Why did reporters keep calling Levandowski an engineer? He's really not, at least not for quite a number of years.
Anyway, Levandowski was a lousy leader, and was really detrimental to Uber's ATG. He bloated ATG from fewer than 100 people to more than 2000 within less than a year, without paying the slightest attention to culture. As a result, the number of people grossly exceeded the quantity of work. Political infighting quickly became rampant. Chaos ensued. Morale nose dived. Worse yet, instead of aligning and uniting the teams in Pittsburg, he created a huge fight with the Pittsburg teams, so much so that Travis, then the CEO of Uber, had to fly to Pittsburg every few weeks to resolve the conflicts.
It's sickening to even think about what he did in Uber.
It's baffling to me how everyone seems to hate the guy and say he was a terrible leader, employee, and person, and yet companies seemed to have been valuing him like a diamond. How did that work? Is he just good at duping and persuading and sweet-talking people? Does he have some past accomplishments that were respectable? Does he have some insight into autonomous driving no one else has? Why would Google and Uber bet so much on this guy?
He was on the Berkeley team for the original DARPA Grand Challenge. Their team was notable for being a motorcycle while everyone else used a car, the complexity of using a motorcycle earned them big points with the higher-ups even though the bike didn't do very well on the course.
So if you were a CEO looking to hire a senior guy for autonomous vehicles, he was one of the most senior in years of experience, pretty much nobody was working on autonomous vehicles prior to the Grand Challenge.
Sure, but once it becomes clear that he doesn't fit in the culture and causes more issues than he solves, why does he keep getting promoted and his pay increased?
I suggest that wasn't as clear as you think it was to the right people (either through incompetence, ignorance, or bad leadership), or that if they did have some idea that he wasn't a great fit they were hoping that he would produce a miracle that would make all the pain worth it.
Coming in with wunderkind status gives you a lot of leeway with some people, and things need to be pretty bad before the people that hired you will admit that they made a mistake, hired the wrong person, and paid them way too much. Admitting such a mistake does some damage to your ego and reputation of hiring problem solvers. Plus, by many accounts he was producing decent results- after all, he's led some pretty famous projects, and most of the projects weren't regarded as failures, so why should he be regarded as a failure? Other than stealing IP and being a dick, he's not usually called a loser or a failure.
Because "results" matter more than culture. Just watch a TV series "Succession" to see how the upper echelons of people treat/think about ordinary engineers and senior engineer.
Never underestimate the damage an absentee boss with no skin in the game can cause to the boots on the ground. Out of sight, out of mind is all too real.
According to the book Autonomy, he was a pioneer in the field of self-driving car, and excelled at making things happen. That said, he was always controversial and ethically dubious even when he was in Google. As the org that he was in grew larger. And he certainly failed in large enough orgs, such as Uber.
It sounds like a weird case of the Peter principle - Levandowski might have been a good engineer, so good that he couldn't stay an engineer and had to try to climb up until he was directing the self-driving program. It sounds like he was worth a lot as an engineer, and worth negative dollars as an engineering director.
To his fairness, Levandowski knows how to move things forward in PoC stage. He made huge contribution in the early days of Google's self-driving car initiative, and Sebastian Thrun liked him so much that he negotiated an amazing bonus for Levandowski.
Was Levandowski primarily responsible for the greedy hiring and in-fighting, or was that Eric Meyhofer? Meyhofer pre-dated Levandowski and notably was involved in disabling safety systems prior to the death of Elaine Herzberg. I've personally seen evidence of heavy in-fighting as early as May 2015.
>It's sickening to even think about what he did in Uber.
Uber's leadership and corporate culture were toxic and ethically dubious long before Levandowski came along. It seems to me like he fit right in. No wonder Uber bet so much on that guy.
Can I ask the question, is this the “Bozo Effect” or the “bozo explosion” that Steve Jobs talked about? Bozos hire bozos so they then proliferate within an organisation, wreaking havoc?
The level of greed, hubris and stupidity of some people never ceases to amaze me.
Levandowski was paid a bonus of $120 million while at Google, which is more money than any reasonable person will need for several lifetimes. This was actually a running joke at Google (while I was still there) to describe $120M as "1 Levadownski". Like Sundar one year was described as earning "only 1.7 Levadownskis" (he got paid $200M one year).
Why someone would risk jail time doing something so clearly wrong (taking material trade secrets from an employer) for even more money is just staggering to me. Even if he escapes prison time the stress and cost of a protracted criminal trial is huge. The loss of reputation is likely permanent.
I get why some high fliers have big egos and they privatize their success (even when pure dumb luck can be a huge factor). This is the hubris part. Right or wrong, that belief in your own abilities is almost a prerequisite for disruption.
The interesting part is how he "cheats". Like he clearly went to efforts to cover his tracks. Those aren't the actions of someone who felt they didn't do something questionable. So at this point, it's not about the hubris of the individual, it's about being perceived as being gifted, intelligent, a visionary and so on.
Honestly it makes me glad when such charlatan have their almost inevitable fall from grace.
I don’t know details about his work at Google but it isn’t uncommon for people who have gotten caught criminally to have done plenty to push the envelope over the years, with actions going from ok, to aggressive, to sleazy, to unethical (but still legal), to unethical (possibly civil offenses), and eventually to criminal. It isn’t usually that someone turns overnight.
Again, I don’t know details here but if you see past corporate crime stories, people got rewarded on the way to the end, which served as positive reinforcement for them to think they are doing the right thing.
For example, the conflicts of interest — and eventual rewards — at 510 Systems were quite possibly a major positive reinforcement.
> it isn’t uncommon for people who have gotten caught criminally to have done plenty to push the envelope over the years
That's actually part of espionage 101- pressuring a person through each little step on the ladder so that they can get all the way up to straight-up criminal behavior without ever doing anything that much worse than they did the week before.
