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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

#371

Post by sk0g »

lovich wrote: post #267
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.

I got into this with another set of engineers on Reddit where I discovered there’s a subculture of engineers who don’t believe you can’t actually own code and apparently take a copy of their employers source code repository everytime they switch jobs. Edit: Updated “can actually own code” to “can’t actually own code”

FYI the edit might have made it more confusing, since there's a double negative now. "don't believe you can't actually own code" reads as "believe you can actually own code", which I'm not sure is what you were going for.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#372

Post by lovich »

sk0g wrote: post #371
lovich wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got into this with another set of engineers on Reddit where I discovered there’s a subculture of engineers who don’t believe you can’t actually own code and apparently take a copy of their employers source code repository everytime they switch jobs. Edit: Updated “can actually own code” to “can’t actually own code”

FYI the edit might have made it more confusing, since there's a double negative now. "don't believe you can't actually own code" reads as "believe you can actually own code", which I'm not sure is what you were going for.

Well fuck, too late to edit it again. My grammatical error shall live on forever

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#373

Post by kqr »

tempaway85751 wrote: post #21
bastawhiz wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here. The code was originally written outside of work hours. I offered the code to Box and they didn't want it. If Uber wants a few thousand lines of JavaScript from over half a decade ago that didn't originate with them and that they used for less than a month, they can send me a letter.

... 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 agree this seems fairly clearly illegal.

That said, I think OP is morally in the right here, and I wish I had the guts to do similar things.

Sharing code is a good thing. Helping one company innovate using code that another company chose to ignore is also a good thing.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#374

Post by Aeolun »

acjohnson55 wrote: post #292
Aeolun wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excel does not relate to Ubers’ core business. I’m nearly 100% certain we can look back at this comment in 20 years and find that absolutely nothing happened.

Literally today I was in a fireside chat where the speaker told us the IP law department at a previous employer brought in a couple billions in revenue by suing for infringement.

Sure, but they weren’t sueing a rock.

Getting a judgement against an individual is vanishingly unlikely to result in any profits.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#375

Post by robertlagrant »

aurareturn wrote: post #331
fnordpiglet wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is sort of the definition of the informal red herring fallacy whataboutism. It doesn’t mean the US hasn’t. It means it’s not related to China being wrong to use military power to bully countries. An awful lot of folks here agree it’s wrong for anyone to bully anyone in any context, especially nations bullying the people of another country. We are all, after all, people. But people citing a fallacy when a fallacy…

I don't have a problem with the US bullying others. My problem is that people here on HN and in the west in general, demonizing China for doing the exact same thing when the US has done worse. They think it's ok to boycott Chinese products, but they won't boycott product from their own country. They will say that the Chinese government is evil, but is completely ok with the government of their own. They will say Chin…

> My problem is that people here on HN and in the west in general, demonizing China for doing the exact same thing when the US has done worse

Er, no. Far more ink is spilled on the US being bad, or Western countries in general being bad, by people in the West. What you're saying is not true for HN, nor for the West in general.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#376

Post by abigail95 »

nardi wrote: post #154

I do not like working with people like this, because I don't want to be anywhere near the maintenance burden of a pile of hacks that technically can run a single Excel spreadsheet. I don't even want to be within earshot of people complaining about this. If I even thought about it for too long I'm sure I'd have a giant headache.

what would you have done instead?

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#377

Post by willcipriano »

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…

Intellectual property is a western invention as I understand it. I don't think China agrees that you can own an idea like we assert that we do.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#378

Post by oddmiral »

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.

All your codebase are belong to us.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#379

Post by hnlmorg »

trickstra wrote: post #351
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…

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.

If your company isn’t making money from the product then whoever owns the copyright is irrelevant.

Good engineering is building the stuff that adds commercial value to the business and buying the stuff that only adds support to the stuff that adds commercial value.

In this instance, monitoring falls into the latter category. It’s not a business differentiator.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#380

Post by kome »

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 not espionage, it's a development strategy, and it's working well. it foster local knowledge, local know how and local production.

the deal is: you can use our cheap labor force, but we can use your ideas

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