[jjallen]

How would a previous employer know what a former employee is telling their current employer about what they know from their former employer?

Not saying anything is right or wrong, just that when something is illegal doesn't mean it prevents that crime.

[josephg]

> How would a previous employer know what a former employee is telling their current employer...

They don't. What I learned while working for your company isn't your company's property any more. Good ideas almost always eventually spread in our industry. And I think thats a good thing for software as a whole!

You can protect your data, and your code. But you can't really stop someone quitting a job at your company, working somewhere else and reimplementing a software system that worked well. It might take years to do it, but probably not decades.

I honestly think this is a pretty good tradeoff. It means if you build some software, you have head start, but not an impenetrable wall. For someone to compete, it'll take a lot of time and money just to catch up with where you are today. So it'll be hard to do but possible. This leaves the door open for any incumbent to be outcompeted in the market if they stop doing good work.

And thats a good thing! Competition is painful, but it pushes us to make better products for our users. Ultimately thats better for everyone.

[devnullbrain]

>You can protect your data, and your code. But you can't really stop someone quitting a job at your company, working somewhere else and reimplementing a software system that worked well. It might take years to do it, but probably not decades.

I don't even think this case is undesirable. If we were welders, it would be absurd to be prevented from using a welding technique we learned on the job at a new employer. System design is just a technique.

[jen20]

If it were a genuinely innovative new technique, it should be patented, which will grant exclusivity for some period in exchange for it _not_ being a trade secret.

[jandrewrogers]

Patents have become effectively unenforceable in many domains. The retreat to trade secrets is a reaction to this. Eschewing patents in favor of trade secrets is a common strategy these days. Ironically, this was the situation patents were intended to prevent, were they enforceable.

[RajT88]

> What I learned while working for your company isn't your company's property any more. Good ideas almost always eventually spread in our industry.

You are only thinking about code. Imagine knowing all the dirty secrets about how your company screwed customers. I have seen employment contracts forbidding working for a customer, in addition to competitors and in addition to an NDA.

[josephg]

Again, that dirty laundry eventually being aired is a good thing for our industry. There need to be costs to being a scumbag, even if the cost is just to your reputation.

[RajT88]

Not saying it isn't; just that there's another angle outside of software.

The "Front Page" ethics test is probably the best one I've heard: "What would people think if what was being done was reported on the front page of the NY Times or other major news outlet?"

[jandrewrogers]

There is no reasonable way to definitively control this, though explicit theft of trade secrets between companies is prosecuted in practice and dangerous enough that ethical companies are careful about even the appearance of impropriety.

Where trade secrets really leak (in tech), in my experience, is engineer to engineer. A chat between friends over beers about some technical problem. It is nearly untraceable and it doesn’t involve anyone leaving their job.

As a fun example, database tech is buried in trade secret restrictions and has been for decades. There is a classic problem in cache replacement algorithms that has no solution in literature. Nonetheless, an astonishingly elegant solution exists — the kind that you can’t believe you never thought of it yourself after you learn it — that has been selectively passed around informally among practitioners for (at least) a decade or two. No one knows who invented it but it was likely developed at one of the old database research powerhouses like Oracle, IBM, et al that have severe trade secret regimes. A trade secret that leaks isn’t a trade secret, but there are enormous punitive consequences if anyone knows who leaked it.

This kind of trade secret leakage happens even under non-compete regimes and it is pretty common. When it happens, the probability of figuring out how it happened is very low. It has to be part of your risk model.

[runnerup]

How would any other signed document let "a previous employer know what a former employee is telling their current employer about what they know from their former employer?"

A non-compete agreement doesn't actually "prevent" an employee from working at another company any more than an NDA prevents an employee from divulging confidential trade secrets.

[InitialBP]

That's true of many illegal things. Trespassing is illegal, but people still put locks, gates, fences, etc on their property because people will still trespass if they want to. The purpose of the law is to dissuade people from doing it because there are consequences for that action.

If you're talking about trade secrets, I believe if there is evidence in the product/products that a former employees company is releasing that seems to be operating or working in a similar product they could gather publicly available evidence, hire a PI, and ultimately attempt to subpoena additional information if there is sufficient evidence that the employee is actually sharing trade secrets from a previous company.

[midoridensha]

As far as I'm concerned, if you can hold it in your head, it's probably not worthy of being protected as a trade secret, at least if we're talking about something technical like software and not a KFC recipe. Downloading a bunch of data like the Uber guy is obviously theft, but being able to remember, in general terms, how some software program worked doesn't seem protectable to me: there's no way you could really re-implement it the same way just from memory unless you have some truly superhuman memory skills. Any modern codebase is huge, the product of dozens of people or more, and not something one person can hope to remember well enough to make a real copy.

[xphos]

Yeah but than the person is liable and could be charged in that case

[shagie]

Example: Former Uber Executive Sentenced To 18 Months In Jail For Trade Secret Theft From Google https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/former-uber-executive-s...

> Anthony Scott Levandowski pleaded guilty and was sentenced today to 18 months in prison for trade secret theft related to Google’s self-driving car program, announced United States Attorney David L. Anderson and John F. Bennett, Special Agent in Charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Levandowski was also ordered to pay a $95,000 fine and $756,499.22 in restitution.

[jjallen]

This is an extreme example. This guy downloaded gigabytes of data from Google before he left. The vast majority of cases are not like this and empowers world never know what their former employees tell subsequent employers

[bushbaba]

That was straight up IP theft. Not hey Uber here’s how we solved XYZ problem at Google after 4 years of R&D digging.