I'm not saying this is an incident of espionage, just that espionage folks have recognized what you pointed out, and basically made it a step by step formal process.
Yes. It's the reason why so many crimes are punished severely (e.g. think about how hard driving-under-the-influence is punished). If you did it enough to get caught, especially as part of an active investigation rather than being passively discovered, you probably did way more of it.
Check out other reports - he clearly was enabled by lary for a long time by letting him get away with anything (self-dealing, employee abuse, borderline illegal stuff, etc). Not surprising he felt invincible after this. Just like with social clusterfuck Lary bears at least part of the blame here.
The common denominator is Larry Page. He has great technical vision, but it's evident that he is an awful judge of character and a poor manager who was out of touch with what was really going on and unable to exert control over his reports. I was there when Eric Schmidt was CEO and don't recall any management issues. Larry takes over, and one of his first big things that happened was the G+ fiasco. Larry just sat back and watched that mess unfold. His whole tenure was marred by hiring sleazy execs like Gundotra, Levandowski, Fadell, and Rubin and letting them do whatever they wanted. Sundar is better, but he lacks the authenticity that Eric had. To be sure, there are lots of reasons not to like Eric, but he was easily the most effective CEO Google had in my mind.
> Honestly it makes me glad when such charlatan have their almost inevitable fall from grace.
"almost inevitable?" -- really?
Seems like most of them get away with it. That's what makes them so frustrating, and why it's such a big story when they do get punished (even inadequately).
But why didn’t anybody at Google stand up against him?
Levandowski is also responsible for perhaps the first incident of Google’s self-driving car causing a freeway crash, and he circulated a video of it to the team:
Levandowski wasn’t the only Chauffeur engineer to collect gobs of cash and run. The founders of Nuro headed out with $40m each. Chris Urmson and Bryan Salesky now run dueling start-ups.
What does accountability at Google even look like? Is it just too daunting to stand up and raise a flag?
I think it's just a scenario where once you are in the big leagues that becomes the group you compare yourself to. I don't think about the kind of comp c-suite people get besides sometimes just being boggled by the concept. But if I was making that kind of money I'm sure I'd be seeing other people making a bit more and trying to get there just the same.
But yeah I think that I would have the common sense to just bow out with just a few years of that comp and be happy, but the fact that I would be satisfied by that probably means I wouldn't go to the lengths that people like that go to get there in the first place.
And that includes the kind of psychotic back stabbing and self promotion, but also all the hard work required as well.
It would be good if corporate culture didn't make such a point of promoting and rewarding people with obvious personality disorders.
Even if you think the ethics are irrelevant - a reach on its own, but let's go there for the sake of argument - how often does the money thrown at these people generate lasting and reliable ROI?
It's weird walking away from 120 million but I think I might get what he was thinking. He was probably over confident with the tech, and thought it was close to roll out. He was also probably thinking the tech was worth billions. I bet Anthony felt he built the tech himself and he owned it. He probably wanted and felt like he deserved a bigger piece of the multi billon dollar self driving pie than just 120 million.
If you read through Autonomy by Lawrence Burns, the author states that Levandowski felt the project was losing focus & getting too bloated, and wanted to disrupt it with a Team Macintosh style parallel project that he would head.
It could've just been part of the big ego'd power struggle that occurred on the project and saw the exit of many early stage employees, but I also wonder if he had a point, looking back today at the stages the project went through. It's hard not to feel like they thought they were close to launch, only to hit some roadblocks and need to rebuild major chunks of it. Speculation. But they're a huge company with a product that is at risk of getting usurped at this point.
If he thought it was close to roll-out and worth billions, he's more a lucky manager than an actual engineer. Which makes his criminality far more understandable.
Much of the vision may have been his, but what he is accused of stealing is the work of 100s (1000s?) of engineers who worked to make those ideas a reality.
> Why someone would risk jail time doing something so clearly wrong (taking material trade secrets from an employer) for even more money
In particular 'for even more money'.
You are assuming that the motivating factor was money. People do all sorts of things when no money or financial gain is involved at all. Sometimes just to enjoy the pleasure of being aberrant. Take hacking as one example.
Yeah, it's conceivable that his motivation was to make self-driving vehicles a reality at all costs (to save lives or something), and Google wasn't moving fast enough for him.
That doesn't excuse stealing, but it might not be as simple as greed or hubris.
But his former employer is no different as Google blatantly steals IP themselves and gets caught in the process! See this popular HN thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18566929
You want to see him strung up for ripping off a company whose does the same thing and he probably witnessed and was taught to do it there(directly or indirectly).
Don't know why your original comment was down voted, but I'll tell you why I down voted this comment: the site rules say not to complain about downvotes. This isn't reddit, these types of comments only clutter the conversation. Plus, your original comment is only 9 minutes old, perhaps wait a bit longer before complaining about downvotes ;)
Since your first comment didn't get downvoted, it's likely because you're repeating the same comment multiple times. Repetition lowers signal/noise ratio, so please don't.
It may also be because your comments contain grand claims and high indignation without much information. That doesn't mean you're wrong, of course, but given that everyone's priors here are formed by past internet discussion, it does increase the likelihood, and comments that fit that description tend to get downvoted.
However, one of the ways prosecutor maintain a 95%+ conviction rate is to only pursue cases they are extremely confident they could win in court. And sure, just because someone loses in court or pleas out doesn't mean they are actually guilty, but it's the best system we have.
Well he appeared to take files from Google / Waymo's repo on the same day as he met with Uber about selling Otto (before Otto even existed). More importantly, Uber very explicitly paid (and handsomely so) for Levandowski's capacity (and a few others) to create lidar-- Uber allotted 20% of Otto golden handcuffs to building a lidar.
