Is it common to take code written for one employer and reuse it for another?
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I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
341–350 of 565 posts
Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
#342Is interesting what people focus on when they read, ultimately I think one needs to ask oneself why you take some jobs. Is the money, the challenge or the purpose. I find that money and challenge has little to go for me if the purpose is skew.
Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It’s pretty hard not to overlap with big tech companies. Everything has been touched internally.
My understanding is the same though. Unfortunately whether a clause is legal or not may matter little - you’ll run out of cash for legal bills before they do. The best defense is probably just that most companies don’t care about your side projects.
Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
So an engineer learns how to make something, and then goes elsewhere to make it. To be honest, the way you put ut, the story feels OK to me. There are many truly bad examples, e.g. the arm china story, but engineers doing their thing is not one of them.
This isn't that.
This is engineers deliberately taking tech to somewhere where they know IP laws won't be enforced.
It's not like I'm saying they can learn calculus here and then go to China and use calculus to design things.
It's that I'm saying they design a very specific thing, a very specific way, for hire, then go make that exact specific thing, that same specific way.
If it were in any other country but China, it wouldn't be allowed to happen.
Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Because you intend to lose it with 0 damages.
Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
#346> having answers that were very, very close is objectively worse than having numbers that are wildly wrong: very wrong numbers usually always mean a simply logic problem. Almost-correct numbers mean something more insidious. Ha! I massively identify with this. 'The market-wide median is off by £3.07' is a much harder but to crack than the 'worse' report that 'the median is twice the max and the min is null'.
*bug to crack
Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Nortel too.
Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
So an engineer learns how to make something, and then goes elsewhere to make it. To be honest, the way you put ut, the story feels OK to me. There are many truly bad examples, e.g. the arm china story, but engineers doing their thing is not one of them.
The espionage really is next level in China. It’s not just reconstructing software (that’s part of it) but stealing binaries (and source where they can) for everything along the way.
I worked at a large tech co with an assembly line in China and experienced this first hand. A routine scan of one of our calibration machines turned up a Trojan with a copy of all calibration software squirreled away. Fortunately nothing is network connected there, but it was obvious someone was planning to come back for it. The stash had our calibration software and the factory’s proprietary control software on it. Both companies sent security to watch the machine for 48 hours straight until a hard drive shredder could be procured to mutually assure each party no software would leak. It was nuts, but apparently common.
Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
#349Is it common to take code written for one employer and reuse it for another?
Nope, it's extremely illegal. Unless the first employer gives you explicit written permission to. Why anyone would run the legal risk of stealing IP from their old employer, to benefit not themselves, but to benefit their new employer... is beyond me.
And then brazenly admitting it on their blog which hits the front page of HN... that takes some cajones.
Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
#350Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This tool will cost us $500 to buy. What's your hourly pay rate for 40 hours This argument makes sense, but I worry that it’s a bit short-sighted. There are a lot of metrics that are hard to quantify where it might end up better: for one thing, I’ve found that integration costs and maintenance of integration of third-party systems are routinely underestimated: I’ve implemented “buy” for various systems where the wo…
Its extremely short sighted. The cost is much more than (hourly wage x code hours). There is ongoing maintenance cost that no one considers. I've never seen a project that gets built and just sails off for eternity with no maintenance or bugs. There will be times when the libraries or frameworks that built the underlying tool need upgrading. The requirements of the job might change even slightly and need a change in…
It all sounds great in theory but it still happens that buy turns out to be a total waste if time and money.