6 ms·
One result of the injunction (all of the hearings up until now) was that uber needs to use all of its power to compel levandowski to testify, the extreme limit
by sillysaurus3 9y ago
One result of the injunction (all of the hearings up until now) was that uber needs to use all of its power to compel levandowski to testify, the extreme limit of which is firing him. Uber followed through as was legally required
How does firing him equate to pressuring him to testify?
- empath75 9y ago"If you don't testify or produce documents, we're going to fire you." "I still refuse to testify." "Alright, you're fired." That's all they can do.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jacquesm 9y agoWhat else would you have them do? Jail him? Torture him? The company has limited tools at its disposal the ultimate one being to fire the person.
- TallGuyShort 9y agoAlthough for the sake of this discussion I agree with you, I could have a lot of fun making a list entitled, "things companies have done to people that are worse than firing them."
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- csours 9y agoAnd most of those things would also go on a list called "illegal things companies have done". Probably not a good idea to do something illegal in the middle of a lawsuit.
- sillysaurus3 9y agoThere are many ways to make an employee's life worse without doing anything illegal. You tend to see them in dysfunctional companies.
- jacquesm 9y agoYes, but usually not in the middle of lawsuits that spell 'doom' in large letters for the eventual loser(s). Uber has one and one chance only to get this behind them: to play by the book and to ask 'how high' when the judge tells them to jump. If they try anything funny they can expect the ROI of that to be substantial and negative.
- sillysaurus3 9y agoI agree, but the topic had diverged somewhat. OT, have you noticed an increase in superfluous downvoting? I'm not really complaining, just trying to figure out if I'm imagining it or if it's randomness doing its thing. Since HN has become so much bigger, I wonder if the mods could scale down the effect of downvoting. E.g. make it take two downvotes to make a comment appear at 0.
- jacquesm 9y agoHappens all the time, I wouldn't worry about it, just ignore it.
- sillysaurus3 9y agoOk, I wrote a tampermonkey extension to hide the effects of being downvoted: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/9d681310f4714277a37832643c2d3b93 https://gist.github.com/anonymous/9d681310f4714277a37832643c... It removes scores from your comments and replaces your karma counter with "(9999)". HN is much more pleasant now.
- jacquesm 9y ago
- ThrustVectoring 9y agoCompanies can do worse things than firing people, but it's hard to legally compel them to do so.
- Pyxl101 9y agoIt also probably means that Levandowski loses some or all of his compensation for Uber's acquisition of Otto, right? From what I recall, that purchase was made in Uber stock, and I'd expect it to have a vesting schedule. Depending on the length of the initial cliff, it seems possible that he hasn't vested any of that stock. I am speculating though and don't know for sure.
- pinewurst 9y agoMy understanding is that the vesting started when he left Google/Waymo. Uber made vesting retroactive back to Otto's nominal start date. This has been called out by Waymo's lawyers.
- dllthomas 9y agoOf course, if it is the case that Otto was built on misappropriated trade secrets, and Levandowski lied to Uber about that during the acquisition, then we might well see some of that clawed back in a separate lawsuit.
- phlakaton 9y agoYou could fire him and then write a public post explaining that he was fired because of rank incompetence and unethical dealings. Just saying. (IANAL but if I were I would probably not counsel doing that in any case. :-P )
- MichaelBurge 9y agoA bit pedantic maybe: firing him doesn't pressure him, but threatening to fire him does. And it's not a threat if they don't eventually do it.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]