If he didn't actually deliver / use Google's files at Uber (I believe they actually may have found he didn't?), he was clearly trying to get the tech in his head and build a crib sheet for what was to come later.
In any case, today he paid $2m in bail and is wearing an ankle bracelet GPS monitor.
I don't believe this, but just to entertain the possibility that he is innocent, let's try and come up with some dystopian world where he could be:
Imagine all big-corp actually have a book or ledger of IoU's / tabs / etc so that any work for each other goes untaxed instead of reporting reciprocal work done. This would be a way to avoid paying taxes to the state. Once optimized, what's left? Avoid actually paying your employees, you feed the chicken ... but then you eat it: they pay their employees for a prolonged period of work, then they ask another company to seduce the employee in a crime, then you sue the employee (with or without a mock trial surrounding the second company), then the second company settles. If this happens mutually the money of the employees goes back to the employers. If just 2 companies are on the ledger this may become noticable, so larger cycles (A to B, B to C, C to D, D to A) spread over time and in a different order have the same effect.
A large part of what he made was paid before he went to Otto/Uber. He will be financially very well off for the rest of his life, unless he does stupid shit with the money.
> The max fine of $8m is tiny compared to what he made.
Restitution to injured parties is available for the charges here on top of fines, and the DoJ has also included a non-specific criminal forfeiture allegation against any property used in, intended to be used in, or directly or indirectly derived from the charged offenses.
So if he made anything (or deprived anyone of any value) from his crimes, he could pay that back on top of the fines, potentially.
He is also being sued. So at the end it’s going to be more then the $8m fine. This charge resulted from the judge at the civil action saying “If what is being said here is true then it would also be illegal so I’ll refer that aspect to the prosicutirs “
Google has special compensation structure for some startup-like projects designed to keep talent in the company instead of leaving and building their own company. After they hit (or were thought to hit) all milestones, self-driving unit was valued at 8B by independent assessment. As one of the leaders, Lewandowki’s share was 120M.
Also, they bought his startup (510 Systems) to bootstrap the self-driving car unit. It's possible at least some of that $120M was an earn-out from the acquisition.
I never read up much on his payouts until now, but it's extra baffling to me since I interviewed with the self driving car team back in 2015 and was told all the engineers had to start as contractors hired through an outside firm until they got budget approval to bring them on full time. It already seemed bizarre to me for such a high profile project at rich company, but seems especially indefensible now.
>>Levandowski was paid a bonus of $120 million while at Google, which is more money than any reasonable person will need for several lifetimes.
$120 Mil is about half after taxes. Or nothing, depending on the crowd Levandowski hang out with or wanted to join. Private jets, Aspen ranches etc etc cost a lot of money... IMO he felt he would get away with it and become a billionaire. Fame and billions might not let you enjoy your tens of millions.
Sure. But that’s an absurd response to the assertion that it’s “enough for any reasonable person for several lifetimes”. Sure, you could potentially burn $60 million on private jet service and an army of personal waitstaff. For that matter you could also literally burn $60 million cash in a fire. But most probably wouldn’t consider these “reasonable” behaviors.
I mean he was rubbing shoulders with SV giants worth tens of billions at the time. He probably felt like he could do better than paltry hundreds of
millions.
Is he worth that much though? Everyone seems to paint him as a genius, but is his value 5x the other engineers on the team? 10x? 100x? It seems like there are plenty of smart and talented people you could hire for your self-driving car initiative that are 1% his price. Or, flipping it around, if self-driving engineers are really worth $100MM+ then maybe they should band together and work for themselves.
It isn't uncommon for employees to sign over their rights over the intellectual property they develop using the company resources. The argument being those resources were a necessary component and the person was compensated for delivering that product. Some go even further to cover any work done off hours as well because the company's resources provide the knowledge necessary for that work, but that can be more of a grey area
> Levandowski was paid a bonus of $120 million while at Google, which is more money than any reasonable person will need for several lifetimes.
There is not and there should not be any hard cap on what is 'reasonable' in a lifetime. Maybe someone wants to make money so they can get their name on a wing of a hospital or fund their alma matter. Forget the 'good cause means it's ok' angle as well. Maybe you are ok living a particular way but that doesn't mean others are or that you are reasonable and they are not.
Also plenty of good comes out of the world (as well as bad) because of people's pursuit of money, fame etc. If everyone was just content with very little many things we enjoy today would not exist. And maybe that wouldn't matter to you (not you but 'you') but just the same I don't like sports but I recognize others do and find enjoyment in their lives (or video games).
"Theft of trade secrets" is how Silicon Valley was built.
Fairchild was "theft of trade secrets" from Shockley; Intel was "theft of trade secrets" from Fairchild. When Camenzind left Signetics and designed the 555 (under contract to Signetics), he was "using trade secrets" of Signetics; in today's legal environment, they could have just ordered him to stick around as an employee and work on a less risky project. MOSTek was built out of "trade secrets" of Motorola. Unix was only released under a source licensing agreement, and for decades the Lions book, the bible for Unix kernel engineering, was illegal and could not be printed legally, because it contained "trade secrets" (and copyrighted code!) of AT&T. (Or, rather, Western Electric.) Indeed, economists have published a number of papers arguing that that California's prohibitions on non-compete agreements and on employer ownership of private work product underpinned the 1970s–1990s shift from Boston to Silicon Valley.
So this movement toward resolving such conflicts in the courts, instead of by companies competing to out-innovate one another, is very troubling. Investors, and in this case Google upper management, are killing the goose that laid the golden egg; they want to shift power from engineers, who make things, to lawyers and investors, who specialize in getting paid for them.
This is probably a major factor in the widely-observed shift of the center of innovation from Silicon Valley to Shenzhen, where shanzhai ("theft of trade secrets") is a way of life.
