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Without sounding controversial and having peers in Infosys/TCS since college days, I can attest that leaking design & implementation decisions between projects

Without sounding controversial and having peers in Infosys/TCS since college days, I can attest that leaking design & implementation decisions between projects is very common in consultancies. I have personally privy to one such story where choices made in one healthcare giant's systems were "modified/adapted" to another. IP issues galore, these should be red flags but sneak under the radar being a consultancy

neuronic 3y ago
To contextualize this, in my experience this doesn't happen as a result of some malicious conspiracy but rather as a natural outcome of working with various projects and exchanging with colleagues in various projects. For the consultancy it boils down to not reinventing the wheel, learning from others and sharing knowledge about what works and what doesn't. Typically, what is shared are anonymized generic design or cases and not actual code or design files though. Of course what is knowledge sharing and efficiency for consultants might simply boil down to IP theft for the affected companies. My question is rather how much of it is natural human social interaction and collaboration if you put dozens of people from dozens of projects into one room talking about a similar problem.
- firebirdn99 3y ago
  It's not necessarily consultants in these companies that are malicious. I find working with many to be honest, and deeply caring about their work. It's that some of the management in these companies are incentivized to engage in duplicitous behavior to gain clients one way or another. Working for a tech consultancy before, they do have clear lines to distinguish for legal reasons and make you take courses. For e.g., you can't give or receive gifts of any monetary value, etc. But management find other ways, to gain client's trust and affection. One way is to overwork the consultants, and other is to share information that is privy sometimes.
iamshs 3y ago
My Indian Engineering college had no course on ethics and nor were ethics mentioned even once. While Ethics was a mandatory course in my Masters abroad. Indian engineering colleges really need to start cleaning up the detritus, it is time to provide healthy base for the young ones. Once a culture builds up, the managers at consultancy will feel ashamed to cut loose on ethics even under pressure. Or not, but a start has to be made in this aspect.
- mikelovenotwar 3y ago
  Worked for TCS, such 'courses' were mandatory, however as with all of their training cheating was rife.
  - pooper 3y ago
    I have never worked for TCS but just want to put this in context. Training cheating is not just an "IT" department problem. previously on HN, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38432752 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38432752 Zenefits Software Helped Brokers Cheat On Licensing Process (buzzfeed.com)
- triceratops 3y ago
  People are taught "Don't steal" at age 4 or so. Revisiting that lesson in college isn't going to make a lick of difference. It's a problem of corporate culture and incentives.
  - dotnet00 3y ago
    Engineering ethics is quite a bit more than just "don't steal".
    - triceratops 3y ago
      This particular case involved stealing. Engineering ethics is knowing what's right or wrong when performing engineering work. Children develop a pretty decent sense of right and wrong. It isn't rocket science. A 22-year old ordered by their manager to falsify data in their first month on the job knows it's wrong. They aren't going to refuse because they took some course in college. Whether or not they do it is more likely a function of how prevalent that behavior is in the organization, how often it's caught, and how publicly it's punished.
      - GabeIsko 3y ago
        I think we should stop framing this as ethics. TCS tried to get the best outcome for their client. CSC decided the client should suffer because they didn't win the re-compete. That's basically retaliation. Also a Texas Jury deciding that an Indian company should give 210M to an American company? If you take a step back, none of this is about ethics. Now, with this kind of money and scrutiny you have to follow the letter of the law, whether it is productive or not. TCS should know better. But we can't pretend that this is about ethics.
axus 3y ago
In this case "source code and documentation" were copied, these are concrete written artifacts. I'm not bothered by people sharing things verbally and implementing to a blank file.
- srvmshr 3y ago
  In the case which I referred to being personally privy, a high-speed data bus of a rapid imaging system (which was a crowning advantage for the first) was 'adapted' over in a slightly different form. Personally, you could say "as long as they didn't Ctrl-C/V it is fine", but then implanting a winning feature to the competition product is a red flag to me. That databus didn't exist previously as a feature - and its addition was a innovation in rapidity. This happened in 1999-2001, so it isn't recent & won't affect any outcomes. But it goes on to say it can blunt a prior client company's competitive advantage.
  - GabrielTFS 3y ago
    It seems normal to me that if someone implements the same thing twice in a row they're gonna do it faster the second time. Though I don't know the specifics of your case (maybe they did copy-paste the original, who knows), it seems perfectly plausible that they did so without copying any code. To say that this always involves illegal copying of code in some way would imply that an employee is effectively forbidden from ever writing similar code in two different companies - are you supposed to be forbidden from re-using the experience you gained working for a company ?
    - srvmshr 3y ago
      > are you supposed to be forbidden from re-using the experience you gained working for a company ? No but adding implementations to competiting company's product based on the innovations seen in the first falls squarely under IP misuse (At the least, bypassing patent licensing etc.) Software domain would see acrimonious litigations cases based on mundane things like the rubber band scrolling (Apple vs. Samsung). Adding readout specific databus improves acquisition speeds by order of 2 or 3x - and that is not a trivial change which can be disregarded. Most times they've been misused since they were minor trade secrets not patents. There was no way to attempt litigation in this one without opening up certain parts of software ecosystem to legal scrutiny/comparison (which probably exposes more IP).
GabeIsko 3y ago
This wasn't just between projects - it was from one firm to another. So there is a conflict of interest; why would any gov. procure anything from anybody if a giant like Tata can swoop in and poach all your workers and steal your project? Personally, I think that any technical implementation details that does work for citizens should be public property and not commercial IP, but that's just me. It's not the world we live in.
- ClumsyPilot 3y ago
  That’s why governments should do more in house and rely less on consultancies. However in many cases of enter-rise software, everyone involved knows perfectly well that copying is happening. In which case there is nothing immoral ~ just a mismatch between elegant and actual reality.
  - GabeIsko 3y ago
    Yeah, I agree 100%. The only corollary is that I view a lot of settlements like this as much more protectionist. I thought that this was for a gov. bid and not an insurance conglomerate, but the principle is the same. DXC lost the bid, probably because they were doing a bad job. So they held the whole effort hostage and sued based on IP protections. And then the Texas court awarded the American company 210 Million dollars from the Indian company. In this case it is very straightforward legally if they copied documents over. You just can't do that, full stop. But I'm uncomfortable to say that this is an equitable relationship between all these companies, because it gives a level of protectionism to DXC to do a really poor job in delivery knowing that the American court system has their back if they lose on re-compete.
crowcroft 3y ago
When it comes to consultancies/agencies this is basically put forward as a feature, not a bug. If you're doing a multi million dollar project of course you would want to bring in 'experts' with 'prior experience in the problem space'. My experience of it is in advertising, look at something like GroupM. They intentionally make a set of agencies to act as different front doors into the group so they can make it look like there are no conflicts of interest. Then once work comes in the door it all gets serviced by the same shared resources. The 'front door' agencies of course promote as a centre of excellence with deep expertise etc. but you really don't need to read between the lines very much.
- jmspring 3y ago
  I think it goes one step further, the companies that employ these consultancies (including/especially healthcare) there are consistent patterns across companies in a given industry.
chasd00 3y ago
Check the contract (all of it) there may be something in there about sharing implementation with other clients.
akudha 3y ago
I wonder how it can apply to an individual - say I am developing a feature at my job today. Five years later, I am on a different job, but developing a similar feature for some other employer. I wonder how much of the two implementations that are apart by 5 years but done by the same person, would be similar (even after accounting for my own personal growth in terms of programming abilities)? What if I am a teacher who is creating quizzes and exercises? Or a graphic artist making illustrations from eerily similar requirements? I suppose this is an interesting question, not quite black and white? That said, don't these huge companies have armies of lawyers to protect their IP?
FireBeyond 3y ago
Yup. The only surprising thing here to me was that the lawsuit wasn't around TCS taking a customer's own source code and selling it back to them as a consulting product.

