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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

#431

Post by Angostura »

mkii wrote: post #177
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…

And yet, when the author takes code from one company to use for another, or releases company code on Github, nobody bats an eyelid.

Indeed. Having warned against "If you treat the code like a pet for sentimental reasons, you’re working in direct opposition to the interests of the business." He does exactly that.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#432

Post by ak_111 »

iancmceachern wrote: post #344
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.

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,…

This feels like the debate between tax evasion and tax avoidance. What the engineer did here going to an IP lawless place is more like tax avoidance. It has a bad smell but he legally exploited a loophole in the international IP system if I understood correctly. Sort of migrating to a tax haven to avoid taxes.

Unless there is something explicitly stated in your contract banning you from taking the "know-how" in your brains and use it elsewhere (so long as you don't breach any patent) then it sounds there is nothing technically wrong.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#433

Post by austhrow743 »

sneak wrote: post #264
nwiswell wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It's easiest and safest to assume that property is not stolen" is a parallel construction of your argument. You can assume whatever you want but the cops may not be very impressed. There are a lot of polite fictions in law, and this is one of them. If you had no reasonable way of knowing that a license was invalid (or property was stolen), the judge is probably going to be sympathetic, but the property will still ge…

I'm not talking about this code in particular - I am talking about all code presumably written by individuals and posted on GitHub with a LICENSE file saying it's free software. It is standard, reasonable person practice to use foss-labeled code on GitHub under the presumption that the license is not a lie. This case is no different. Nothing in the author's linked story suggests this code is not MIT licensed as the r…

>Nothing in the author's linked story suggests this code is not MIT licensed as the repo claims.

The lack of him saying he went to the effort of having Box or Uber license their code MIT suggests it.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#434

Post by MattPalmer1086 »

fader wrote: post #122
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…

> 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…

I was told that you should only build strategic things you needed to differentiate on. Anything else, buy and adapt yourself to it.

I like your story of enlightenment though! I guess if you could genuinely build and maintain something cheaper, then why not.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#436

Post by ClumsyPilot »

emptysongglass wrote: post #409
kome wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's not "the deal". It's illegal. No one on either side agreed to do this and had that been part of the negotiation, the offended party would have walked away or else agreed to a higher sale price in exchange for technology transfer.

Am yes, executives of eestern firms earn billions spesifically because they are clueless about the country where they outsource production.

It might nit be in the contract, but they definitely know whats going on, and they still take the deal

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#437

Post by xmcqdpt2 »

emptysongglass wrote: post #409
kome wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's not "the deal". It's illegal. No one on either side agreed to do this and had that been part of the negotiation, the offended party would have walked away or else agreed to a higher sale price in exchange for technology transfer.

> It's illegal.

According to who? Sovereign states have their own laws, that's what makes them sovereign.

You claim that companies wouldn't have done business in China (in the times before our current Second Cold War) had they known about the lack of IP law enforcement there. I think companies who outsourced to China knew very well what was going on, and calculated that they'd still come out ahead.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#438

Post by berniedurfee »

the-dude wrote: post #425
iancmceachern wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> If it were in any other country but China, it wouldn't be allowed to happen. IIRC the USA did plenty of that.

That’s my understanding as well; that the Industrial Revolution in the US was very much based on IP from outside the US.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#439

Post by hu3 »

soperj wrote: post #39
Kwpolska wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how many times do you really need to write a spring OAuth server that integrates with LDAP? I would expect this to be a library somewhere. > import it to employers machines How would you prove that you write the code long before getting hired by them?

> How would you prove that you write the code long before getting hired by them? Commit it to a repo somewhere.

This is what I did once. And it worked!

I have a 4 years 1 day old repo for code that was used in a job 4 years ago.

But I made sure to have a written agreement saying that the code I was bringing in was, within reasonable limits, still mine.

Clearly this doesn't include code that was produced during the job.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#440

Post by ryukoposting »

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #158
ryukoposting wrote: post #112

I wonder if the author would view this situation differently had Uber/Box decided to claim the code as their own. It has to bring some catharsis to know that, even if the code never actually met its potential, at least the whole world can see and appreciate it. I created a whole programming language as an intern for . It was lazily evaluated and garbage collected. Unquoted MAC addresses were valid syntax, among other…

The part the author is missing is that Box and Uber have already claimed the code as their own. It will be in the employment contract. The author appears to be under the impression that asking a mid-level manager (or even a senior manager) "Hey, do you want this?" and that manager answering "No", is in any way legally binding on the company.

I've only ever agreed to those terms kicking and screaming. I wish there was a larger part of the community willing to advocate for a "love of the art" clause that would explicitly state that code I wrote on my own time is mine.
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