(Disclaimer: happy PD employee from 2011-2015)
It's still probably against your employment agreement, especially if you work at a BigCo where just about anything computer-related could be construed to be in their line of business.
I remember the Amazon thing .. differently. Also some pretty shady marketing tricks, and you know, failing to protect a female employee from a predatory creep at a conference.
4. Naughtiness
Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter. This quality may be redundant though; it may be implied by imagination.
Sam Altman of Loopt is one of the most successful alumni, so we asked him what question we could put on the Y Combinator application that would help us discover more people like him. He said to ask about a time when they'd hacked something to their advantage—hacked in the sense of beating the system, not breaking into computers. It has become one of the questions we pay most attention to when judging applications.
I believe they took that question off the application in the last few years. Perhaps “rules that matter” versus “rules that do not” turned out to be not so cut and dried.
My experiences there taught me that no good deed goes unpunished. I dropped out of the startup world and become a “fuck you, pay me” consultant.
When I worked at PagerDuty, some of the less ethical aspects of the company (like the product was initially developed while interns at Amazon) were explained to me with this phrase, verbatim:
“Paul told us to be naughty, but not too naughty.”