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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

#501

Post by adastra22 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #284
adastra22 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It only depends on your employment agreement in the other direction. Work done for hire is by default owned by your employer under federal law. For salaried employees it doesn't matter if it is done during working hours. The employment agreement can give up this right for things not related to the company's core business, and I usually insist on that in my agreements. But that is not the default behavior.

Surely someone has to ask for it before it's work done "for hire".

Now I understand what you are saying, and no. For a salaried employee it pretty much covers everything you do that is related to your job, with that “related to your job” being interpreted very loosely, or done with company equipment or on company time.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#502

Post by adastra22 »

bastawhiz wrote: post #493
adastra22 wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you are not a lawyer. OP specifically wrote the code to help Box with its business. That's cut and dry within the scope of an employment contract, under California law. This doesn't get a safe harbor exception.

> OP specifically wrote the code to help Box with its business. This is a leap

It’s stated by OP in his blog post.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#503

Post by bastawhiz »

dmd wrote: post #118
bastawhiz wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was easy to go to IT and say "get us a pile of laptops" and let the data scientists do their thing. It was hard to hire engineers to solve the problem (I was one of the engineers). They particular problem was far enough down the priority list that it took until 2016 to solve.

Heh. Well, I guess... sorry I didn't come help :) (I interviewed but turned down my offer.)

You dodged a bullet

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#504

Post by bastawhiz »

cush wrote: post #195
bastawhiz wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even worse: he was a director

Arguably the most battle-tested, feature-rich program on the planet. Yeah just make it like that.

I should tell the story of the PM (also at Uber!) who demanded our web app be "faster than Excel". I couldn't make it up if I tried.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#505

Post by bastawhiz »

user_named wrote: post #271
cornel_io wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're routinely successful at arguing down C-level execs who have already rejected your pushback multiple times? Seems like a risky strategy...

You don't reject it you understand what the problem is and design the solution and explain it to them. I'm sure this entire team didn't need to exist in the first place but that's what you get when you only have a business person and the Dev team they hire. A PM here would have saved the company what, $5m per year?

The second team I was on at Uber fired (with a capital F) six (6) PMs in five months for pushing back on product requirements that came from the CFO. For whatever reason, engineering rolled up to the CTO and product for this team rolled up to finance. The solution for disagreement? Pips!

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#506

Post by sublinear »

School-Cotton wrote: post #481
sublinear wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_Inc... > This is an even stronger case than anything being discussed in this thread. Oracle claimed to own code written by their own employees on their clock and still lost this case. Google won their claim of fair use. That's exactly and explicitly what an MIT licensed open source project would fall under: fair use by the employer and nobody owns it despite th…

This has nothing to do with what we’re talking about. Whether Oracle owns the copyright to that code is independent of whether Google’s use of it qualifies as fair use.

It absolutely does.

There are two questions here:

1) Can the employee use the code at work?

2) Who owns the code?

In Oracle v. Google, not even actual ownership impeded fair use. Nobody really owns the code on a public repo, so there's your answer to #1. The employee can use the code they authored and published to the world without any issues.

Now for question 2...

> what we’re talking about

What you're talking about.

You're correct that Oracle v. Google does not give any clear answers on ownership. For that you have to rely on the license applied to the project. It's simple. If you publish a project under a permissive license and your project does not contain anything proprietary, nobody owns it. Employment contracts don't have anything to do with this situation.

But, what does it really mean to "own" code? What is owned? The concept or the literal sequence of chars? It seems to be the latter which Google showed is trivially sidestepped by rewriting the code behind an API. Thus ownership is pointless in software unless it's closed source and proprietary, which is the opposite of a fun little Excel clone, amateur video game, etc.

The only thing enforceable about an employment contract is the clause about terminating an employee for working on side projects on the company time and/or with company property such that it takes away from productivity towards their work. I don't think anyone is talking about that or would even think of doing that though.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#507

Post by robertlagrant »

concordDance wrote: post #474
robertlagrant wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It massively disadvantages the company. Why pay for software to be built that can just be taken by your software engineers, who form a new company and run a competing product?

Because that won't happen unless you massively mismanage the company. The coordination problem between the company employees is very hard to solve.

Why not? Why as a developer wouldn't I go to a VC and say "I have the source and rights to this premade product - fancy giving me some cash to take my team and run it?"

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#508

Post by zo1 »

pbj1968 wrote: post #262
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 I was called a racist 25 years ago when I said, “like, our engineering school is, like, crawling with Chinese nationals.” We said like a lot on the 90s.

We're headed for a very protectionist and isolated world because some players couldn't play nice. To me, the only thing holding the floodgates in the west back is the media which is very "rainbows and butterflies" about everything.

As soon as they start playing along and seeing this stuff in an alarmist way, they'll turn the narrative and report on it constantly.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#509

Post by kyleee »

burner420042 wrote: post #194
lowbloodsugar wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that you are claiming ownership of this code and by making it available on GitHub under an MIT license you are claiming that you have the right to do so. If I take that code and make a billion dollar business out of it, Box or Uber could then claim a share of it. That's the kind of things that companies do with the lawyers on retainer. I then sue you for falsely claiming that you own it. You are partic…

Long time ago my employer at the time had this in-house deployment system written by a guy that worked there. It worked well and we used it well after he had moved on. He left suddenly and started a company based on the idea. Employer went to sue him and discovered the ‘all your code belongs to us’ form was missing from his permanent file so they didn’t pursue it. That company is called Chef.

A small victory for the underdog

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#510

Post by fnordpiglet »

didntcheck wrote: post #441
fnordpiglet wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A crucial difference is the US spying is for state use, whereas in China the state is deeply intermixed with industry. State industrial espionage is used for commercial competitive advantage. This is a huge structural and cultural difference. For instance it’s hard to believe China bootstrapped BYD and GWM among others from green fields. They’ve been exfiltrating and transferring automotive technology for decades. Th…

It's not just China. For example, there's been several accusations of the French state assisting in industrial espionage against the US, and France has acknowledged some of these cases as true https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_espionage#France_an...

To be clear I’m not saying China somehow invented the idea, but the scale, breadth, and depth is unparalleled in history.
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