neuronic 3y ago

To contextualize this, in my experience this doesn't happen as a result of some malicious conspiracy but rather as a natural outcome of working with various projects and exchanging with colleagues in various projects. For the consultancy it boils down to not reinventing the wheel, learning from others and sharing knowledge about what works and what doesn't. Typically, what is shared are anonymized generic design or cases and not actual code or design files though. Of course what is knowledge sharing and efficiency for consultants might simply boil down to IP theft for the affected companies. My question is rather how much of it is natural human social interaction and collaboration if you put dozens of people from dozens of projects into one room talking about a similar problem.

firebirdn99 3y ago
It's not necessarily consultants in these companies that are malicious. I find working with many to be honest, and deeply caring about their work. It's that some of the management in these companies are incentivized to engage in duplicitous behavior to gain clients one way or another. Working for a tech consultancy before, they do have clear lines to distinguish for legal reasons and make you take courses. For e.g., you can't give or receive gifts of any monetary value, etc. But management find other ways, to gain client's trust and affection. One way is to overwork the consultants, and other is to share information that is privy sometimes.

iamshs 3y ago

My Indian Engineering college had no course on ethics and nor were ethics mentioned even once. While Ethics was a mandatory course in my Masters abroad. Indian engineering colleges really need to start cleaning up the detritus, it is time to provide healthy base for the young ones. Once a culture builds up, the managers at consultancy will feel ashamed to cut loose on ethics even under pressure. Or not, but a start has to be made in this aspect.

mikelovenotwar 3y ago
Worked for TCS, such 'courses' were mandatory, however as with all of their training cheating was rife.
- pooper 3y ago
  I have never worked for TCS but just want to put this in context. Training cheating is not just an "IT" department problem. previously on HN, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38432752 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38432752 Zenefits Software Helped Brokers Cheat On Licensing Process (buzzfeed.com)
triceratops 3y ago
People are taught "Don't steal" at age 4 or so. Revisiting that lesson in college isn't going to make a lick of difference. It's a problem of corporate culture and incentives.
- dotnet00 3y ago
  Engineering ethics is quite a bit more than just "don't steal".
  - triceratops 3y ago
    This particular case involved stealing. Engineering ethics is knowing what's right or wrong when performing engineering work. Children develop a pretty decent sense of right and wrong. It isn't rocket science. A 22-year old ordered by their manager to falsify data in their first month on the job knows it's wrong. They aren't going to refuse because they took some course in college. Whether or not they do it is more likely a function of how prevalent that behavior is in the organization, how often it's caught, and how publicly it's punished.
    - GabeIsko 3y ago
      I think we should stop framing this as ethics. TCS tried to get the best outcome for their client. CSC decided the client should suffer because they didn't win the re-compete. That's basically retaliation. Also a Texas Jury deciding that an Indian company should give 210M to an American company? If you take a step back, none of this is about ethics. Now, with this kind of money and scrutiny you have to follow the letter of the law, whether it is productive or not. TCS should know better. But we can't pretend that this is about ethics.