I live in a poor country which is poor mostly because the established economic powers are able to strangle new centers of wealth creation in the cradle, using the government and laws. Don't let that happen in your country.
Engineers create wealth. Lawyers and investors just compete to privatize it.
> So this movement toward resolving such conflicts in the courts, instead of by companies competing to out-innovate one another, is very troubling.
A lot of the things you cite were actually fought out in the courts. Motorola sued MOS Technology [1]. AMD and Intel have been in constant legal battles since their inception. The complicated question of Unix ownership started the famous SCO-Linux litigation. This isn't anything new.
And Anthony Levandowski is one of the least sympathetic figures in the industry; virtually no story about people who worked for him has been a positive one. I have sympathy for ordinary senior engineers getting strangled by non-compete agreements. Not for Levandowski.
Do you think MOStek would have been able to survive in today's legal environment? I don't think so, and that's what worries me.
The SCO-Linux litigation wasn't complicated. It was just fraud on SCO's part, under copyright law that was well-established at the time. With the Google/Oracle precedent in place, SCO would probably win.
I agree that Levandowski, like weev, is profoundly unsympathetic, but we can't let that blind us to the precedents he is being used to set. If Levandowski wins his case, ordinary (and extraordinary) senior engineers will be safer from getting strangled by non-compete agreements; if he loses, they will be in more danger.
> Do you think MOStek would have been able to survive in today's legal environment? I don't think so, and that's what worries me.
What’s different about “today’s environment?” If anything patent rights are weaker today—back in 1976, there were no ex parte or inter partes reexams to challenge patents in the PTO. You had to challenge patent validity in district court, where the patent was accorded a presumption of validity and a high “clear and convincing” standard was necessary to overcome that presumption.
Looking briefly at the case history, it seems like the litigation with Motorola would have played out the same way today. Motorola had patents in the 6800 chip bus. As a result of the litigation, MOStek had to drop the 6501, which was socket compatible with the 6800. But the 6502 was a substantially different architecture internally, and was not socket compatible. (Moreover, that lawsuit settled when Motorola got the upper hand when it discovered that one of the MOStek’s engineers had taken confidential documents with him from Motorola. Taking confidential documents with you, which is what happened here, wasn’t okay back then either.)
As someone who grew up in Santa Cruz with parents and friends working in tech, I feel the need to point out that the "SCO" involved in the lawsuit wasn't the same people as the "SCO" that developed the tech - the rights to the name and the software were purchased by Caldera after (it seems, although I'm less confident about this part) all that was left was at Caldera were the lawyers and MBAs.
True, but the bit about interfaces is also not comparable between the two. There wasn't a lot of commonality between openserver and IBM (RedHat) Linux. It's not like the libraries on one system would run on the other. SCO's seminal allegation was that code was copied between the two, but they never produced evidence. Likely, because there was none. The case was eventually dropped when it was determined SCO couldn't even make a claim to begin with and the rightful copyright holder, Novell, stated they didn't believe SCOs claims. Then SCO went bankrupt and the whole situation just kind of quietly went away.
They did eventually show some “code”, namely signal.h and a couple of other similar files.
However, thanks to iBCS, it is actually possible to run SCO Unix binaries on Linux, and has been since last millennium. That's why interfaces like signal.h shouldn't be copyrightable: the goal of copyright Law is not to give SCO control over code their customers write.
Not quite. The case is still active (!) in the Federal court in Salt Lake City. The judge lifted the stay on the case on May 14, 2018. Since then, absolutely nothing has happened. But the case has not "gone away" so far as I can tell.
> The complicated question of Unix ownership started the famous SCO-Linux litigation. This isn't anything new.
Just a bit correction there. SCO-Linux litigation is pretty contemporary. Way back before then, there was the System-V vs BSD "Unix wars" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_wars )
SCO-Linux litigation was just the SCO assholes wanting to get a piece of the pie when they were dying out.
Unfortunately Sun won the System-V vs BSD "Unix wars", and then uni(x)laterally capitulated to AT&T.
The Day SunOS Died
"Bye, bye, SunOS 4.1.3!
ATT System V has replaced BSD.
You can cling to the standards of the industry
But only if you pay the right fee --
Only if you pay the right fee . . ."
For context, the guy who wrote "The Worst Job in the World" email was Michael Tiemann, one of "open source's great explainers." ;) Now he's pranking IBM executives by installing RedHat Enterprise Linux on their mainframes.
"The indictment alleges that in the months before his departure, Levandowski downloaded from secure Google repositories numerous engineering, manufacturing, and business files related to Google’s custom LiDAR and self-driving car technology. The files downloaded included circuit board schematics, instructions for installing and testing LiDAR, and an internal tracking document. The indictment also alleges that at the time he took the files, Levandowski was involved with two companies competing with Google in the self-driving space: Tyto LiDAR LLC and 280 Systems, Inc., the latter of which would become Ottomotto. Ottomotto acquired Tyto in May 2016, shortly after Uber Technologies, Inc. agreed to acquire Ottomotto and hire Levandowski."
This is definitely not how Silicon Valley was built. People moved around (and still do) with the knowledge in their heads, not with proprietary data and backroom deals.
The old school equivalent would be to rent a U-Haul on your last day at work and fill it with a dozen file drawers full of confidential docs (that you’ve been photocopying for weeks in plain sight) from your boss’ office...
Actually in the old days it was being given a backup tape in the parking lot in exchange for an envelope of money.
I’m referring to the Cadence vs Avanti trade secret theft in the early 2000s. This was in the EDA (Electronic Design automation, electrical engineering software) industry. See this article for a very brief review of the 6 years of legal wrangling.
>Remember that "theft of trade secrets" is how Silicon Valley was built. Fairchild was "theft of trade secrets" from Shockley; Intel was "theft of trade secrets" from Fairchild. When Camenzind left Signetics and designed the 555 (under contract to Signetics), he was "using trade secrets" of Signetics
Do you have proof of this? Claiming all those companies were founded by people who stole confidential documentation from their previous employers is a pretty bold claim to make without evidence.
