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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

#71

Post by andrewxdiamond »

thebradbain wrote: post #61
tempaway85751 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... 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.

Cool -- if one of the companies wants to issue a takedown request, they're free to make the case for it. It's funny there's this idea that a company _might_ be potentially injured over code they do not want or know they had being made open source by its actual author, even though many of those companies will gladly use open-source tooling without ever contributing anything back. Perhaps more soundly, though, in Calif…

There are gray areas but I do not think you are in one.

> and then later adapted and expanded upon that code (or even started over, with the knowledge of what you learned from others' work)

These are extremely different scenarios. Starting with a copyrighted material and modifying it is not at all the same as reading material and starting over. The first is violating copyright, the second is a derivative work.

If I read everything correctly, what you describe doing is taking code owned by the first company and modifying it for the second company. That’s not at all a gray area. It’s a copyright violation. You the engineer sign away your rights to the code when you built it for company 1 while employed by them. Their employment contract for-sure states they own any work produced by you during your employment, and you agreed to this.

If the first project was done off of company time, posted publicly on a private account, you might have a claim to the rights.

I know you’ve dug your trench too deeply to change your mind at this point, but anyone reading your comments should know what you did was technically illegal and can get people in legal hot water.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#72

Post by bjornlouser »

"'Growing as an engineer' means becoming a better engineer, and becoming a better engineer (directly or indirectly) means getting better at using your skills to create business value."

Learning how the Excel model worked and then reimplementing it would have been a better example of 'getting better at using your skills to create business value'.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#73

Post by Alupis »

pc86 wrote: post #56
sokoloff wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if you lose immediately, you likely owe damages. Those damages, even if trebled, appear to be $0 here.

Which would be a great solace to someone who just spent $10k or more like 2-3x that responding to a lawsuit. But that's also why I agree the odds of actually getting sued are near-zero.

Some companies, armed with floors of attorneys and retained outside counsel, do that sort of thing just for the message alone. It costs them next to nothing, relatively, ruins the defendant regardless of outcome, and makes it clear for others to not mess around with IP.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#74

Post by migf »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #57
migf wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was also absolutely gob smacked at this. Will they care? Probably not. Are you putting yourself at the absolute mercy of them deciding not to care? Absolutely. I would have a hard time sleeping... like this would be like being in IT and knowing the backups were bullshit.

Is this a thing in the US? Here, if the code was written of your own volition outside of work hours then it's yours.

It depends on your employment agreement or contract. Most contracts I have seen say that any IP you develop related to what you're doing at work is the employers.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#75

Post by andy81 »

abeppu wrote: post #59

I'm confused about the circular reference thing. Like, was there a reason to do the linear regression that way? Is there a secret story in a story where next week, in a spinoff / sequel episode, the data scientist responsible will explain why they took the weird/surprising choices they did?

I used it once to run a Monte-Carlo simulation in a spreadsheet.

After enabling iterative calculation and manual calculation, every press of refresh runs a loop. Fun stuff.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#76

Post by bsder »

Side question: Why the hell is it so stupidly difficult to display and edit tabular data from programming code?

You can't drive Excel from Python/Rust/etc (Microsoft just announced to great fanfare that Excel can call Python--which is the wrong way around). All the editable table widgets for the web seem to suck. Nobody seems to have a TUI which you can drive from an external program.

A poorly written spreadsheet with a driveable API seems like a component that has been built multiple times by lots of people yet seems to be unavailable.

Is there some solution that I'm missing?

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#77

Post by dragonwriter »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #57
migf wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was also absolutely gob smacked at this. Will they care? Probably not. Are you putting yourself at the absolute mercy of them deciding not to care? Absolutely. I would have a hard time sleeping... like this would be like being in IT and knowing the backups were bullshit.

Is this a thing in the US? Here, if the code was written of your own volition outside of work hours then it's yours.

“Work hours” are less clear for salaried workers who may or may not take work home: if it was written to solve a problem for the employer, reviewed with other workers at work, but ultimately not further pursued the status seems murky.

The later derivative that was actively used by and updated for the requirements of another employer during the coarse of work seems to more clearly their property as a derivative (but also murky because it is potentially an illegal derivative of the earlier work, if that was owned by the earlier employer.)

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#78

Post by easton »

Excel circular reference doc, for the curious: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/remove-or-allow-a...

> Unless you're familiar with iterative calculations, you probably won't want to keep any circular references intact. If you do, you can enable iterative calculations, but you need to determine how many times the formula should recalculate. When you turn on iterative calculations without changing the values for maximum iterations or maximum change, Excel stops calculating after 100 iterations, or after all values in the circular reference change by less than 0.001 between iterations, whichever comes first. However, you can control the maximum number of iterations and the amount of acceptable change.

Re: I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

#79

Post by brap »

rkangel wrote: post #69
brap wrote: post #62

> He simply couldn’t believe that I’d written a full spreadsheet engine that ran in the browser. I can't believe it either, and I don't mean this in a good way. Apache POI lets you run headless Excel. You import and interact with sheets programmatically in Java. We used this in my old workplace for exactly the same reason (functions, cell references, the whole thing), it worked great. You found the ‘circ’ problem wit…

To be fair, he wrote a spreadsheet engine that could run one particular spreadsheet . Admittedly a complex one, but it was a fixed set of functions that he needed to implement and not and endless tail of things that people expect Excel to do. I think I'd probably have argued more about the UI spec and down some Excel behind the scenes but it is a familiar UI if you've got lots of number inputs all over the place. I'v…

Project requirements are never fixed, they’re always evolving.

It was only a matter of time before users would’ve complained about features being missing/broken, especially since what they’re used to is Excel and this was meant to replace it.

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