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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

#271

Post by user_named »

cornel_io wrote: post #223
user_named wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, that's why you have product managers. I would have talked to this stakeholder for an hour and realized the solution is not to build another excel.

You're routinely successful at arguing down C-level execs who have already rejected your pushback multiple times? Seems like a risky strategy...

You don't reject it you understand what the problem is and design the solution and explain it to them. I'm sure this entire team didn't need to exist in the first place but that's what you get when you only have a business person and the Dev team they hire.

A PM here would have saved the company what, $5m per year?

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#272

Post by Dylan16807 »

aurareturn wrote: post #212
fnordpiglet wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A crucial difference is the US spying is for state use, whereas in China the state is deeply intermixed with industry. State industrial espionage is used for commercial competitive advantage. This is a huge structural and cultural difference. For instance it’s hard to believe China bootstrapped BYD and GWM among others from green fields. They’ve been exfiltrating and transferring automotive technology for decades. Th…

“When governments permit counterfeiting or copying of American products, it is stealing our future, and it is no longer free trade.” - US President Donald Trump, commenting on China. Actually, the above quote is not Trump and not on China. It's Ronald Raegan on Japan in 1985. When a new economic threat rises, the US will use the same playbook- demonizing in media, accusations, turn the public against said country, ba…

> Actually, the above quote is not Trump and not on China. It's Ronald Raegan on Japan in 1985.

Good, I was surprised at the claim that trump would say something so balanced.

What's "demonizing" about this? It doesn't even mention a specific country.

"accusations" are not a problem if they're true...

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#273

Post by justinwp »

Kon-Peki wrote: post #244
stickfigure wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think you might be surprised how easy this process is at some big tech companies. For me the bigger hurdle is getting past a privacy review, not the issue of the license.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#274

Post by Dylan16807 »

aurareturn wrote: post #200
ipython wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn’t say china can’t innovate… I said that the Chinese government actively encourages and finances at a large scale industrial and economic espionage activity. See for example the China National Intelligence Law’s Articles 7 and 10: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Intelligence_Law_of...

[flagged]

Something "feeding into" a false rhetoric doesn't mean it's false.

Facts get twisted all the time.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#275

Post by chillbill »

lll-o-lll wrote: post #265
treesknees wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Worse than that, many companies have clauses that indicate that any software you write (regardless of whether for the company or not), belongs to them. I don’t know if this would hold up in court, but it’s there in the contract.

[dead]

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#276

Post by password4321 »

bastawhiz wrote: post #81
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…

> 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…

For anyone else curious, Apache POI re-implements support for the Excel file formats and most formulas.

https://poi.apache.org/components/spreadsheet/formula.html

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#277

Post by hughesjj »

aurareturn wrote: post #205
Alupis wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not "same old rhetoric" if it is in fact true. There are many publicly known examples of Chinese Espionage, including fake "police" departments in SF coercing nationals and naturalized citizens alike to commit espionage. You don't have to take our word - you have the internet at your disposal and can locate this information freely. You are simply choosing not to.

[flagged]

> The problem isn’t that China is doing the same

Wait what? So you think industrial espionage is to be accepted?

> the problem is the sheer amount of one sided propaganda that you and everyone here is receiving.

I mean, you're literally doing whatabboutism with this exact line

Look I get countries looking out for their own interests and fuck the facists the US has supported but that doesn't mean I'm just willing to bend over and let governments or companies steal my company's secrets because "everyone is doing it"

Further, to be real, with the current and historical governments for each nation, I'd still rather trust the US government having the tech advantage over the Chinese one. That is abso-fuxking-lutely not an endorsement of the US government nor their actions, but, I mean the US definitely walk the walk on liberal values out of the two

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#278

Post by BlueTemplar »

yard2010 wrote: post #103
Retric wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, in 2016 there was several off the shelf options for doing the exact same thing. It’s a perfect example of a young engineer feeling a huge accomplishment from reinventing the wheel, and then realizing the clever solution wasn’t actually worth anything like the effort required to create it. I had a long conversation to convince someone not to go down that path in 2006, and I am sure someone’s going to do it in…

I would say what you talk about is experience. To have an experience, you must go this path to realize what to not do. It feels like a catch 22 kind of thing.

Experience certainly helps, but last time I checked, schools are supposed to teach you how to use reference tools (reference manuals, company listings, search engines...), and how to use them well - a pretty fundamental skill of being an engineer ?

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#279

Post by xpe »

zarzavat wrote: post #245
migf wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> If they want to bankrupt you, they always can, regardless of whether you did anything wrong or not.

Misses the point, which is: the likelihood of being sued increases when you break contracts or appear to do so

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#280

Post by xpe »

xwdv wrote: post #47
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.

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.

Trivial to ask for a ChatGPT rewrite. Not trivial to make sure it works.
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