They were the key engineers of those companies, which were (in the first two cases) the only ones in the industry at the time; their heads contained nothing but (what today we would call) "trade secrets".
> If Levandowski had only taken the secrets that were in his head, he would have been fine.
Kai-Fu Lee wasn't. Evan Brown wasn't (edited to clarify: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/08/12/alcatel_owns_us_emp...). Don't be so quick to fall prey to the Just World Fallacy, assuming that bad precedents will never be applied against good people.
Remember, too, that the founders of Fairchild and of Intel had lots of knowledge in their heads that had been discovered by their left-behind coworkers at Shockley and Fairchild. They probably had documents in their homes — by accident if nothing else, if the history of recovered source code printouts from that epoch is anything to go by — but because there was no prosecution to find out about it, we'll probably never know.
Microsoft sued Google in civil court over a non-compete agreement, not theft. The settlement allowed Lee to keep his job, so other than five months of anxiety I'm not sure how he wasn't "fine". Levandowski is being charged with 33 counts in a criminal indictment. These cases are not even in the same ballpark.
> Evan Brown wasn't.
I don't know who that is, and there are apparently too many notable people named "Evan Brown" for me to figure it out without more context.
That’s still a huge difference. Someone having printed flow control diagrams, knowledge of what did and didn’t work, and the list of packages and tools used in a spreadsheet is very different ripping the entire source code.
certainly. but the logical conclusion redefines 'severance' to mean leaving my head at the door on the way out.
trying to clearly define what exactly are ideas owned by the employer has to fail on principle. especially when you consider that even a new grad is being hired with the expectation that they are bringing ideas and techniques to bear that they developed someplace else.
> but the logical conclusion redefines 'severance' to mean leaving my head at the door on the way out.
Or just leaving the industry, or lifetime employment with a single company — hardly unthinkable; in fact, it was the rule in the US within living memory, and I've worked at companies where the majority of engineers were lifers. This would be a very favorable outcome for investors in your company: they get the fruits of your million-dollar ideas for the rest of your life, and they only have to pay you a somewhat-below-market salary, since you have no negotiating power to demand a higher one. It's not such a favorable outcome for engineers, or for hacking as a vocation or programming as a profession.
It's a favorable outcome for people who want stability. There is huge value in knowing that you're not going to get fired unless you do something actively malicious.
Some people aren't interested in climbing, have poor interviewing skills, and don't want to deal with the cognitive overhead of learning a different company's tech stack every two years. Plus, most companies tie vacation time to seniority, so being able to stay at a company for 10+ years means you'll get to have four weeks of vacation every year, while people who switch jobs every two years will always be stuck at two.
I wasn't talking about a situation where the company can't fire you. I was talking about a situation where you can't quit the company. If the company has a credible legal case against any prior employee who works for a competitor, then firing you ends your career. That makes your job less secure, not more.
If I work in medical x-ray machines, say, when I quit, I don't go to another medical x-ray company. I can still work in embedded systems, though - it's a really big world out there.
Your argument works a bit better for Shockley and Fairchild, because semiconductors was not a big world then. And it perhaps works for Levandowski today, because self-driving cars skills aren't super portable to other industries. I could see some market for his skills in more general robotics, though.
You are saying it like having just 4 weeks of paid holidays is a great achievement.
I don’t want to disillude you, but when I was very, very junior in EU 5-6 weeks were taken for granted from the first day of work, and in one case I had 7 weeks. Now I an not a permanent anymore, I don’t have any paid holidays whatsoever and I’m much, much happier.
Also, people who change jobs every two years can get unpaid six-month vacations every two years. The idea that the benefit of working at a company for a long time is that you can not work is terribly amusing to me.
You’re confusing trade secrets with non-competes. A trade secret is specific information, disclosed to employees under a duty of confidentiality, which is misappropriated (usually by a breach of the confidentiality duty), and which is not part of the employee’s general knowledge and experience. I’ve never heard, for example, that anyone at Fairchild misappropriated what might be called a trade secret of Shockley.
That is, on the other hand, what this case is about. Levandowski is accused of taking large numbers of confidential and proprietary documents, not just the general knowledge in his head. That’s certainly not how Silicon Valley was built.
Lawyers and investors provide pathways to the market that allow engineers to build things that have actual value. The idea that engineers like you and I hold all of the tools and training to "create wealth" is too dismissive of those professions.
Yes, the truth is more nuanced: production is a collective endeavor that requires knowledge, energy, raw materials, labor, and capital equipment. Here in Argentina, the government is still in the hands of landowners, who control the raw materials, just like in the medieval feudal system. The US, on the other hand, is largely run by investors, whose access to capital to invest in capital equipment was the crucial limiting resource in the 19th and 20th centuries.
The difference is that capital equipment is not the crucial limiting resource for programming, or even for building self-driving cars.
Consider a steelworker: perhaps he earns US$80,000 a year, but he is operating two million dollars' worth of steel mill. (More accurately, a hundred steelworkers are collectively operating a steel mill worth two hundred million dollars.) If he (and his coworkers) were to save 10% of their salaries, they could build their own steel mill after 250 years. It's understandable that in such a situation most of the bargaining power is with the investor.
Contrast that with our situation. A typical salary in our profession is US$150,000 per year. A nice laptop costs US$2000. A nice rackmount server, even if you can't be satisfied with a VPS, might cost US$500. (And I used to host my website on dialup in my house, and cable modem connections today are a hundred times faster than colocated data-center bandwidth was 20 years ago.) This is two months of savings, not 250 years. So we have a lot more bargaining power, and that's one reason we're able to demand so much more money than the steelworker.
