These are the times that, if you at least enjoy the process of coding, you should try to look at your work as a videogame. You enjoyed the game, you even got paid for it, and you beat the final boss, it doesn't matter that no one will ever see your final score.
I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
141–150 of 565 posts
Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You write code on your personal computer outside of work hours, it belongs to you (barring truly terrible and likely unenforceable contracts). Let's say you put it up on github.
The next day you download it onto your work laptop and use it to solve problem X. I don't think there's any reasonable interpretation where your company now owns it.
Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
A dedicated satellite link cross pacific is not that much money. Then again maybe the CFO didn't know so he took the easiest known option.
I've always been fond of container ships loaded up with entangled qbits. Much lower latency!
If you don't quite believe it, it's almost certainly less per annum then 2 months of a typical mid-level SRE's loaded cost, even in 2016. Bandwidth would have been not great, way under a gigabit, but it wouldn't matter in this case.
Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
#144Best quote: "People working for Didi apply for intern jobs at Uber China and then exfiltrate our data. We can’t let them see the formulas or they’ll just copy what we do!”
This is so true. People in the US just don't understand the level of economic and industrial espionage that happens in China on a daily basis. I was responding to an unrelated breach at an unnamed tech company back in mid-2000s time frame and had a side bar conversation that went like the following:
Them: "Yeah, we just opened a tech center in Xinjiang and ... wow, we've had quite the rash of lost ID badges there recently"
Me: "Have you considered that they're not 'lost', but rather 'sold' for profit?"
... silence ...
I don't know if executives are aware but just don't care, or if they're simply incompetent, but China has productized industrial espionage on a massive scale. GE Aviation was a victim more recently: https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2022/11/16/accused-chi...
Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
#145Best quote: "People working for Didi apply for intern jobs at Uber China and then exfiltrate our data. We can’t let them see the formulas or they’ll just copy what we do!” This is so true. People in the US just don't understand the level of economic and industrial espionage that happens in China on a daily basis. I was responding to an unrelated breach at an unnamed tech company back in mid-2000s time frame and had a…
Well, not just corporate espionage, right? State espionage is going to be at every large US company too. To speak to the article, I can only imagine how excited an agency would be to get real-time updates on the Uber movements of a target.
Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
#146> He simply couldn’t believe that I’d written a full spreadsheet engine that ran in the browser. I can't believe it either, and I don't mean this in a good way. Apache POI lets you run headless Excel. You import and interact with sheets programmatically in Java. We used this in my old workplace for exactly the same reason (functions, cell references, the whole thing), it worked great. You found the ‘circ’ problem wit…
> It seems to me like a bit of googling and >90% of the work here could have been avoided. I had a deadline and the only idea on the team for shipping a working product, and I shipped a working product on time. Uber ran (runs?) their own data center. Getting a Windows machine/VM procured to actually run Excel would have taken an act of god. I was able to spin up a new front-end service in about thirty minutes. And I…
A little over ten years ago I worked in the Excel Services team that makes the consumer-visible Excel Web App and also the SharePoint-integrated Excel Services product (server side processing accessible via API or web UI).
I loved seeing the genuine joy our PMs had whenever they found an honest to goodness calc bug and could get it reproduced and fixed in The State Machine. It was also a delight to see the web app approach parity with the desktop client experience -- we got to listen to a wide swath of users and build out the stuff we thought would be most useful to the most folks. And I loved our group PM's insight about what the heck Excel could be good for versus purpose built BI tools, other web sheet apps, pure SQL, etc.
This is a very fun kind of product to create and it's awesome that you were able to ship it in a way people could use!
Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
> My entire career is effectively to sit in meetings and tell young, passionate engineers not to build things. It’s a bit depressing, but it’s also vital. This was the single most impactful thing I learned in my early career. I was building out monitoring systems for an in-house service we hosted on site. My boss wanted to buy some small utility to keep tabs on some minor aspect of our environment. I was a bit offend…
> This tool will cost us $500 to buy. What's your hourly pay rate for 40 hours This argument makes sense, but I worry that it’s a bit short-sighted. There are a lot of metrics that are hard to quantify where it might end up better: for one thing, I’ve found that integration costs and maintenance of integration of third-party systems are routinely underestimated: I’ve implemented “buy” for various systems where the wo…
Sure it’s shortsighted, but we’re all shortsighted, that’s the human condition. We can’t know all ends, which is why experience and judgement matter. The worst thing you could do is handwring over it though. Gather whatever data you can quickly leveraging the extent of your current expertise, make a call, implement and learn.
Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
... Nothing came of it, but I took the code and shoved it into my back pocket for a rainy day ... You can't really do this. Depends on your employment contract but code you write for an employer is usually copyright to them ... My first reaction was to publish the code on Github ... You can't really do that either.
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 particularly fucked because, thanks to this thread, you can't claim that you didn't know.
Even in California the "I wrote it on my own time" doesn't apply to software that relates to an employer's core business. In other places, like Washington State, you could be employed to write TPS reports and write a video game at home, and your employer would own that too.
IANAL but I have paid for advice on this very topic. I suggest you pay one too.
Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
#149Earlier 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…
What an utterly bizarre story. What’s the point of it? Why is the wife upset about her brother? Why is the husband so sure the brother won’t do it? What’s the significance of his little performance at the end? Why is the wife the husband’s mother, what does that have to do with anything, considering the issue is with the wife’s brother? Why don’t we get to see what the wife’s reaction to the husband’s stunt is - is s…
I think the wife is upset because "going ascetic" means cutting off contact. The husband is sure he won't do it because the brother is talking about it instead of doing it, which he demonstrates.
It feels like there should be more to the lesson learned than, "people who have decided will act, people who haven't only talk," but I am not quite grasping it. Maybe the other part is, "and worrying about things you cannot change harms yourself," or something?
Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
#150Earlier 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…
IANAL but I understand the distinction is:
1. I copied this to disk, and I've iterated on it. Derivative work. Company owns it.
2. I created a new original work from scratch, based on my experiencing doing it once or twice before. Independent work. Author owns it.