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I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

basta.substack.com

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Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#111

Post by deodar »

hitekker wrote: post #100
continuitylimit wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So come on man, let’s be honest here. I got serious sacred masterpiece vibes from this story. This reminds me of some Hindu parable about people who let go of possessions and head out to become ascetics. So there is this wealthy man and wife and the wife is all upset because her brother keeps insinuating that he’s gonna go ascetic and cut loose. The husband tells her to stop her crying and don’t worry about it, he ai…

I might be dumb today but I think this parable is incomprehensible. Do you have a link to another version?

It's almost as incomprehensible as a Zen koan. I think the husband is showing the difference between talking and doing by, well, doing it. A radical way to demonstrate it.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#112

Post by ryukoposting »

I wonder if the author would view this situation differently had Uber/Box decided to claim the code as their own. It has to bring some catharsis to know that, even if the code never actually met its potential, at least the whole world can see and appreciate it.

I created a whole programming language as an intern for . It was lazily evaluated and garbage collected. Unquoted MAC addresses were valid syntax, among other application-specific oddities. No bytecode or JIT shenanigans - the interpreter just pushed and popped stuff from a stack as it traversed the parse tree, and that was fast enough for what we were doing with it. The interpreter was written in pure ANSI C, and Valgrind was very happy with it. Maybe it has been totally forgotten, or maybe it became critical to their technical infrastructure. That code never left the airgapped lab where I wrote it, so I have no way of knowing. 3 years ago, as a recent college grad, that was by far the coolest piece of "actually useful software" I had ever written. It's still high on the list. Sometimes I wonder whatever happened to it.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#113

Post by bastawhiz »

lph wrote: post #106

Excel is an ancient and complex beast. I get the appeal of building this project---it sounds fun---but trying to duplicate the Excel engine to the level of producing identical outputs is, frankly, bonkers. The author caught the one discrepancy they noticed, circular reference handling, but how many did they miss? How do they know different inputs won't cause it to deviate from Excel? I didn't get the sense from the b…

No Windows, no Excel license, hundreds of concurrent users. How confident are you that each user is getting the calculations that they triggered and not someone else's? How are you deploying that spreadsheet? How are you version controlling the mutable parts of the system? How confident are you that the solution would be robust in the face of bad inputs and high load?

I won't say there wasn't risk, but there was quite a bit of testing and a human always made the final call anyway (I never fully understood why we didn't eliminate humans from the processes altogether).

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#114

Post by bastawhiz »

dmd wrote: post #98

> So the data scientists have multiple laptops that they download the data to, then run the models overnight. This haphazard way of running compute jobs really stuck out to me. I can't imagine doing things this way (rather than having a central compute cluster running SLURM or similar) at a company bigger than, say, a dozen people - much less the scale of Uber. What's the rationale? Even if it's just a cluster of 3 o…

It was easy to go to IT and say "get us a pile of laptops" and let the data scientists do their thing. It was hard to hire engineers to solve the problem (I was one of the engineers). They particular problem was far enough down the priority list that it took until 2016 to solve.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#115

Post by itigtohft »

kazinator wrote: post #63

> You see, when formulas create a circular reference, Excel will run that computation up to a number of times. Like almost every spreadsheet before it: Lotus 1-2-3, Borland Quattro Pro, VP Planner ... Spreadsheets iterating on circ references goes back to the 1980s. The first spreadsheet application, VisiCalc, didn't track dependencies: it evaluated cells left to right, top to bottom, IIRC. Microsoft had a product ca…

There are a couple of nice minimal spreadsheets in js:

http://web.archive.org/web/20130606222859/http://thomasstree...

Inspired by that, an even smaller one: https://jsfiddle.net/ondras/hYfN3/

The latter catches circular references rather than trying to calculate the fixpoint

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#116

Post by contravariant »

sublinear wrote: post #20
contravariant wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course those of us familiar with copyright law would probably not admit to doing so publicly, right?

Quite the opposite. Software written off the clock that does not compete with the employer is not only not the property of the employer, but any contract attempting to gain such ownership is unenforceable. Many businesses even actively encourage their developers to contribute to open source projects.

Well sure, but how on earth are you going to claim it does not compete when you use that very code for the employer?

By all means try stuff out with some hobby project but don't be an idiot and tell your employer you've reused 'their' code (or at least, code in their codebase) for other clients. Either get an agreement up front or keep it secret.

A contract that grants your employer copyright to code you wrote and used in their codebase is easily enforceable. An exception would be code you wrote before the contract, but in that case using the code without some kind of agreement up front is still dangerous.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#117

Post by m00x »

sokoloff wrote: post #51
pc86 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially the brazenness with which the author basically says "if they want to sue me for this verified and admitted IP theft, they can." Sure, they probably won't. But they might. And if they do, you'll lose immediately. Seems like a pretty high risk no reward scenario.

And if you lose immediately, you likely owe damages. Those damages, even if trebled, appear to be $0 here.

I'm sure they could find damages amounting to a large enough amount that OP would regret.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#118

Post by dmd »

bastawhiz wrote: post #114
dmd wrote: post #98

> So the data scientists have multiple laptops that they download the data to, then run the models overnight. This haphazard way of running compute jobs really stuck out to me. I can't imagine doing things this way (rather than having a central compute cluster running SLURM or similar) at a company bigger than, say, a dozen people - much less the scale of Uber. What's the rationale? Even if it's just a cluster of 3 o…

It was easy to go to IT and say "get us a pile of laptops" and let the data scientists do their thing. It was hard to hire engineers to solve the problem (I was one of the engineers). They particular problem was far enough down the priority list that it took until 2016 to solve.

Heh. Well, I guess... sorry I didn't come help :) (I interviewed but turned down my offer.)

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#119

Post by m00x »

sublinear wrote: post #20
contravariant wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course those of us familiar with copyright law would probably not admit to doing so publicly, right?

Quite the opposite. Software written off the clock that does not compete with the employer is not only not the property of the employer, but any contract attempting to gain such ownership is unenforceable. Many businesses even actively encourage their developers to contribute to open source projects.

That's if they didn't use any resources from their employer.

If that code touched their work laptop (which it did since he showed it), it's now company property.

That code most likely belongs to Uber legally, but they probably don't care that much.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#120

Post by ryandrake »

thebradbain wrote: post #84
andrewxdiamond wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are gray areas but I do not think you are in one. > and then later adapted and expanded upon that code (or even started over, with the knowledge of what you learned from others' work) These are extremely different scenarios. Starting with a copyrighted material and modifying it is not at all the same as reading material and starting over. The first is violating copyright, the second is a derivative work. If I r…

I wrote the comment above, though I'm not the author of the code that you appear to think I am. But I am in agreement with him. > Their employment contract for-sure states they own any work produced by you during your employment, and you agreed to this. There are many open legal questions as to where this line is drawn. Surely the line falls somewhere between "every character I've ever typed on a keyboard" and "the v…

Like many things in this area, the answer is usually "You'll find out if you want to go up against an army of lawyers". The last three companies I worked for all claimed ownership of any IP I create, on or off the job, using company's equipment or using my own equipment. One of them explicitly called it out during the interview: You will have to stop working on open source or publishing side projects when working here. Can they do that? Maybe, probably not. It doesn't matter because I do not plan to bankrupt myself fighting their lawyers.
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