> Someone will take joy in ripping it out someday.
I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
161–170 of 565 posts
Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
#162"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.
Uber and the people they hired never struck me as particularly concerned by things like "laws" and "property".
The Levandowski lawsuit comes to mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Levandowski#Civil_laws...
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Edit:
Since I enjoyed OP's story, I thought I should clarify a bit.
I'm speaking broadly of how I remember (from the outside) Uber's fast-and-loose IP attitudes in the 2010s.
I don't think OP did anything of a similar sort. From comments here it sounds like they used some code they built in their free time that a previous employer didn't want.
At Uber it sounds like they asked and were permitted to post their no-longer-needed code to GitHub. It's got its own GH org and everything.
This whole chain is legally risky (I wouldn't do it and would strongly advise others not to do it).
I feel OPs actions are not Ethically Wrong, though. I wouldn't enjoy living in a world where OP gets sued for this, since it sounds like nobody at work wanted the work and it's not giving competitors an advantage. I won't claim the world isn't like that, though.
I really wish I could share OP's attitude and sense of ownership. I built something really cool (entirely in my free time) for a previous employer's hackathon. That code lives on some server they own now, possibly deleted. I deleted my copy after submitting it to the hackathon because I didn't want to risk anything. Company lawyers make just building things for fun feel so risky! It takes the soul out of our work.
Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
#163Earlier 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.
It’s trivial to tell ChatGPT to rewrite the code base so it not longer resembles the original and then publish as a new thing. So yea, you can.
Derived work
Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
#164Earlier 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.
IANAL, but even in California, if it relates to the business of the employer then they own it, even if you do it on your own time, on your own equipment. By definition, if you use that code while performing your job duties, then the company owns it. If you are in Washington State, then your employment contract can (and therefore will) state that anything you write, they own, and this is legal and enforceable. Again, IANAL.
Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
#165I do not like working with people like this, because I don't want to be anywhere near the maintenance burden of a pile of hacks that technically can run a single Excel spreadsheet. I don't even want to be within earshot of people complaining about this. If I even thought about it for too long I'm sure I'd have a giant headache.
I worked with the author for maybe 3 years, I thought he was pretty awesome.
Not surprised he implemented a partial implementation of excel so quickly.
I'm disappointed in myself that I somehow got through most of the article without realizing who the author was (thanks Firefox reader mode); especially since the naming of Wesley and Crusher is too good. Of course it was Basta! Of course it was!
Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
#166Best 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…
They don't understand it, because what you're quoting as a behavior is pretty standard anywhere in the world. That's why companies protect their secrets from low rank employees. Except if you're arguing that western companies are bound by stronger ethics, in which case I'd like to see some evidence.
If a low ranking employee in Cincinnati divulged corporate trade secrets, they'd be tried and convicted. If a low ranking employee in Shanghai did the same, what can the US company do? Not much. So it's a low risk activity, that is also actively encouraged and in many cases financed by the Chinese government. This is in no way intended to be disparaging of folks who are of Chinese descent, but rather a reflection of the reality of contemporary Chinese government politics and policies.
Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
#1671) This was the type of effort and level of coding that I saw when I was Uber during its heyday. I love it and I miss it every day.
2) You stole Box code, used it at Uber, and then stole Uber code and posted it on github. I understand no one's using the code or missing that code, but you really did steal that code. It belongs to the company, not to you. I would be careful not to do that in the future, because technically that's a trade secret and people have gone to jail over that, like that programmer at Goldman Sachs (wrongfully) and ironically Levandowski who took Google code and tried to use it at Uber.
Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
#168Earlier 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…
Its extremely short sighted. The cost is much more than (hourly wage x code hours).
There is ongoing maintenance cost that no one considers. I've never seen a project that gets built and just sails off for eternity with no maintenance or bugs. There will be times when the libraries or frameworks that built the underlying tool need upgrading. The requirements of the job might change even slightly and need a change in the code because custom tools are always built to only solve the narrow problem.
There is also the overhead of the fact that this junior developer will inevitably leave in 6 months and now someone who has never seen this project before has to pick it up to fix it, which means it will take even longer.
Plus that ignores the fact that if a developer tells you it will take 40 hours it will actually take 80-120 hours.
When you buy, the tools you buy are designed to be integrated with. They have support teams that will help you, and ongoing maintenance. Plus the tool is going to be more robust because it was built and used by many different companies with slightly different requirements. Plus someone else's developers will keep it up to date for you so you don't have to.
Internal tools are almost never worth it unless a pre-existing tool literally doesn't exist which happens when you are either solving insanely complex problems or insanely niche problems.
Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
#169Best 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…
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Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
#170IANAL but I've paid lawyers to answer this question in the US.
The question is, if you do some work, in your own time, on your own equipment, does your employer own it just because the employment contract says they do?
In California: if the work in any way relates to the employer's business, then yes, they own it. One way to guarantee that it relates to the employer's business is to bring it into the office and use it as part of your job. If your employer is Apple or Google or AWS or Microsoft, then probably anything you write would in some way relate to their business. Write spreadsheets by day, but games by night? All of those companies make games, or are in the games business.
I would love to hear a lawyer say, "Well, it doesn't matter what the employer does, it only matters what your job duties are, so writing games at night is fine if they don't pay you to work on games related things during they day." But I've never been told that by a lawyer, whether I paid them or otherwise.
Everywhere else in the USA: they probably own it. You could write software for washing machines, and write a video game, and if your contract says they own everything you write then they do. You signed it. There's no "but surely not!" defense.