OP is either bullshitting or overestimating the market value of his idea.

>Considering that they were using Word and Excel to manually create those documents

So at best, they're mostly text documents, possibly compiling some drawings from an external team. I've made something similar by inserting field entries into a TeX file and generating documentation. Anything more complex and you should take a look at this page:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_documentation_generators

Doesn't sound like anything special software-wise. That's not to say there's no marketing gap. If you're working at a big engineering company and they're still making documentation in Word then there's definitely a gap somewhere.

As I said it's quite trivial coding wise but it does save a lot of time and afaik other companies don't have any software either. I'd have to do some extensive market research to be sure.
And of course it's not ground-breaking but to a poorfag like me anything above wagecucking is an upgrade.

First thing you want to do is license your code.

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What is the documentation for? Software or actual physical products?

It's it's the latter, then I have no idea, but you better move fast. I'm going to call up my engineer buddy and ask him how they actually get that stuff done. IIRC it's tailored TeX frameworks, but there might be room for a SAAS type of deal.

It's the latter and go fuck yourself, buddy.

High energy thread here

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Looks like current solutions integrate documentation building on top of document management:

mastercontrol.com/document-control-software/manufacturing.html
nuance.com/print-capture-and-pdf-solutions/industry-solutions-for-document-management.html
zuken.com/en/products/electrical-wire-harness-design/e3-series/products/formboard

So I'm guessing large companies usually buy document management and that comes with some sort of tailored documentation automation process. In that's true, then there may be a gap with companies that are too small to afford large scale solutions, where the responsibility of complete documentation is for specialized staff or tasked the engineers themselves. I've seen the last case for myself, so it might be a widespread inefficiency among small engineering firms. In this case, smaller companies would definitely be looking for a packaged solution whose savings could easily be defined in the subscription cost vs. lost manhours.

Which begs the question, why did it take a scrub from Jow Forums to see the potential. There's probably a simple answer, but if not, then you better hope your company doesn't sue you.

Same here! I just wrote a tool that uses git and GitHub APIs to effectively create a release note for everything that is released in GitHub. It gives a pretty screen to look at that you can attach as an asset to GitHub. Trying to think if it’s worth making public or just use it in my company. It depends on a certain gitflow which could complicate things for everyone else but it works for us

I'm not going into more detail as to what exactly it is that my program does but it's not just simple documenting.
The user does have to do some thinking and designing. However all the tedious work is taken from him which saves a ton of time.
I haven't found any software that does that yet, so either it doesn't exist or they have terrible SEO.
>Which begs the question, why did it take a scrub from Jow Forums to see the potential. There's probably a simple answer, but if not, then you better hope your company doesn't sue you.
The majority of people in mechanical engineering are boomers and most can't program software either.
It was pretty random actually. The guy that does this at our company complained about how tedious that work is and that it would be nice if there was software for it.
Being new at the company and wanting to be useful I quickly made a prototype in my free time and after getting approval I have been working on it ever since.
And I would rather do it for the company if I get a cut.

I have to correct myself, though. There is software for one of the tasks that my program does. However it's not much better than using Excel. I think I have solved that in a better way.
Apart from that my program also includes related tasks which eliminates a lot of redundancy.

You're israeli right?

read your contract

more likey than not you're obligated to tell your employer and your employer has the first right to exclusively buy it off of you.

No.

((()))

I'm not keeping it a secret, mate. I'm actually going to hold a presentation about it this month.

however it's only intended for internal use and the software is still far from a sellable state.

>The majority of people in mechanical engineering are boomers and most can't program software either.

How many people in your company?

Like 150.

>How can I best profit from this?
Lol, you wrote it for the company. They own it.

You profit from that by being employed there, and that's it.

IMO the best thing you can do is just go to your boss and tell them what you can do.

they'll either greenlight it or not. If yes you can negotiate terms or whatever. if it's something not only your company can use, I'd phone up another company or talk to people in the industry if they'd also be interested in such a tool.

before that I wouldn't waste too much time on it.

don't think as this as your last baby. you'll have more ideas as you'll be faced with more problems. don't be greedy and don't expect to become a millionaire and you'll save yourself a lot of headaches; instead, think of how you can make the world a better place - for now.

the best outcome you should strive for is that you have something for your portfolio. anything beyond that is a bonus

hope this helps : )

>however it's only intended for internal use and the software is still far from a sellable state.

doesn't matter, it's already "invented". it doesn't even have to be scribbled down on a napkin from a legal perspective.

That explains a lot. Looks like an opportunity. Best of luck my dude.

Yes thanks. That's probably the best option. I just hope that the higher ups see the potential.
However they don't really have anything to lose, so it would be stupid not to try.
I barely cost them anything. At my current wage I could work a decade and they wouldn't even feel it.
And I'm pretty sure that my program will save them more money than I could ever cost.

>doing anything for fun
>not doing anything for profit
choose neither

Using your program, how many people could one person replace?

As I wrote in OP using the program for that set of tasks is at least twice as fast as doing it manually.
It really depends on how many people are employed to do those tasks. If it's a big company with several guys doing them you can definitely let a few go.
If it's just one guy, you obviously can't fire him. However even then it increases his productivity and eliminates him as a potential bottleneck meaning that the company can take on more projects (if he indeed was the bottleneck).