Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Deleting Software I Wrote Upon Leaving Employment of a Company

law.stackexchange.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 75 posts

Re: Deleting Software I Wrote Upon Leaving Employment of a Company

#61

Post by bell-cot »

raynr wrote: post #31
bell-cot wrote: post #2

IANAL, but "would it be legal for me to delete..." is the completely wrong approach here. Instead... - You were an hourly warehouse flunky, not any sort of professional programmer. While doing your warehouse job, you cobbled together a mish-mash of software stuff, on company computers, to try to make your job easier. With you there to fiddle and debug and update as needed, that worked pretty darn well. - Now, you are…

IAAL but likely not in your jurisdiction, and I agree with this, because the biggest "legal" concern I would have as the linked OP is the company coming back and blaming me for some software I wrote that was out of my job scope entirely. I would add that the goal isn't just to convince the company to delete the software, but rather to acknowledge and accept that there is no support, no warranty, and if things go wron…

Yep.

Added Point I: The value of product going in and out of even a modest-sized warehouse in a week can easily be 1000X the net worth of any of the hourly employees there. So if things went wrong - trying to recover their losses by suing Manuel McLong-Gone would be hopeless. And that might also alert their insurance carrier to an excuse for denying coverage.

Added Point II: Being responsible for all that money, no Warehouse Manager worth a pallet would want some undocumented & unsupported software, cobbled together by some former hourly employee, to be left running in his warehouse. Even as you depart, you are being loyal and industry-savvy, and making sure Mr. Manager knows about that potential problem. And how to prevent it.

Re: Deleting Software I Wrote Upon Leaving Employment of a Company

#62

Post by nerbert »

armada651 wrote: post #7
bell-cot wrote: post #2

IANAL, but "would it be legal for me to delete..." is the completely wrong approach here. Instead... - You were an hourly warehouse flunky, not any sort of professional programmer. While doing your warehouse job, you cobbled together a mish-mash of software stuff, on company computers, to try to make your job easier. With you there to fiddle and debug and update as needed, that worked pretty darn well. - Now, you are…

Or, if you're more of the entrepreneurial mindset, convince management of the value of the software and offer that they can pay you to keep improving it.

Or, if you're more of the entrepreneurial mindset, do one last update of the software to introduce a pay-as-you-go/SaaS model with your credit card in, and when you're leaving, you remove your credit card info.

Re: Deleting Software I Wrote Upon Leaving Employment of a Company

#63

Post by smcin »

rented_mule wrote: post #24

I saw something that was sort of the inverse of this. A teammate quit with zero notice in a 3 AM email. In that email, he indicated he'd made the decision to open source all the code that he had written in his last year or so with the company. It was in a public github repo in his personal account. The company had a lot of open source, but this was never expected to be part of that. We were able to get it taken down…

Not "license to quit", "quit to license"...

Re: Deleting Software I Wrote Upon Leaving Employment of a Company

#64

Post by em-bee »

rented_mule wrote: post #24

I saw something that was sort of the inverse of this. A teammate quit with zero notice in a 3 AM email. In that email, he indicated he'd made the decision to open source all the code that he had written in his last year or so with the company. It was in a public github repo in his personal account. The company had a lot of open source, but this was never expected to be part of that. We were able to get it taken down…

somewhat related: at one job that was working with GPL software, i managed to get them to add a provision into my contract that stated that all code i wrote at the company would be published under the GPL. that way the company still owned my code but i would be allowed to take it and reuse it, and potentially do what your teammate did.

Re: Deleting Software I Wrote Upon Leaving Employment of a Company

#65

Post by em-bee »

brnt wrote: post #36
madsbuch wrote: post #33

The top comment is interesting: > If you wrote this software during your working time (nine to five), and were paid for that time, then the company owns the software. I don't live in the US, but copyright laws are quite homogeneous world wide. But I do have the impression that copyright is kept as long as it is not signed over. given that the person did logistics without an employment contract, he could notice the co…

It's important to separate copyright, right of use and ownership. In Europe, copyrights are often not transferable: you will have forever written that line after all. What is transferable, and implicit or explicit in a work contract, is the right of use. Usually the employer has and exclusive right to use, and usually they won't relinquish it upon your leave.

i think the distinction is better described as copyright vs authorship right. you can sell the right to copy, but you can't give up the right to have your name associated with your work.

