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I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

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Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#491

Post by bastawhiz »

Aeolun wrote: post #178
bastawhiz wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Just make it like Excel" is a super low quality answer from someone who has a completely different set of objectives. The only way forward would have been to consult with someone closer to the actual users and counter-argue from there. The only contact we had with "actual users" was over WeChat because they were on the other side of the planet. > What's missing here is the courage to recognize weak assumptions and…

Except in this case you’d wait a few weeks and have the whole problem be OBE.

Even better: the project would be OBE and I would be on a PIP

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#492

Post by bastawhiz »

user_named wrote: post #201
bastawhiz wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Just make it like Excel" is a super low quality answer from someone who has a completely different set of objectives. The only way forward would have been to consult with someone closer to the actual users and counter-argue from there. The only contact we had with "actual users" was over WeChat because they were on the other side of the planet. > What's missing here is the courage to recognize weak assumptions and…

Nah, that's why you have product managers. I would have talked to this stakeholder for an hour and realized the solution is not to build another excel.

> you have product managers

Ha

Ha ha

Hahahahaha

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#493

Post by bastawhiz »

adastra22 wrote: post #236
geoelectric wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A spreadsheet UI didn’t relate to Box’s core business because Box didn’t sell spreadsheet UIs. Box could have had the author’s hobby project been adopted as a feature but explicitly chose not to. The author clearly owned that bit if they did it on their own resources and own time. In other words, you can write generally useful components and utilities on your own time, network, and equipment; license them to your emp…

Well, you are not a lawyer. OP specifically wrote the code to help Box with its business. That's cut and dry within the scope of an employment contract, under California law. This doesn't get a safe harbor exception.

> OP specifically wrote the code to help Box with its business.

This is a leap

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#494

Post by bastawhiz »

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #148
bastawhiz wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, I asked at the time, and I did it. If either company wants to start a legal fight over a pile of code that neither of them wanted that's old enough to be in elementary school, they know how to reach me.

The problem is that you are claiming ownership of this code and by making it available on GitHub under an MIT license you are claiming that you have the right to do so. If I take that code and make a billion dollar business out of it, Box or Uber could then claim a share of it. That's the kind of things that companies do with the lawyers on retainer. I then sue you for falsely claiming that you own it. You are partic…

I built a side business that makes five figures of MRR that started while I was at Box and continued through my tenure at Uber. It's still going. If anyone was going to sue anyone about anything, it wouldn't be my shitty spreadsheet library.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#495

Post by bastawhiz »

egwor wrote: post #399
kqr wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree this seems fairly clearly illegal. That said, I think OP is morally in the right here, and I wish I had the guts to do similar things. Sharing code is a good thing. Helping one company innovate using code that another company chose to ignore is also a good thing.

I'm not sure how we weigh up the morals here. If you've done something using a companies resources (laptop, desk, chair etc.) and they're paying you and the contract says they own it I don't see how you can have a moral high ground. Maybe there should be some way to allow these ownership concepts to expire so that society benefits overall but right now we don't have that.

> If you've done something using a companies resources (laptop, desk, chair etc.)

You're making a huge assumption that this is what happened.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#496

Post by bastawhiz »

gberger wrote: post #462
bastawhiz wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here. The code was originally written outside of work hours. I offered the code to Box and they didn't want it. If Uber wants a few thousand lines of JavaScript from over half a decade ago that didn't originate with them and that they used for less than a month, they can send me a letter.

Sergey Aleynikov (born 1970) is a former Goldman Sachs computer programmer. Between 2009 and 2016, he was prosecuted by NY Federal and State jurisdictions for the same conduct of allegedly copying proprietary computer source code from his employer, Goldman Sachs, before joining a competing firm. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Aleynikov

"the same conduct" is doing a lot of work here

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#497

Post by roarcher »

The intended lesson of this article may be the "cattle, not pets" point made near the end, but I think there's another lesson hidden in it.

This is the story of literally every single large project I've done under a tight deadline in my career:

- Some non-technical department (usually sales) promises a customer something very big very soon, with no regard to how much time might actually be needed to build it. Fulfilling this promise "on time" is now your problem, Engineer.

- Months are spent frantically building said Thing, working overtime, burning out engineers, and bastardizing the previously clean codebase in the rush.

- The deadline is met, and no customer uses Thing for at least several months. Or the deadline is not met and customer waits for Thing as long as it takes, because they're not going to blow up a big contract or integrate with your competitor instead of waiting another month. They have too much invested and the deadline wasn't that important anyway. The third possibility, as it was in OP's case, is that Thing gets thrown away in its entirety due to some fateful turning of the organizational wheels.

I swear, almost as if by some karmic law of the cosmos, literally every frantic deadline turns out to be irrelevant in the end, and you should have saved your sanity and gone home at 5 every day for the last 6 months.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#498

Post by _lvbh »

Znafon wrote: post #4

"Nothing came of it, but I took the code and shoved it into my back pocket for a rainy day. My idea was to take this code and spruce it up for Uber’s use case." "My first reaction was to publish the code on Github." I’m very surprised by this, isn’t the code property of Box, or Uber? The author does not mention their authorisation before releasing it under MIT license.

I find it seriously disgusting that we have given rights to corporations so that they can sue someone over work they did in their own free time.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#499

Post by bastawhiz »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #260
bastawhiz wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here. The code was originally written outside of work hours. I offered the code to Box and they didn't want it. If Uber wants a few thousand lines of JavaScript from over half a decade ago that didn't originate with them and that they used for less than a month, they can send me a letter.

That’s really not how it works. Ostensibly by showing it to box, it was written for box, and they would be well within a standard of legal standing to make your life a living hell for taking it elsewhere. You should really be more careful with what you say. Why would you wontonly open yourself to legal liability? You say “they’re free to come after you” but you really _really_ don’t want that. Ive seen that happen to…

You know, you're totally correct that they're well within their right to do... something. But why? What damages could they collect? It would take far less cash to rewrite the library I made from scratch than it would to pay lawyers to write some scary letters. There's no trade secrets. It's not even a novel idea. It would be terribly expensive and embarrassing for either Box or Uber to try to juice this even if they were motivated to. Hell, I'm technically still an active contributor to one of the OSS projects Box uses and maintains—absolutely treacherous ignorance that doesn't make me lose a second of sleep.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#500

Post by treyd »

ffhhttt wrote: post #390
treyd wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps we should reframe how intellectual property works to make secrecy no longer desirable and allow industries that rely on "trade secrets" to realign naturally.

Perhaps (well.. almost certainly) that would disincentivize any of the companies in these industry from innovating at all (if you can’t gain any edge by additional investment since anything you do will be stolen you might as well start stealing if that cheaper). This would also especially favor large mega corporations as long as they are efficient enough (due to obvious reasons).

Most substantial technological innovation is either funded by government grants or is publicly funded in some other way in the first place. It's a myth that IP laws protect innovation, they protect profits of corporations that add very little to the process on their own.
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