This is a terrible situation for investors, or for that matter managers of big companies. They are left without bargaining power through ownership of capital goods; they therefore struggle to recapture that bargaining power by lobbying, litigation, and of course illegal wage-fixing conspiracies like the one Google was involved in a few years ago. Aside from its dismal implications for us as individuals, this development will discourage talented young people from going into engineering — law or management will be more lucrative.
Law is zero-sum: a case that one lawyer loses, another wins. Management is largely zero-sum, a popularity-contest game of corporate politics to obtain control over more of the company's short-term fixed pool of resources. Engineering is positive-sum: what one engineer produces, another can buiild off of.
So what does a country look like when its talented young people choose law or management over science, engineering, or medicine? René Favaloro commits suicide; young people idolize Maradona rather than Einstein, and play football rather than experimenting with chemistry sets or building ham radios; its nuclear fusion program is a fraud; it imports its computers from China, then does the last assembly step locally, in order to capture the windfall value of government protectionist measures designed to develop local industry; the talented young people who do go into science or engineering (including programming) usually emigrate, often to a country with better universities. Argentina has been this way for a century or more, and the US is starting to become this way, too.
But it's worth pointing out that, even in the middle of the 20th century, the US wasn't that way, and that's how Silicon Valley was able to exist in the first place.
I've been fortunate to know good lawyers that have made my life easier, reduced the stress of dealing with hard situations. I've seen investors take chances on long shots that succeed, and wouldn't have had any hope without that investor help. I've had excellent managers (and some not so good) that championed my professional development and growth and took care of details that made it easier for me to focus on my core work. You're pointing at the worst parts of things and using those extremes to say they're not necessary. I see this view a lot on HN: Engineer == Good because they produce easily tangible output, and those with less tangible output == Bad.
These professions with less tangible output aren't zero sum. They're the necessary infrastructure of massive organizations, large projects, civilization itself. Calling them zero sum is sort of like saying pipes are zero sum because they just take water from one place and put it in another. It's a bit more complex than that.
Society has to have rules. Society is big, there are lots of domains. There need to be experts that understand those rules and help lay-folk navigate them. That's lawyers. Some are awful, do bad things, make things worse, we produce more of them than necessary, but civilization doesn't really work without them.
Similarly, the economy is huge. Allocation of capital requires people to oversee that process. There's your investors. Many are awful and greedy, but it's a necessary process unless/until we find more efficient ways of allocating capital-- And while programming itself is not capital intensive from the equipment perspective, it is from the "human capital" perspective. The burn rates of many startups will show just how intensive. Again, investors are "plumbing". They're positive sum because the entire system, which is positive sum, requires them to function.
Large projects have lots of moving pieces. At some scales, it's near impossible for a single person to have it all in their head, much less focus on a full time programming job while they're at it. All the moving pieces require coordination. Integration into the non-programming parts of a company require coordination. Managers do this. Plenty are mediocre at it. Others play power games. Some make things worse. But overall the system wouldn't function without them.
Easy to say, but apparently harder to respond with any substance. Not unlike your unsupported claims of zero sum status to begin with-- stated but not supported by any decent argumentation.
If for example, your government were to ban import of these computers from other countries, say, for a few years. Do you think that would have any effect on the economy of the country? Do you think this would spur curiosity where the energy spent on idolizing Maradona is instead focused on developing the expertise needed to develop computers locally?
It would spur smuggling, and anyone who's trying to manufacture things locally that contain computers would have to move their manufacturing offshore, maybe to Uruguay. For a while I worked at Satellogic; they manufacture their satellites in Uruguay because, during the currency-exchange controls a few years ago, it was impossible to reliably import the necessary components into Argentina. (Those controls are coming back, most likely, in December.)
Also, anyone who wants to do deep-learning research would have to go overseas, unless paying the inflated rates AWS charges was ⓐ feasible in practice (i.e., Argentine banks still allow you to pay Amazon with your credit cards, and ⓑ not so expensive it sinks your research project.
More broadly, what you're suggesting is called "import-substitution industrialization", and it was the mainstream economic policy throughout Latin America during most of the 20th century. By contrast, during that time, most Asian countries focused on "export-oriented industrialization". This is the major reason why countries like Japan, Korea, and Taiwan are roughly as rich as the US, while Latin America has become relatively poorer and poorer. I consider import-substitution industrialization a failed experiment, like Communism.
You don't need a market to build things of value. The wealth creation happens with or without navigating laws. That's not true of capturing some of that wealth.
BTW, calling "investors" a "profession" is profoundly insulting to the professions. A profession — canonically, law, medicine, academia, or the clergy — is a vocation that answers to a higher ideal than mere self-interest and obedience. Investors are just people who bought things.
I’m hardly one to defend finance generally, but I’m thankful to my investors that allowed me to create my startup. Finance greases wheels, and the amount of VC funding is a big reason why Silicon Valley has been so successful.
There's an element of truth in what you are saying. But in this case Lewendowski didn't build the stolen technology. He misappropriated the work of other engineers at Google.
It would be one thing if he just left with his own work. That would be more understandable.
I agree that Levandowski didn't invent everything he "stole", but this is not significant from the point of view of legal precedent — whether you write code at work or your coworker writes the code, the law considers it to belong to your employer — and some of the cases I mentioned above also included the departure of executives, not just engineers.
> this is not significant from the point of view of legal precedent
It's incredibly significant. Those cases you mentioned above were civil suites; this is a criminal charge brought by prosecutors. Totally different ball game.
Previously you dismissed law as zero sum, but here you appeal to it to bolster a part of your argument, thereby attributing value to it. Regardless of some of it's ugliness end excesses, if it's a system that can help steer a course through difficult situations regarding the rules of society then it is adding value.
