I disagree with most of his advice. I really doubt you'll be able to quit your job and get anywhere with your business if you follow it. I don't really want to get into details for obvious reasons, but when I worked on my business on a side last year, let's just say I wasn't following the advice in this article, and I glad I didn't. If I did, I would still be working for "the man" and hating my life.
Everything in life takes balls. Decide what's important for you, and go for it, fuck everything else. You've gotta have the attitude that your business is #1, and the corporation just doesn't really matter that much. Again, I can't post that many details, but pretty much reverse most points from this post and you'll have a good idea of what to do.
Ok, maybe I should be more careful, what I wrote could definitely be misconstrued as that. Obviously I'm not saying to do anything illegal.
But - telling your employer in advance that you're working on your own project? Really? What's the advantage in it? What you do in your off time is 100% yours [unless you signed something that says it's not], and letting your employer know about it will not bring you any additional benefits. On the other hand, the disadvantages are huge - everybody will start mistrusting you, knowing that you're looking for a way out, you'll never get promoted, etc.
And that's just one point.. Not doing business phone calls in the day hours? C'mon, how realistic is that? How is anybody going to take you seriously if you don't pick up your phone during the day? Instead, you should FIND time during the day for important business-related phone calls. When I was employed, I always ate lunch at my desk in about ten minutes. At lunch hour, I found a nice quiet place in a plaza 2 minutes from the office, brought a notebook to take notes, and made 2-5 business calls.
My point is, while you should definitely not do anything illegal, if your #1 goal is to quit your job and make your business your primary source of income, you should find creative ways to reach that goal, and stop at NOTHING before you do that.
The treacherous thing about these precautions is that they don't matter to most startups, because most startups don't succeed. It's only when what you're doing actually matters that it starts to make a difference whether, in year 1 of the company, there are phone records of you fielding tech support calls from your cube.
The "assume Big Brother is watching" advice seems to be good in all cases. If the startup doesn't succeed, then you need the day job and don't want to be found out and lose it. (Your company is not likely to think "startup" when they see "strange activity", but rather "interviewing elsewhere"; that, however, will get you just as fired in a lot of places.)
I am going to agree with that. If you want to do a startup right you have to devote all of your time to it. But working on the side may be ok in the beginning just to see a proof of concept, or determine if a business idea is viable.
Ignoring the ethical complexities here, which are inherently subjective, and the legal issues, which I have no authority so speak on, let me just say this: writing code for your side project on your work computer is really fucking stupid.
It's not a gray area; there is precedent and you will lose.
Once in my life (first job out of school) I was in a job where I'd been relegated to menial grunt work that wouldn't teach me anything or advance my career, so I've been in the career sand trap. What I did: I taught myself Python and a few APIs I needed for the side project (which was actually a research project, not a startup) during slow periods. I did a bit of research into AI algorithms (on Wikipedia) as well. But I never wrote code for the project at work.
If you must steal ("liberate") time, be very careful not to write any code that you'll need when at work. I'd say 3 rules apply.
1. Generally, a company can own what you do, not what you learn. If you're going to steal time, use it to do research and exploratory code (that is thrown away) but keep your product code 100% on your own resources. I'm not saying this strategy is right, nor that it's a fool-proof legal defense, but it beats the alternative (of writing side code at work) which is generally considered both wrong and illegal. As far as I know, there's no legal distinction between reading AI articles on work time and the million other kinds of goofing off that 90% of corporate denizens spend most of their days on.
2. Companies want you to work 9-5 because those are your best hours. If you're serious about a side project, then the first thing to do is to figure out if you're a morning or a night person (which is mostly genetic). If morning, start waking up at 4 and use 4-8 for the project. If night, your side project should be done in the evenings. You can only give the side 33% of your work time, but you can give it 80% of your energy by aligning your most energetic hours with your side project time. If you're not serious enough about a side project to make these adjustments, you're not cut out for it.
3. If you get a creative "spark" at work and must get an idea down, have a legal pad and pen that you own (i.e. not with the company's name on it). Write down your design and implement it later. Poets may lose it if they don't get it down at once, but you're a programmer, not a poet. So get your ideas and maybe some pseudocode on paper, but no code goes into any machine until you're home and it's your machine.
Everything in life takes balls. Decide what's important for you, and go for it, fuck everything else. You've gotta have the attitude that your business is #1, and the corporation just doesn't really matter that much. Again, I can't post that many details, but pretty much reverse most points from this post and you'll have a good idea of what to do.