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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

#31

Post by tempaway85751 »

bastawhiz wrote: post #25
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 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.

Fair enough. But I'll leave my comment there as general advice for other readers

enjoyed the article, the bit about Excel circular ref linear regression was wild

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#32

Post by School-Cotton »

sublinear wrote: post #20
contravariant wrote: post #9

Earlier 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.

> 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?

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#33

Post by Alupis »

sublinear wrote: post #20
contravariant wrote: post #9

Earlier 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.

Your employment agreement or contract likely has some clause saying you transfer ownership, rights, etc to the organization.

Which likely means your "free time" code you decided to do to make your job easier now belongs to your employer since they asked you to write it (albeit indirectly in this situation).

Will anything come of it for trivial stuff? Probably not, but that doesn't mean it's ok.

Unless you have something in writing saying otherwise, best not to mix stuff like this because one day you might wind up on the wrong side of an army of lawyers.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#34

Post by [deleted] »

bastawhiz wrote: post #28
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 just like telling fun stories from a long time ago

[deleted]

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#35

Post by bastawhiz »

sokoloff wrote: post #11
Kwpolska wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how many times do you really need to write a spring OAuth server that integrates with LDAP? I would expect this to be a library somewhere. > import it to employers machines How would you prove that you write the code long before getting hired by them?

> I would expect this to be a library somewhere. Indeed. That library is often written off-the-clock by person X and imported on-the-clock by person Y. Sometimes X === Y.

And sometimes that person even writes about it on substack

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#38

Post by sr228822 »

ironically, I was backend at Uber 2014 - 2018 and used to ask a simple version of implementing an excel formula engine as my go-to coding interview question. Its got a nice mix of data-structures, algorithms, complexity, and implementation. Good candidates can get a reasonably efficient implementation handling cell references in an hour.

nice read. made me nostalgic for the wild days of Uber-China hacking.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#39

Post by soperj »

Kwpolska wrote: post #8
arcbyte wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of us will strategically write generic code on our own time and machines and import it to employers machines when needed and customize it. For instance, how many times do you really need to write a spring OAuth server that integrates with LDAP? Or the guts of a simple CRUD app?

> how many times do you really need to write a spring OAuth server that integrates with LDAP? I would expect this to be a library somewhere. > import it to employers machines How would you prove that you write the code long before getting hired by them?

> How would you prove that you write the code long before getting hired by them?

Commit it to a repo somewhere.

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