I wasn't dismissing law as zero sum. Salary negotiation is zero-sum too; that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. But you shouldn't organize your career around it.
If it's worth doing, and in the case of Law necessary to a functioning society, then if you regard society as positive sum then things that are necessary for it to function are part of what makes it positive sum. You can't strip them away, they don't exist on their own, they are part of the system itself, they exist in a context, and discarding that context over simplifies to the point of the absurd. It's like saying sanitation is positive sum but one of things that is necessary to make it work, proper plumbing, is not positive sum. You can't strip off the necessary pieces of something like that and regard them as things in and of themselves.
Salary negotiation is an excellent example of your blinders in this. I suppose you see it as the employee gets X dollar, employer loses X dollars, so it must be zero-sum. That get's too hung up on the easily tangible piece of the transaction and ignores the more complex context in which the negotiations take place. In truth, both employee & employer get something out of it. Obviously the employee gets a better salary. The employer, by providing the employee with the things that help make them a satisfied worker, gets higher productivity than otherwise, and perhaps a higher guarantee that the employee will stick around. Both win. They are cooperating, literally part of what game theory, from where the entire concept of zero sum comes, regards as integral to many positive sum outcomes.
Can we please stop with this false equivalence? This guy ripped servers worth of company information, he didn’t walk out the door with a bunch ideas in his head.
There's some evidence that the industrial boom in Germany in the 1800's came about because Germany did not have copyright laws. People copied, printed and disseminated manuals on everything.
I've been working on open source projects (D programming language) for 20 years now. There's little evidence that making code free of copyright, license, and patent restrictions has impeded progress and innovation at all. In fact, there's a great flowering of programming languages going on.
And yet the largest D codebases (which are also the ones that make companies money) are the proprietary ones which give companies a competitive edge. It's hard to imagine there's no innovation going on there.
> "Theft of trade secrets" is how Silicon Valley was built.
And blatant copyright violation is a common tool for up-and-coming countries (e.g. the US in the past) to jumpstart their creative sector. But at some point, they all begin to protect their own work (nowadays the US is among the fiercest proponents of a strong copyright).
You have the “protecting their work” part backwards. You and I agree that copyright stops people from working. So clearly the way to protect your work is to not be at risk of someone using copyright to stop your work; for example, you can protect your work by not having a copyright law. Lots of people in China have work because copyright is not strongly enforced, and their work is in danger if copyright starts being enforced more strongly.
You say “jumpstart their creative sector”, but protection from copyright is just as important to allow an existing “creative sector” to survive.
Shanzhai in China will probably end, just like democracy in America. But we can hope that the flowers of human creativity and liberty will not die forever; somewhere else soon, they will sprout anew.
In Germany there's an old idiom of it being the "country of poets and thinkers", and when going back to its origins it wasn't primarily about Goethe and Kant, Germans, being exemplary intellectuals (as it is understood today), but about the lack of copyright enabling cheap reproduction, so just about everybody had poets and thinkers (no matter the nationality) on their bookshelf (when compared to countries with copyright such as Great Britain).
As cheap reproduction is an prerequisite for copyrightable artifacts (don't want to spend too much on creating copies after all), the first high value product in that space is reproduction. Once that infrastructure exists and running it becomes a bottom feeder (everybody can run a printing press), locking in artifacts and thereby recreating scarcity is more lucrative. And that's done through copyright.
Workers (such as the "lots of people in China") rarely enter the picture, it's about who owns the means of production of the highest value goods.
(side note: I'm not a fan of that scheme, but it seems rather inevitable given the incentives)
Sybase’s database code is doing quite well, in its perfectly-legal descendant, Microsoft SQL Server (Microsoft partnered with Sybase—and Ashton-Tate—on porting Sybase’s software to OS/2 in a deal that included Microsoft getting exclusive rights to make the database on x86 shortly after its first release, and when the deal ended Microsoft kept the rights to continue developing and marketing the database, though Sybase was then also allowed to enter the x86 market.)
> "Theft of trade secrets" is how Silicon Valley was built.
However something was "built" doesn't mean that those practices are ethical or should be continued, or be imitated by others trying to catch up to that thing.
For (an extreme) example, many countries were built on the massacre of indigenous peoples. Most of them have stopped doing that now.
Also possibly because it's a lot more difficult to cover these things up nowadays (but doesn't stop people trying; cf. Bolsonaro's attitude to indigenous people or denying flu vaccine to detained migrants on the US border.)
I don't think those guys stole trade secret as much as they were the trade secret. They were just experts in the area and could recreate it. Thats different than outright stealing documents.
Would it be wrong to claim that sales, investors, and lawyers now generate more value than engineers? The market seems to reflect this in salary allocation
As I explained in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20813333, the division of spoils from a collective endeavor is largely a result of social norms and bargaining power, not disinterested justice.
And the examples I gave went to court and, if I'm not mistaken, in both the companies were not allowed to continue to use their reverse engineered tech in their products.
Corona and Handwell did not engage in reverse engineering. They copied BIOS source code that IBM released publicly (but not under a license than permitted them to do that). I'm not familiar with Eagle software.
VTech did their reverse engineering properly and the courts sided with them. You might be thinking of Franklin Computer which directly copied Apple's software and did lose in court.
> I live in a poor country which is poor mostly because the established economic powers are able to strangle new centers of wealth creation in the cradle, using the government and laws. Don't let that happen in your country.
Is there any country in the world that still prioritizes freedom over having a massive regulatory state? It would surprise me.
Governments do not prioritize the freedom of their subjects; it's contrary to the incentives of everyone in the government. People win freedom by limiting the powers governments have over them.
Edit: looks like we've had to ask you this a bunch of times before. Continuing to violate the site guidelines will get your account banned, so would you mind reviewing them and using HN as intended? We'd be grateful.
