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

Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview

patentpandas.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 510 posts

Re: Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview

#41

Post by avalaunch »

CryoLogic wrote: post #20

Something very similar happened to me. When I was at university studying CS I was running a Arduino fansite and a fansite for a videogame - both of whom made most of their money from affiliate revenue (a couple hundred bucks per month). I thought it would be cool to work at Reddit (was close to graduating), and I had read blog posts from here and various other sites and IRC about how hiring managers liked projects. I…

Alternatively maybe they had been working on the idea for awhile and it was just a coincidence. Bringing an idea to the table that they were already working on might also hurt your chances of getting a job there.

Re: Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview

#43

Post by eksemplar »

ugh123 wrote: post #23
eksemplar wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s almost always better to achieve for yourself instead of others. A PhD. is infinitely more valuable than a couple of years working for any company, especially if your subject is interesting enough to on-spot hire you before you finish. And I say that as a manager who’s hired a lot of people before they earned X because their work was interesting. I don’t do it anymore, as a rule, because it crushed a lot of those…

Why did it crush them? Shouldn't the job they agreed to take with you have set them up for success? Or did they not perform well and find themselves unemployed?

I think it’s easiest to explain like this.

You don’t get a lot of opportunities to earn a PhD, most people never get the chance. By comparison almost everyone in CS get a lot of truly great job opportunities in their lives.

That’s a PhD, we had a habit of hiring people before their finished they CS degrees because skilled people were so hard to come by back in the day. They have good careers as far as I know, but they would have had much better opportunities if they had finished their degrees, and some of them haven’t taken that well.

Re: Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview

#45

Post by arduinomancer »

avalaunch wrote: post #41
CryoLogic wrote: post #20

Something very similar happened to me. When I was at university studying CS I was running a Arduino fansite and a fansite for a videogame - both of whom made most of their money from affiliate revenue (a couple hundred bucks per month). I thought it would be cool to work at Reddit (was close to graduating), and I had read blog posts from here and various other sites and IRC about how hiring managers liked projects. I…

Alternatively maybe they had been working on the idea for awhile and it was just a coincidence. Bringing an idea to the table that they were already working on might also hurt your chances of getting a job there.

Why would that hurt your chances? Wouldn't they see that as a good thing?

Re: Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview

#46

Post by spullara »

CryoLogic wrote: post #32
anilgulecha wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the specific idea: The idea is not unique, and really low hanging fruit for a mass site.

At the time, I could not find a single social media site that was using link-rewriting to make affiliate money. Blogs and fan sites for niche products had been using this to make money for a while, social media sites had not yet tried it. The close proximity with the announcement and my interview is what really bothered me. I have a strong feeling (but cannot prove) that someone I interviewed with took the idea and r…

We did that at Bagcheck in 2010. It was super common. They may have taken your idea and ran with it but it wasn't a novel idea. Generally though, at scale, you run into problems with the affiliate programs and they cut you off.

Re: Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview

#47

Post by dkfmn »

CryoLogic wrote: post #32
anilgulecha wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the specific idea: The idea is not unique, and really low hanging fruit for a mass site.

At the time, I could not find a single social media site that was using link-rewriting to make affiliate money. Blogs and fan sites for niche products had been using this to make money for a while, social media sites had not yet tried it. The close proximity with the announcement and my interview is what really bothered me. I have a strong feeling (but cannot prove) that someone I interviewed with took the idea and r…

I believe you independently derived a very old, but lurcrative, idea. Kontera started off back in 2003 although I don't recall when they actually got to double-underline links. Viglink has been doing this more subtly as a commercial service since 2009, and AOL actually had a flavor of this built into Instant Messenger. There were also a number of affiliate networks that built this infrastructure to parse the Commission Junction offers database and update their networks with match/near-match products & services.

Re: Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview

#48

Post by amenod »

CryoLogic wrote: post #32
anilgulecha wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the specific idea: The idea is not unique, and really low hanging fruit for a mass site.

At the time, I could not find a single social media site that was using link-rewriting to make affiliate money. Blogs and fan sites for niche products had been using this to make money for a while, social media sites had not yet tried it. The close proximity with the announcement and my interview is what really bothered me. I have a strong feeling (but cannot prove) that someone I interviewed with took the idea and r…

Not sure if it helps, but - sometimes the time is just right for some ideas and they crop all over the place. While it may seem to you it was your idea, they could have been working on it for days / months / years... I agree it sucks for you not to be able to know that though.

Re: Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview

#49

Post by GenericsMotors »

asmithmd1 wrote: post #40

I believe this was an honest misunderstanding and not an attempt to steal the idea because if the patent had issued and become valuable, it would have been easily invalidated. If a company wants to steal your patent they will "surround" your idea with other patents: method of manufacturing , method of using in , used in adjacent use case. This is a legal but slimy way to force the sale of your idea since now only the…

> I believe this was an honest misunderstanding and not an attempt to steal the idea because if the patent had issued and become valuable, it would have been easily invalidated.

"Easily", if you have deep pockets to foot all the legal costs.

Big companies know this, hence I don't think it was an innocent misunderstanding. The fact that they wouldn't even add OP as an assignee on the patent just reinforces my view that they were acting in bad faith.

OP was lucky to catch this before the patent was issued.

Re: Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview

#50

Post by nl »

CryoLogic wrote: post #20

Something very similar happened to me. When I was at university studying CS I was running a Arduino fansite and a fansite for a videogame - both of whom made most of their money from affiliate revenue (a couple hundred bucks per month). I thought it would be cool to work at Reddit (was close to graduating), and I had read blog posts from here and various other sites and IRC about how hiring managers liked projects. I…

Here's my HN submission of a demo I wrote of something in the same space back in 2010: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1908283

It wasn't a new idea then either. The founder of VigLink reached out to me then to share what they were working on.

Post reply on HN