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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

#181

Post by nextaccountic »

cflewis wrote: post #145
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…

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.

> State espionage is going to be at every large US company too.

Snowden revealed, among other things, that the NSA did state espionage on Brazil's state oil company, Petrobras

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/09/world/americas/nsa-spied-...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/09/nsa-spying-bra...

https://g1.globo.com/fantastico/noticia/2013/09/nsa-document...

International relations are based on reciprocity. I sincerely think that if the US didn't think that industrial espionage would be a legitimate activity of intelligence agencies, they wouldn't practice it themselves.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#182

Post by Aeolun »

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…

Excel does not relate to Ubers’ core business.

I’m nearly 100% certain we can look back at this comment in 20 years and find that absolutely nothing happened.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#183

Post by teaearlgraycold »

erulabs wrote: post #23

I read this article looking forward to the complex bespoke code to be ripped out and deleted - but the author clearly grew as an engineer in a way I didn’t expect: > Sometimes that’s just how it is. The devops saying “Cattle, not pets” is apt here: code (and by proxy, the products built with that code) is cattle. It does a job for you, and when that job is no longer useful, the code is ready to be retired. If you tre…

Any time I identify a fun and novel problem I get suspicious. Generally, programming should be mundane and you should be solving problems that have been solved thousands of times before. If something looks new it's more likely you haven't correctly identified the problem you're solving.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#184

Post by stickfigure »

mkii wrote: post #177
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.

If we're being generous, the author may have had permission to do so. It's not inconceivable; the code was abandoned. If one of my reports had asked, I would have approved.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#185

Post by endisneigh »

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…

Well information wants to be free, copyright shouldn’t exist, piracy is ok yadda yadda

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#186

Post by lowbloodsugar »

Aeolun wrote: post #182
lowbloodsugar wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Excel does not relate to Ubers’ core business. I’m nearly 100% certain we can look back at this comment in 20 years and find that absolutely nothing happened.

The author explains how analyzing and presenting data was worth millions of dollars. The author documents how a senior executive instructed him to write excel. It is clearly their core business. Also, and this comes back to the fantasy/denial/wishful-thinking aspect here, neither I nor the law says core business. That's a word that you added. If you did it as part of your job, then it is, by definition, part of their business.

I am also nearly 100% certain we can look back at this comment in 20 years and find nothing happened, but only because nobody will take this code and make a billion dollar business. If they did, I guarantee there would be a law suit.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#187

Post by lxe »

> To this day, I’ve never encountered an in-house application system as well-designed as Uber’s. You could go from start to Hello World running on a *.uberinternal.com subdomain in under 30 minutes with full CI/CD.

I worked on all this at Uber back then, and this comment warmed my heart a bit. Thank you.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#188

Post by Aeolun »

pc86 wrote: post #56
sokoloff wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Which would be a great solace to someone who just spent $10k or more like 2-3x that responding to a lawsuit. But that's also why I agree the odds of actually getting sued are near-zero.

Why would you spend any money on a suit you intend to lose?

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#189

Post by charles_f »

> “Every day that we don’t have this tool as specced, we’re losing millions of dollars.” There was no budging on the spec.

If this is life or death, then the first reflex should be to find ways to make things simpler to ship. I understand that the requester in this case was a head of finance, but sh*t, if you want something, try to compromise once in a while.

This is a great story, but at some point as an engineer in a gig-selling company, I would have asked myself if my job was really to re-build excel.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#190

Post by Aeolun »

brap wrote: post #62

> 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…

> Apache POI lets you run headless Excel. You import and interact with sheets programmatically in Java.

How does this help you in the browser?

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