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by ubernostrum
3341 days ago
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I don't see how trade secrets are analogous to a non-compete clause. California doesn't like non-competes, but most certainly does respect trade secrets. And Waymo isn't claiming that Levandowski is wrongly using skills or experience he picked up there; it's claiming he literally downloaded a bunch of internal documents on his way out the door, and handed them over to a competitor. |
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I think one of the crazy things about all this is that having files from a previous employer is not a smoking gun. I wouldn't be surprised that with the blurring or work and life boundaries that a significant portion of people on HN have files from a previous employer on their personal computers. I still to this day occasionally find emails and files from prior employers for whom I haven't worked for in almost a decade now, including employers in an industry I've long since left behind. When I encounter them, I just delete them andget on with my day. Still having these files is nothing malicious on my part. It was often work that followed me home or files emailed around to print while on a business trip or any number of completely non-malicious reasons. This also extends to private code repos on github (many engineers use the same github account for both personal work and professional work). Check your personal computer and email for files from a previous employer. Do you have zero files from your previous employers lying around accidentally?
Thus far discovery has found a single file on a personal computer of one former Waymo engineer and no files on Uber computers using the terms requested by Waymo in discovery. To me that suggests that Google does a pretty good job of keeping work on Google's infrastructure (probably because most code only is useful on their specialized infrastructure) and that the overwhelming majority of former Waymo engineers are honest people doing honest work. There is literally one and only one engineer whose conduct has been called into question and that is Levandowski. Yes, he's the head of it all, but if discovery using the terms Waymo turned up nothing on Uber's machines then the files likely never made it to Uber. At best the knowledge from those files was laundered through Levandowski's mind, but even then without his personal computer showing that he still has those files and he's opened them since leaving Google, it's reasonable to assume that any knowledge he's past along was knowledge he himself created, i.e. it's tacit knowledge earn through his many years of professional experience.
Google is bleeding engineers to Uber. Why I don't know. It could be bureaucracy at Google and the lack of bureaucracy at Uber or Uber just made a better offer. One thing for sure is that if I were a Google engineer I would fear the ability to change employers to Uber right now because Google is going after many former Waymo engineers and not just the one engineer they have evidence for. This means that these engineers have fewer prospects to shop around their skills. That's evil in my book and as bad as the wage fixing collusion between companies like Google, Apple, Palm, Pixar, etc. Self driving car engineers are worth a lot of money in the market right now and Google filing this lawsuit against not a single engineer accused of wrongdoing but many engineers none of which they have evidence against that are likely honest hardworking people trying to get their market value is evil IMHO. Google should be dealing with Levandowski arbitrage, not dragging other engineers into it that have nothing to do with what Levandowski did when he was at Google.