Roy Tang

Someone on quora asked:

As a programmer, are you committing intellectual property theft by abstracting ideas learned at work into a SaaS product?

In my opinion there is no issue here. Your technical and domain knowledge are not subject to anyone’s intellectual property and you are thus free to use it as you see fit. Anyone attempting to impose such limitations would probably be in an uphill battle legally. The exception would be highly-specific algorithms used by a company as a trade secret, like for example if you wrote software for a stock brokerage firm with a unique algorithm for picking stocks.

Your specific example is even less likely to have problems as online ordering systems are very commonplace and will generally work more or less the same wherever it is implemented/used