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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

#321

Post by adastra22 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #284
adastra22 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It only depends on your employment agreement in the other direction. Work done for hire is by default owned by your employer under federal law. For salaried employees it doesn't matter if it is done during working hours. The employment agreement can give up this right for things not related to the company's core business, and I usually insist on that in my agreements. But that is not the default behavior.

Surely someone has to ask for it before it's work done "for hire".

I usually insist that personal and open source work done outside of the product areas I work on are not company owned. Otherwise if I work on financial software at a bank, and then at home I work on defi/blockchain based financial stuff, I could be setting up a liability for me or my users.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#322

Post by [deleted] »

makeitdouble wrote: post #211
ipython wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a low ranking employee in Cincinnati divulged corporate trade secrets, they'd be tried and convicted. If a low ranking employee in Shanghai did the same, what can the US company do? Not much. So it's a low risk activity, that is also actively encouraged and in many cases financed by the Chinese government. This is in no way intended to be disparaging of folks who are of Chinese descent, but rather a reflection of…

Would you get tried in the US for interning at a company and then go to a competitor with all your inside knowledge ? [edit: barring a paid non compete agreement] Then a step further from that, sure there are laws to prevent you from wholesale lifting corporate data and bringing them out as you leave, but as many laws it will be extremely difficult to detect and prove that happened in many low profile cases. That's w…

[deleted]

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#323

Post by adastra22 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #301
dragonwriter wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That was the intent, but not what actually happened. The intent is a fact of what actually happened: which appears to be that it was written by an employee within the scope of employment to solve a business problem. Possibly outside of usual working hours, but if it’s by a salaried employee where doing work at home outside of usual working hours is itself a normal if not consistent part of employment, is probably n…

> which appears to be that it was written by an employee within the scope of employment to solve a business problem. An imagined business problem. If the code wasn't relevant to their actual business practices, that's quite relevant. They not only didn't want that code, they didn't want anything like it. As for the modifications for Uber, that's not what I'm here to contest.

No, it’s not relevant. Seriously, go consult a lawyer in this. I have. They’re very consistent on this point because there are tons of case law regarding it.

There are a massive number of examples of patent and copyright litigation stemming from work done for one employer, who rejected it, then the employee goes off and founds their own company and gets successfully sued.

Fairchild was unique in that they had claim to the IP that their employees wanted to use in new startups, yet they decided not to follow through and allowed the employees to start their own companies. They could’ve prosecuted but didn’t, and as a result we got Silicon Valley and the culture that surrounds it.

But it’s no guarantee that that your employer won’t pursue a copyright claim they are perfectly within their rights to do. Don’t assume your employer is Fairchild.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#324

Post by noobface »

iancmceachern wrote: post #320
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…

I've watched this happen. I've watched key, core engineers and technical leaders work for US and European companies, develop their next generation products, then turn around and design and develop essentially the exact same thing for the Chinese market. They then build a company, in China, that makes essentially the same product, but for the Chinese Market, and with Chinese investors, etc. Examples: Thoratec/Abbot He…

Everyone should've seen what happened to Cisco and thought better, but short sighted execs focused only on next quarter gladly opened the gates and accepted the horse.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#325

Post by nperez »

I've worked on a project that was intended to replace Excel spreadsheets with a web front end. It was presented like we were moving our processes out of the stone age - as if we were replacing a pen-and-paper process that "doesn't scale", or whatever.

I will never do that again. We didn't build a whole spreadsheet engine, but we did build a web UI that simply doesn't do as much as Excel. Excel is powerful. Sometimes it's a fine tool for the job. Our team was laid off before we could roll it out, but I remember the growing sinking feeling of "I would hate using this if I already had a bunch of habits built up in Excel"

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#326

Post by justinclift »

sneak wrote: post #251
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…

Yes, but if we speculate as to the invalidity of the explicitly published license, we basically can't use any foss code on GitHub. Any reasonable person can expect that the MIT license on this code is valid and authorized by the rightsholder. Did Uber or Box explicitly agree to release it under an foss license? Is it the author's personal individual copyright made on personal hardware outside of work location/time? D…

> Any reasonable person can expect that the MIT license on this code is valid and authorized by the rightsholder.

Yep, that's the reasonable default position.

If however, the author of the code wrote a length article about how they'd developed this code while working for a company (not in their spare time), and you happen to read the article in question... then for that specific repo you might look at it differently.

The article in question doesn't clarify things regarding the Box derived code, nor whether they sought and received permission from Uber prior to publishing. Absent both of those, I'd personally not use code from this repo.

That's just me being risk-adverse here, as I don't personally have a use for the code. Others might make different choices. :)

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#327

Post by closeparen »

crazygringo wrote: post #307
justinwp wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, I would be surprised. What big tech company makes it easy for you to take code written and deployed there while you were employed, and just open-source it? I know there are big tech firms that own everything you do outside of work, but have a fairly easy process to allow you to release that as open-source. But this is different, this is about code written for and deployed by the company itself, that isn't part o…

“Corporate open source strategy” where I work is just having a form that engineers can fill out to request to open source things, and a committee on the other end of the form to sign off. It’s similar to the process for speaking at a conference or publishing on the company blog. Management sometimes steers in the direction of more or less public content, but specific releases are always individual initiative by engineers who want to develop their project in the open. Tech brand wants our name associated with high quality work.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#328

Post by stickfigure »

tomcam wrote: post #293
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.

I’m assuming you own the company. Because if you don’t, you don’t have that right.

You might or might not; it's not like Google polls the shareholders to decide what source license to use for each project. Authority gets delegated and every company is different.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#329

Post by fruit2020 »

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…

A great engineer should be both good and great. I do a lot of ‘great’ stuff at work, but that won’t help me to get into my next gig unless I also code a lot and don’t lose my skill.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#330

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

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.

In California, at least, this is illegal unless the code competes with the company's products.
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