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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

#171

Post by cpursley »

cowthulhu wrote: post #159
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 want to know what GPT model was used to generate this comment so I can make sure to avoid it

You won an internet, needed the laugh - thanks.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#172

Post by mmcwilliams »

ipython wrote: post #144

Best 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…

It's somewhat ironic to frame that as a problem that "isn't understood" in the US considering what the CEO of this company was convicted of.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#173

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

jacurtis wrote: post #168
fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 tools you buy are designed to be integrated with.

Until they change on a whim and force you to spend hours rebuilding your integration for negligible benefits. And then there’s the good old “change our vendors every five minutes because the last one wasn’t quite right”

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#174

Post by grepfru_it »

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…

Big facts

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#175

Post by School-Cotton »

Tao3300 wrote: post #102
School-Cotton wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> any contract attempting to gain such ownership is unenforceable I highly doubt that this is true, at least in the US. Can you cite case law? You can write a contract granting ownership of all the songs a musician performs, or all the books a writer writes during a specified time period. Why shouldn't the same be true of programmers and code?

Because no programmer is going to sign that. They'll go somewhere else. Musicians and writers don't usually have as many options, if any.

> Because no programmer is going to sign that.

Completely false. Most people sign job contracts without thinking too hard. And side projects just aren’t important for the majority of programmers, so why would they care?

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#176

Post by [deleted] »

mmcwilliams wrote: post #172
ipython wrote: post #144

Best 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…

It's somewhat ironic to frame that as a problem that "isn't understood" in the US considering what the CEO of this company was convicted of.

[deleted]

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#177

Post by mkii »

ipython wrote: post #144

Best 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…

And yet, when the author takes code from one company to use for another, or releases company code on Github, nobody bats an eyelid.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#178

Post by Aeolun »

bastawhiz wrote: post #90
sublinear wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (from the article) - Having Excel in the browser was a useful solution, but the problem wasn’t showing spreadsheets in the browser: the problem was getting a specific UI delivered to the right users quickly. > (from the above comment) - A good engineer can solve any problem with clever code. A great engineer knows what problems aren’t really problems and probably an XLS download link updated daily would have been f…

> "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.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#179

Post by mkii »

> "In 2015, I had built a prototype of a tool at Box. Box had a collaborative note-taking product called Box Notes (based on Hackpad). I had the idea to make a similar project for working with numbers: sometimes you didn’t need a full spreadsheet, you just needed a place to put together a handful of formulas, format it with some headings and text, and share it with other people. Sort of like an ipython notebook for spreadsheets. I called it Box Sums."

> "Nothing came of it, but I took the code and shoved it into my back pocket for a rainy day."

...

> "Apparently that was a thing. I remember being only half-surprised at the time. I hadn’t considered that our threat model might include employees leaking the computations used to produce the numbers in question."

...

> "My first reaction was to publish the code on Github."

Perhaps the author feels "only half-surprised" due to their own disregard for corporate legal ownership of code. The hypocrisy is strong here.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#180

Post by Aeolun »

tempaway85751 wrote: post #21
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.

... 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.

Different person, but when I asked if I could publish code as open source (where appropriate), I was told that that’s fine, as long as I don’t associate it with the company in any way (e.g. non-company specific stuff is ok).
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