4 ms·
An honest and naive question from someone outside industry: where is the line between stealing trade secrets and taking your experience and expertise developed
by bonoboTP 6y ago
An honest and naive question from someone outside industry: where is the line between stealing trade secrets and taking your experience and expertise developed at another company to a new company. Where does a lesson learned during project X become taking the know-how of the company which it developed during project X?
Because obviously the next company pays you so much because they see in your CV that you gained experience at the other company. This also works outside tech and I'm genuinely confused how this works for people bouncing across FAANG, say. How do they not take best practices across companies? What is your personal expertise and what is company IP? Does it depend on the wording of the contract? Is it ambiguous and murky and up to the court and everyone just hopes they won't get in trouble?
- xoxoy 6y agoit wasn’t ambiguous at all. he downloaded related files directly to a personal hard drive when he left.
- ponker 6y agoThe unsatsifying answer is "there's a grey area and a judge and jury decide" but the Levandowksi case is 100 miles beyond the grey area.
- lostcolony 6y agoTaking best practices is not the same as taking trade secrets. It's ambiguous and murky, yes, but realistically, if it is ambiguous and murky, the case is likely to fall apart. It's when it's clear that you took some secret sauce with you, and replicated it wholesale, that a case is likely to be brought, and likely to be won.
- thewhitetulip 6y agonobody can actually point out 'best practices' even if you implement them in new company. in this case, they literally copied code and that's why there was a case after the email gaffe.
- bonoboTP 6y agoHow about stuff like how you set up your automated tests, or the Python project folder structure, or that you always first test the road sign recognition on self driving cars before testing something else. Or you first pretrain your neural nets of lane detection before jointly training for road signs and lanes. I mean you remember the code you wrote and when faced with a similar case you will solve it in a similar way. The above are just really silly simplified examples for it.
- thewhitetulip 6y agoThat's the point I was trying to make. You can't really 'catch' someone using the same logic to write similar code. If I change companies, I am going to write code in the same way and test it in the same way. It'll be very difficult for my original company to 'sue' me if I were to code for the other company unless I do something like this guy did.