Re: Deleting Software I Wrote Upon Leaving Employment of a Company

#66

Post by em-bee »

bhaney wrote: post #3

There's a lot of answers stating that if the code was written by an employee during work hours, it's automatically owned by the company. Is that true? My understanding is the author would still retain copyright unless they've already entered into an agreement with their employer that anything they build during work hours is owned by the company. That kind of thing is pretty standard in employment agreements for softw…

just because there is something in the contract, doesn't mean it would not also be true without a contract.

in general work for hire is owned by the one paying. this is also true in the EU.

the EU has clear exceptions that work done not for the company while employed, does not get owned by the company. even a contract can not override this. in the US this is less clear, and contracts can demand ownership of everything, and so often they do.

i hardly doubt that warehouse worker contracts don't also have such a paragraph. it's pretty standard. i mean it doesn't hurt to put it in the contract. so why leave it out.

even without a contract though, anything done at work in order to help your job should be owned by the company.

Re: Deleting Software I Wrote Upon Leaving Employment of a Company

#67

Post by gravescale »

treflop wrote: post #40
siva7 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> too impatient to set up an internal AWS resource using the more time-consuming channels Those are by far the worst software devs, not understanding the implications of their actions. But also that his manager didn't catch up this mishap

It’s quite possible they understood but didn’t have loyalty to the company.

If he had had loyalty, it clearly would have been misplaced since they laid him off.

Re: Deleting Software I Wrote Upon Leaving Employment of a Company

#68

Post by ckdarby »

blencdr wrote: post #34
tunesmith wrote: post #13

It's more likely it'll work out like how a situation recently worked out at my employer. We had an employee that was too impatient to set up an internal AWS resource using the more time-consuming channels, so he set it up in our hack-stuff AWS account under his own user account. Our teams found it useful, and began to rely on it. He got laid off. Ops deleted all his user-related stuff, including accidentally deleting…

This is a CISO's nightmare fuel. Shadow IT is a real pain, consisting of systems with no ownership, no control, and possibly a tight link with the inner IT system. And the majority of this is only exacerbated by the complexity of the decision-making process.

Yet the CISO's are the very folks driving Shadow IT.

I've been at a company where getting a Slack plugin approved took 8 months alone. Vendor review took a year.

These departments aren't equipped for the modern day and most want to live 10 years ago without change. Just keep with the old and vest.

Re: Deleting Software I Wrote Upon Leaving Employment of a Company

#69

Post by everforward »

siva7 wrote: post #35
tunesmith wrote: post #13

It's more likely it'll work out like how a situation recently worked out at my employer. We had an employee that was too impatient to set up an internal AWS resource using the more time-consuming channels, so he set it up in our hack-stuff AWS account under his own user account. Our teams found it useful, and began to rely on it. He got laid off. Ops deleted all his user-related stuff, including accidentally deleting…

> too impatient to set up an internal AWS resource using the more time-consuming channels Those are by far the worst software devs, not understanding the implications of their actions. But also that his manager didn't catch up this mishap

Coming from the ops side of the fence, who should be opposed to this, it's also often the only way things get done.

I've worked a couple places that had an unspoken Catch-22 mantra: "ye shall not invest resources in apps that are not business critical".

So the only way to build something new was to skunkworks it until something major depended on it and you could get resources to actually productionize it.

A smart ops team should have a semi-standard "skunkworks to production" pipeline.

Re: Deleting Software I Wrote Upon Leaving Employment of a Company

#70

Post by jjav »

carlmr wrote: post #47
treflop wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s quite possible they understood but didn’t have loyalty to the company.

It's also possible the company has processes that make doing the right thing take so long it's infeasible. If that is the case, these broken processes will cause far more damage than that one employee.

> It's also possible the company has processes that make doing the right thing take so long it's infeasible.

If it caused outages and disruption, it wasn't the right thing.

I understand the temptation to just do my own thing and bypass everything to get a deliverable done and be the hero. But in the long term that's never the responsible thing to do. Follow the process to avoid disruptions like this one. If the process seems inefficient, work to improve the process to bring consistency benefits to everyone.

Post reply on HN