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>Spiro accused Meta of hiring dozens of former Twitter employees who “had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential i
by tw04 3y ago
>Spiro accused Meta of hiring dozens of former Twitter employees who “had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information.”
So you fire 80% of your workforce claiming they're dead weight and completely unnecessary, while simultaneously suing their new employer because apparently they were vital cogs who somehow "continue to have access to trade secrets"? So vital you're refusing to pay out any of their severance packages. Only in Elon land.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nomel 3y ago> because apparently they were vital cogs who somehow "continue to have access to trade secrets" I don't think this is a sane take. Knowing trade secrets and being a "necessity" are not related. They were, and you are, and I am, replaceable. Our possible deep esoteric knowledge of secret sauce maybe makes the replacement more painful, but that's all. If you've ever been on the "not fired" side of a layoff, you'll understand how losing someone "vital" is almost always just a disruption, in reality. The group may even collapse, but if the work truly is non-optional, pressure will build, and it will be done. If there's any competence, nobody will miss that person in a short time, and that's a good thing, because key person risk is a bad thing.
- rumblerock 3y agoMy question is – what trade secrets does Twitter even have that Meta didn't already have the existing infrastructure for, or competency to build themselves (probably better)?
- bagels 3y agoThey definitely have existing products, knowledge and competency for building a twitter clone that could be adapted for this purpose (instagram/facebook posts & comment systems). Whether they did or not is maybe the question?
- paxys 3y agoKnowledge is not automatically a trade secret. Skills from one job can be freely applied to another. The onus is on Twitter to prove that the employees took something specific (copyrighted code, a patented algorithm implementation, some other asset or IP) which is the property of Twitter and used it to build Threads. The last high profile lawsuit of this nature was Google vs Uber for stolen self driving tech, which had all of this and more.
- bagels 3y agoSorry if I was not clear, I'm saying that without hiring any Twitter folks, the Instagram folks could easily create a Twitter clone. Instagram posts & comments could be adapted pretty easily. The question is whether the Twitter employees actually brought and used trade secrets for this effort.
- paxys 3y agoThe thing is these employees could have come in and directly used all the "knowledge and competency" they learned at Twitter to build Threads and it would still be 100% legal. There is a very high bar to proving whether any of it is actually a trade secret.
- bagels 3y agoI think we're in agreement here. The general shape of how to build Twitter isn't a trade secret at this point. Copy-pasting source code is.
- ImPostingOnHN 3y agothe question is better phrased as, "can elon prove they did", because unless he can, they didn't, by default
- rtsil 3y agoNone. There is no trade secret in building something like Twitter. Anyone on this site can probably make a clone of it. The real secrets are the massive money needed to promote the network and to pay for the infrastructure, the massive social reach to attract top posters, the massive networking effect needed to make it a must-have app. Meta already have all of those.
- veec_cas_tant 3y agoI’m very confident that not everyone on this site could make it work at such a massive scale
- 6D794163636F756 3y agoI'm not very confident, I'm 100% certain that there is at least one person on this site (me) who could not make it work on such a scale.
- danShumway 3y agoPeople on HN in particular tend to oversimplify large projects. Trying to build and maintain an app the size of Twitter would be hard. Trying to tie it into a functional advertising network would be harder. HN just tends to be brightly cynical about complexity in general; in reality there would be very significant challenges (as Musk is discovering now). But do I buy that specifically Facebook could do it? Yeah, obviously they could. It's not at all surprising that Facebook could quickly launch a Twitter clone. This isn't like the "metaverse", Facebook already runs social networks that are larger and more complicated than Twitter is, and Threads looks to be highly tied into their existing infrastructure. I could not build a Twitter clone in my free time, but I also don't currently run Instagram.
- ulfw 3y agoThere's zero "trade secrets" (everyone knows how twitter works) and no technical secrets necessary. Threads is just instagram. It works and looks the same way. Instagram is photos with text, Threads is text with photos. The latter is not exactly rocket science to build when you already have built the former at scale and ran it successfully for years. And that's the genius of it!
- tentacleuno 3y agoHow does everyone know how Twitter works? Doesn't it use proprietary code?
- losthubble 3y agoWell they open sourced part of it, https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm and then I'm pretty sure Elon had a whiteboard session during his first days before firing everyone and had people explain it to him. Which he then posted on his twitter account. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593899029531803649?s=20 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593899029531803649?s=20
- bagels 3y agoThey have published a lot of blogs over the years, eg: https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastructure/2023/how-we-scaled-reads-on-the-twitter-users-database https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc...
- mrtksn 3y agoMy guess would be stuff like upcoming products, business connections, contract details, way of doing business etc. However I doubt that Musk has any grounds for claiming that "the most useless employees" who weren't even treated with dignity upon firing them would have transferred those to Meta illegally. IMHO this is just Musk freaking out that the next time Twitter doesn't work as expected or asks for money, people would have real alternative to move on. Reddit needs something similar.
- paxys 3y agoThe firing is irrelevant. Noncompetes are unenforceable. It would be the exact same outcome if all of them voluntarily decided to leave Twitter and join Meta the same day. You have to prove to a court that these employees had access to some proprietary Twitter IP which they took to Meta and used to build Threads, which is not happening.
- danans 3y agoI think they are pointing out the chutzpah more than the lack of legal basis.
- angry_moose 3y ago> ....former Twitter employees....continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets. I don't think I've ever seen anyone admit to major organizational failings like that. I haven't worked for a company in at least 15 years where every single bit of access I had wasn't revoked within minutes. When I last changed jobs in 2021 I watched the Outlook app on my phone. My boss walked me out of the building at 1:00pm, took my keycard, and the app access was revoked at 1:07pm.
- prvc 3y agoNot the new management's fault.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mlevit 3y agoI believe that's a reference to IP, not actual physical systems.
- blitzar 3y agoIts more distopian than that. The "trade secrets" are pieces of knowlege inside peoples brains. They are suing on the basis that someone somewhere said "when I was at twitter we used tabs not spaces in our code"