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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

#241

Post by hansonw »

acchow wrote: post #43

> Over the summer of 2016, we came up against a new twist on the project. We had a model that ran overnight to generate data for anticipated ridership in China. That data wasn’t useful on its own, but if you fed it into a tab on a special Excel spreadsheet, you’d get a little interactive Excel tool for choosing driver incentives. Our job was to take that spreadsheet and make it available as the interface for this mod…

I’m building a solution that works like this - we directly connect spreadsheet models to company databases (even converting pivots/formulas to SQL). Would love to chat with anyone that might find this valuable: https://arcwise.app

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#242

Post by shard »

makeitdouble wrote: post #218
envsubst wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> western companies are bound by stronger ethics I wouldn't say people in the west are "better people in their hearts" but they absolutely follow more strict norms regarding honesty and theft. This is one of the main reasons why companies pay a premium for workers in the west when they could hire from other places. One example: accounting scandals in the US are rare. I don't think anyone trusts accounting figures for…

> This is one of the main reasons why companies pay a premium for workers in the west when they could hire from other places. By this token "other places" companies would also want to pay a premium to hire US workers outside of sheer competency. Yet we're not seeing Samsung massively moving institutional operations to US centers for instance. > accounting scandals Whait, what ? You're telling me that while the crypto…

> Yet we're not seeing Samsung massively moving institutional operations to US centers for instance.

Culture matters a lot. Korea is a high context society, and relationship building is extremely important. Its very difficult to migrate functions to other locations when the way to get things done is through building trust and relationships over long periods of time. That said, Samsung does have significant offices all over the world.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#243

Post by ww520 »

I had a somewhat similar requirement in a past work. The Excel file had all the formulas and data, and the analysts only work with Excel files. The result of the calculation in Excel needed to be put on the web.

The solution was not to recreate Excel in the browser, but ran the Excel file with its formulas and its data plus the input parameters from end users at the backend server. Apache POI was a nice Java library that could do everything on an Excel file. Once it finished the formula calculation, I just read the cells from the Excel file to extract the result data and generated the web pages to present the data and graphs.

One nice benefit was the analysts could update their work in the Excel file, uploaded it to the server, and got the new calculation reflected on the web pages right the way.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#244

Post by Kon-Peki »

stickfigure wrote: post #184
mkii wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You probably don't have the authority to allow your report to release "company code" on their personal Github account.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#245

Post by zarzavat »

migf wrote: post #50
tempaway85751 wrote: post #21

Earlier 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 was also absolutely gob smacked at this. Will they care? Probably not. Are you putting yourself at the absolute mercy of them deciding not to care? Absolutely. I would have a hard time sleeping... like this would be like being in IT and knowing the backups were bullshit.

It’s pointless to worry about being sued by a large corporation. If they want to bankrupt you, they always can, regardless of whether you did anything wrong or not.

We are like ants to them, they can squash us at any time, but most of the time we are too small to worry about.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#246

Post by sneak »

zik wrote: post #219
mkii wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

My hair stood on end both times he did this. Holy crap that's some massive legal liability.

The code is MIT licensed. Anyone is legally allowed to upload MIT licensed code to GitHub, it's free software and may be freely redistributed.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#247

Post by [deleted] »

endisneigh wrote: post #185
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

[deleted]

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#248

Post by diogenes4 »

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…

> People in the US just don't understand the level of economic and industrial espionage that happens in China on a daily basis.

Back in my day this was called "competition" and worked for the consumer, not against them. I find the espionage factor to be theatrical hogwash trotted out by the corporate types. We americans love competition, right? Stfu and compete.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#249

Post by treesknees »

sneak wrote: post #246
zik wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My hair stood on end both times he did this. Holy crap that's some massive legal liability.

The code is MIT licensed. Anyone is legally allowed to upload MIT licensed code to GitHub, it's free software and may be freely redistributed.

It’s alarming because, in my experience, anything you write for an employer is intellectual property of the company. Unless he wrote that Box demo all on his own time and his own equipment completely outside of work, or Box has some abnormal contract with their employees, he can’t just slap an MIT license onto it and call it open source.

I worked with a few people who were successfully sued by our employer when those people left and brought a “spare time” project/tool with them and tried to publish it. It wasn’t even code we sold or ended up using internally, but was still IP of the company because they wrote it during business hours on a work machine.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#250

Post by Clamchop »

Alupis wrote: post #128
Clamchop wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethically, I'm not sure how to slice it. I'm operating on what you wrote here rather than this specific story. Some contracts stipulate that anything you write while employed is owned by your employer. (I'm settled in that this is unethical, but it's reasonable to comply.) But let's suppose there's no such stipulation. You get an idea while at work. Everyone gets ideas. You take your brain home with you (I hope) and…

There would be a difference between you publishing your code to a public repository, under a permissive license and then allowing your company to fork the codebase and do whatever with it. Under this situation, the author retains copyright, and the company has the option to decline use of the licensed code. That is different than solving common business problems at home, then when asked to solve them at work just cop…

See, that requires some argument of who it's for. Legally, copyright is established the moment something is created. (Hope you have proof.) I don't think you'd be able to claim _damages_ by sneaking your copyrighted code into the company repository, but other than that, I really have no idea how this would play out in court. It seems very risky but it's not obvious. I'd be interested in reading about cases in this middle area, if there have been any.

But anyway, I focused mostly on ethics. The specific situation you describe is ethically dubious, I agree, but I'm interested in where the line is and it's just not as clear as some are suggesting.

Copyright law is its own can of worms and is not the same as what's ethical. But, it does govern risk and practicality.

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