Microsoft has the most permissive moonlighting policy amongst the major SE companies that I’m aware of. Sometimes they actively encourage it, like during the goldrush days of the Windows Phone and Windows 8 App Stores when they had on-campus hackathons for personal projects and everyone there was using their company-issue laptops, but I guess they were just desperate for content, heh. I remember we had received blanket assurances in writing that MS wouldn’t try to co-opt anything we’d post, just so that we don’t do anything that competes with Office…)
Thing is while many cases are easy to tell if they’re obviously in violation of policy, it’s still possible to sleepwalk into it:
Doing personal email in OWA/Gmail on a company laptop in lunch? OK
Doing personal email in desktop Outlook on a company laptop? OK (as was my understanding of policy at the time: there was a carve-out for having personal email on company hardware)
Doing personal email which involves a quick code-review of a rando’s PR to your personal github repo? hmmmm…
What about making slight modifications to that code?
What if you clone the repo because you need to get a bigger-picture?
What if you inadvertently start a build of your cloned repo?
I doubt Apple would make that claim of your personal Macbook. Likewise if you're not using the /Microsoft account on GitHub, it's not 'company equipment' in that sense, it's just happens that in a personal capacity you are a client of (a subsidiary of) the company you work for.
Thing is while many cases are easy to tell if they’re obviously in violation of policy, it’s still possible to sleepwalk into it:
Doing personal email in OWA/Gmail on a company laptop in lunch? OK
Doing personal email in desktop Outlook on a company laptop? OK (as was my understanding of policy at the time: there was a carve-out for having personal email on company hardware)
Doing personal email which involves a quick code-review of a rando’s PR to your personal github repo? hmmmm…
What about making slight modifications to that code?
What if you clone the repo because you need to get a bigger-picture?
What if you inadvertently start a build of your cloned repo?
Where is the line?