How to develop and monetize side projects without conflicts of interest with 9-5 jobs?

This is actually another reason why I really dislike monetizing side projects actually: Not only does it add operational and product complexity, it adds life complexity from work conflict-of-interest and taxes!

If you really want to make some $$ from your side projects, here's what you can do:

1. Build something insanely simple - I'm talking "Random Name Picker" simple. There's no way your current job will see this as a competitive threat, especially if it's a larger (i.e. >1000 employees) company.
2. Get approval from your company - At Meta, there was a form you could fill out for meaningful side projects and share with your Director to see if it was a conflict of interest for your employment. If your company is on the larger side, this process should probably exist. If it doesn't, just talk to your manager and see if you can figure out something ad-hoc.

For additional insights on making money on the side: "What are some of the side income or passive income sources you can suggest?"

I'm curious, would selling courses or monetizing your tech/non-tech blog also be considered as "safe/ethical" ways of earning a side income ?

@Supportive Tarodactyl -- yes, in most cases, teaching courses while fully employed should be totally fine/ethical (I've done this for years). The areas where you could get into trouble:

• You're teaching something that is proprietary or would undermine your company.
  • While at Meta, I taught about vanilla Android development, which is very safe (no Facebook-specific abstractions).
• Your teaching is taking up more time than you expected and you're missing deadlines at work.
• You're using your company's brand to sell courses in a way they don't want you to.
  • When I was doing the Android lecturing, I wouldn't advertise my Big Tech background.

As long as you feel very confident you're not in the above buckets, you should be good.

Also, to the OP, if you're curious what amount of income may count as "substantial", the threshold at Meta for when you could no longer use the company-provided ad credit was $5K/year.

(Every Meta employee received $250 monthly of free ad credit -- pretty nice perk!)