axus 3y ago

In this case "source code and documentation" were copied, these are concrete written artifacts. I'm not bothered by people sharing things verbally and implementing to a blank file.

srvmshr 3y ago
In the case which I referred to being personally privy, a high-speed data bus of a rapid imaging system (which was a crowning advantage for the first) was 'adapted' over in a slightly different form. Personally, you could say "as long as they didn't Ctrl-C/V it is fine", but then implanting a winning feature to the competition product is a red flag to me. That databus didn't exist previously as a feature - and its addition was a innovation in rapidity. This happened in 1999-2001, so it isn't recent & won't affect any outcomes. But it goes on to say it can blunt a prior client company's competitive advantage.
- GabrielTFS 3y ago
  It seems normal to me that if someone implements the same thing twice in a row they're gonna do it faster the second time. Though I don't know the specifics of your case (maybe they did copy-paste the original, who knows), it seems perfectly plausible that they did so without copying any code. To say that this always involves illegal copying of code in some way would imply that an employee is effectively forbidden from ever writing similar code in two different companies - are you supposed to be forbidden from re-using the experience you gained working for a company ?
  - srvmshr 3y ago
    > are you supposed to be forbidden from re-using the experience you gained working for a company ? No but adding implementations to competiting company's product based on the innovations seen in the first falls squarely under IP misuse (At the least, bypassing patent licensing etc.) Software domain would see acrimonious litigations cases based on mundane things like the rubber band scrolling (Apple vs. Samsung). Adding readout specific databus improves acquisition speeds by order of 2 or 3x - and that is not a trivial change which can be disregarded. Most times they've been misused since they were minor trade secrets not patents. There was no way to attempt litigation in this one without opening up certain parts of software ecosystem to legal scrutiny/comparison (which probably exposes more IP).

GabeIsko 3y ago

This wasn't just between projects - it was from one firm to another. So there is a conflict of interest; why would any gov. procure anything from anybody if a giant like Tata can swoop in and poach all your workers and steal your project? Personally, I think that any technical implementation details that does work for citizens should be public property and not commercial IP, but that's just me. It's not the world we live in.

ClumsyPilot 3y ago
That’s why governments should do more in house and rely less on consultancies. However in many cases of enter-rise software, everyone involved knows perfectly well that copying is happening. In which case there is nothing immoral ~ just a mismatch between elegant and actual reality.
- GabeIsko 3y ago
  Yeah, I agree 100%. The only corollary is that I view a lot of settlements like this as much more protectionist. I thought that this was for a gov. bid and not an insurance conglomerate, but the principle is the same. DXC lost the bid, probably because they were doing a bad job. So they held the whole effort hostage and sued based on IP protections. And then the Texas court awarded the American company 210 Million dollars from the Indian company. In this case it is very straightforward legally if they copied documents over. You just can't do that, full stop. But I'm uncomfortable to say that this is an equitable relationship between all these companies, because it gives a level of protectionism to DXC to do a really poor job in delivery knowing that the American court system has their back if they lose on re-compete.

crowcroft 3y ago

When it comes to consultancies/agencies this is basically put forward as a feature, not a bug. If you're doing a multi million dollar project of course you would want to bring in 'experts' with 'prior experience in the problem space'. My experience of it is in advertising, look at something like GroupM. They intentionally make a set of agencies to act as different front doors into the group so they can make it look like there are no conflicts of interest. Then once work comes in the door it all gets serviced by the same shared resources. The 'front door' agencies of course promote as a centre of excellence with deep expertise etc. but you really don't need to read between the lines very much.

jmspring 3y ago
I think it goes one step further, the companies that employ these consultancies (including/especially healthcare) there are consistent patterns across companies in a given industry.

chasd00 3y ago

Check the contract (all of it) there may be something in there about sharing implementation with other clients.

akudha 3y ago

I wonder how it can apply to an individual - say I am developing a feature at my job today. Five years later, I am on a different job, but developing a similar feature for some other employer. I wonder how much of the two implementations that are apart by 5 years but done by the same person, would be similar (even after accounting for my own personal growth in terms of programming abilities)? What if I am a teacher who is creating quizzes and exercises? Or a graphic artist making illustrations from eerily similar requirements? I suppose this is an interesting question, not quite black and white? That said, don't these huge companies have armies of lawyers to protect their IP?

FireBeyond 3y ago

Yup. The only surprising thing here to me was that the lawsuit wasn't around TCS taking a customer's own source code and selling it back to them as a consulting product.