[MertsA]

Would Nvidia the company want to engage in this? No. Would some middle manager involved in poaching this guy from the competitor want to do it? I have my suspicions. It takes two to tango and Nvidia didn't catch this themselves which raises some red flags. How was he hired? What kind of compensation was he able to negotiate? Was it well above the compensation Nvidia would ordinarily pay for an engineer of his level? How did he introduce the code into Nvidia's version control? Were there obvious red flags about the "development" pace that should have raised eyebrows during peer review?

I work at a big tech company and if I tried something similar, I'm pretty sure it would be caught internally. Even if I managed to pull it off, all it could realistically give me is a foot in the door. Some sketchy hiring manager isn't going to be able to just sweep some $500,000 signing bonus under the rug and $100k isn't unheard of for regular engineers here anyways. As far as compensation and promotion opportunities afterwards it stands little chance of mattering for that either. For the first few months nothing I did was even used performance reviews and it's a peer driven process to rate/promote engineers.

Combined that means that even if I wanted to do this, and I found a corrupt hiring manager that wanted to play ball, I'd have to sit on that IP for a few months after being hired, slowly introduce it into the codebase, alter it in response to peer review and to fit the new code base's coding styles, etc. In the end, that would prove useful for a grand total of one peer review cycle and then it's sink or swim on my own merits from that point forward.

All that to say, yes Nvidia doesn't want this kind of thing as a company, but there are still individuals who potentially stand to benefit and there's a lot of opportunities for Nvidia to catch this before it's accidentally shown on screen to the competitor it was stolen from this far down the line. I don't know much about Nvidia's corporate structure but it kinda seems like they're trying to avoid finding out about it rather than trying to actually prevent it.

[FirmwareBurner]

>Would some middle manager involved in poaching this guy from the competitor want to do it? I have my suspicions.

No company or manager I ever worked at, at both good and bad companies, would even think you'd be bringing stolen proprietary IP from your old job let alone allow something like this to happen under their nose with their knowledge.

They're far too afraid of IP lawsuits, as knowledge of the use of stolen IP can easily leak, and you then rating out that manager making them an accomplice, for anyone to allow for something like this to happen with their blessing. And plus, you never want to hire IP thieves, if they stole source code from their old job they'll steal from you as well.

>How was he hired?

Most likely Nvidia poached the guy on the premise he's gonna build form them something very similar to what he was working on at Valeo. The guy probably sold himself well to get the senior job at Nvidia but most likely knew he overpromised and would underdeliver, so to make his life easy at his new job, he took all the sourcecode and documents from his old job to use at is next job.

>How did he introduce the code into Nvidia's version control?

Well it's not like he was dumb enough to just dump in git all the stolen source code from Valeo with all the headers, variable names and copyright notices and nobody would notice. Most likely he kept the code on the laptop as an offline copy and only used it as inspiration for the code he wrote for Nvidia or maybe he even bluntly took Valeo's source code then pruned, redacted or renamed any and all references to Valeo and checked it in as Nvidia's project so nobody was the wiser that the code was not originally written by him.