Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

basta.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 565 posts

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#351

Post by trickstra »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #129
fader wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My entire career is effectively to sit in meetings and tell young, passionate engineers not to build things. It’s a bit depressing, but it’s also vital. This was the single most impactful thing I learned in my early career. I was building out monitoring systems for an in-house service we hosted on site. My boss wanted to buy some small utility to keep tabs on some minor aspect of our environment. I was a bit offend…

> 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…

I'm surprised nobody here mentioned the copyrights yet. By building it, you are gaining the copyright. By buying it, you are gaining a vendor lock-in.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#352

Post by prox »

harles wrote: post #348
vkazanov wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How did this become a thing on a cultural scale? Like that everyone does it and it is almost expected as it were?

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#353

Post by choppaface »

PeterStuer wrote: post #338

Running the models on laptops overnight? They know desktops and servers exist right?

But when you have to be your own IT / devops... and when maybe all you know is R, some stats, and how to admin a laptop...

The head of finance may have burned most of the opex budget and devops bandwidth on the Vertica and/or other DB service(s) they were using.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#354

Post by choppaface »

dublinben wrote: post #3

Is it common to take code written for one employer and reuse it for another?

Well this story is about Uber, and as far as Uber goes this instance of code copying was not nearly as consequential as what some of their other employees did https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Levandowski#Civil_laws...

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#355

Post by Moru »

noobface wrote: post #324
iancmceachern wrote: post #320

Earlier 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.

Everyone did see it coming. Interviews of experts on TV, talked about at the coffee table at every industry in the west. But since the stockmarket demands constant growth we have to move production to china. And when the move is done, the CEO has a nice rep-sheet showing how much profits went up while he was working at the company and gets hired by the next one.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#356

Post by [deleted] »

makeitdouble wrote: post #155
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…

They don't understand it, because what you're quoting as a behavior is pretty standard anywhere in the world. That's why companies protect their secrets from low rank employees. Except if you're arguing that western companies are bound by stronger ethics, in which case I'd like to see some evidence.

[deleted]

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#357

Post by choppaface »

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 MIT licensed now. It probably wasn't originally, and/or he may not have had the authority to choose the license while at Box / Uber.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#358

Post by iancmceachern »

prox wrote: post #352
harles wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How did this become a thing on a cultural scale? Like that everyone does it and it is almost expected as it were?

It's master planned by the government.

Just Google "Chinese protectionist" and then any industry. The Chinese government has been actively targeting everything from CNC machine tools to medical devices and semiconductors for decades. Some industries with more success than others. Anything they import, especially industrial equipment like textile looms, cnc machines, semiconductor equipment, etc. There are big, long term, well funded pushes to manufacture indigenous versions of just about everything. Airplanes, jet engines, computer chips, industrial equipment, on and on

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#359

Post by delusional »

jacurtis wrote: post #168
fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #129

Earlier 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…

> When you buy, the tools you buy are designed to be integrated with[...]

This makes me question if you're speaking theoretical, or actually have any practical experience.

I've been part of about a dozen "buy it" projects now, and so rarely they've been "designed to be integrated with. A lot of the time it's deeply legacy systems that have a half-hearted api slapped on top to check that box, but once you start using it you notice that everything you want to do somehow requires contacting the vendor first.

Which dovetails into an issue that, although vendors will give you the impression that their system is well tested and widely deployed, it all too often ends up being a lie. We've had quite a few instances where vendors have sold us what turned out to be something they were still building.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#360

Post by choppaface »

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…

Given Uber's efforts on Greyballing, booking fake Lyft rides, hiring Anthony Levandowski etc etc ... it's very on-brand for them to (1) fall into an espionage war with Didi (wonder where all their Vertica data came from?) and (2) have an engineer write about using code he lifted from a prior gig and then also self-published.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-greyball-...

https://www.theverge.com/2014/8/12/5994077/uber-cancellation...

Post reply on HN