The history of the US labor movement is not a history of American workers struggling hand in hand with the government against large employers like Peabody, GM, and Pullman. Rather, it is a history of American workers struggling against large employers who were backed by the government: police, imprisonment, and in some cases even military actions were used against strikers. The Post Office helped out Pullman by putting a mail parcel on each Pullman car so that striking would become a federal crime.
American workers gained workplace protections through unions and the threat of a communist revolution, which forced the government to relinquish the use of its coercive powers against strikers. Only later did (limited) workplace protections become law.
When I lived in the US, I thought like you do. Now I've seen the other side of the coin.
> American workers gained workplace protections through unions and the threat of a communist revolution, which forced the government to relinquish the use of its coercive powers against strikers
And gun battles[1][2][3][4][5]. But now we just commemorate by buying mattress on sale on Labor Days.
This is just an absurd statement. Do you really think that somone is sitting in some cubical thinking, “Geez, how can I regulate purchase of ballpoint pens?” or anything else? That’s not how laws and regulations come about.
I really wish someone would point to an example where any “freedom stealing” law in a democracy was the came from a bureaucrat rather than outside lobbyists. Because the way this common claptrap implies that somewhere there’s a big board where there’s a monthly quota on new regulations and laws, or there’s some other personal incentive.
Responding to the technical merits of a 12 point font:
From what I remember as a high school yearbook editor, 12 point is standard text font size. (Yes, I know MS Word popularized 10 point.) Failing to specify a minimum legible font size would allow someone to print labels that were illegible thus defeating the purpose of disclosures, while maintaining technical compliance. It is an unreasonable expectation that people when purchasing food products at a grocery store to carry a 200x microscope. Given that you want to ensure legibility, I would certainly hope that a regulation would exist that specified what was legible was for say 90+% of the sighted population, and was still accessible to technological pocket readers for the blind.
In a related example, the FDA respecified nutrition labels due to lobbying about its illegibility and confusing layout. Now it’s larger, high constraint, and has simpler headings around total sugar. I remember when they changed, and it was due to successful lobbying from consumer, health, and senior citizen advocates. You can read about the history of nutrition labeling at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK209859/
Now to respond to the point that bureaucrats are incentivized to minimize freedom. What freedom is being minimized? The freedom to deceive consumers? The freedom to obscure? These aren’t really freedoms in the public interest.
More importantly, you even conceded that the regulation was started by lobbyists, when the original argument was the a bureaucrat was being “incentivized” to steal Freedom(tm) from the populace.
Laws aren’t just vague ideas. They’re technical specifications. Sometimes these specifications are at odds with each other. Sometimes they’re over broad, or ineffective at achieving the original goal. Sometimes they’re simple regulatory capture, (Barber and hairdresser licensure does little to protect the public, but limits the number of practitioners. Same with revoking barber licenses for felons. But do you know who is the biggest supporter of cosmetology licenses? Cosmetologists.) Even the regulators know this, but simultaneously are powerless do anything about it, as they are not the ones who pass the laws. For instance, SF Planning commission famously posted this video about trying to open a restaurant in San Francisco:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOreHYVTHGA
There is more evidence that police have ticket quotas than there is that bureaucrats have regulation quotas. (Show me a beat cop that still has his job after refusing to write any tickets, but rather simply uses his professional discretion to give verbal warnings.)
>There is more evidence that police have ticket quotas than there is that bureaucrats have regulation quotas.
Yes, it would not make sense that there are requirements to produce impacts that aren’t publicly noticeable, particularly when there are complaints of scarce resources.
Regardless, people have bosses and work multiplies. Maybe no one has no idea what they are doing, but someone has to have some self reflection that it is harmful.
> but someone has to have some self reflection that it is harmful.
I emphatically reject that notion, both from the perspective that that regulations and regulatory enforcement are intrinsically harmful, and from the perspective that self reflection of enforcers demoralizes them. Quite the contrary, people self deceive themselves all the time. No one ever the bad guy in their own story.
Sure. Maybe someone sometime gets fails to rationalize their actions for a while, and quit, but they are by far the exception, because if they weren't you'd have high turn over and an inability to recruit replacements. Then, even under those circumstances you'd eventually end up with self selected, self perpetuating group. That's just survivorship.
Many or most adults in the U.S. operate at the level of what we expect of children, but not what we expect of adults.
I only specify the U.S. because it's what I know directly.
(I suspect European adults overall are better socialized to behave in an adult way, but are not necessarily actually any wiser than American adults. Just on average. There is an enormous variation from person to person.)
edit: I feel like this needs an example. I'm not saying American adults are incompetent at their jobs, for example. I'm saying they hold childish beliefs, like believing in Santa Claus, but not that one in particular. In other words, they lack intellectual hygiene. Another good example is what came up earlier in the thread: people rationalizing their bad actions so that they are not bad in their own "story."
While obviously I don't agree with the comment you're responding to (cf. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20813149), I wanted to ask you if there's a way I could have phrased the comment it was responding to to be less inflammatory. I didn't anticipate that it would provoke such responses, and I wonder if there's a way to avoid it other than just silence.
You are asking Dan, but answering from the bleachers: I think it's mostly just the length. If you write a short and direct comment that people are likely to disagree with, you invite short, direct and disagreeable answers. If instead your 'meatier' response to 'psychometry' (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20813149) had been part of the original, I think the responses might have been higher quality as well. It's not that short and direct comments are inherently bad, just that as early responses they can set a tone that discourages productive conversation. In any case, I appreciate your opinions and would be disappointed if you revert to silence.
Sorry I didn't see this earlier; am traveling this week and less on top of things. Are you asking about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20812948? I think the trouble was that it admits too many interpretations, some of which (e.g. "dumb ideological boilerplate") are provocative, and users have a strong tendency to leap to a provocative interpretation if one is open. Or rather, probably every possible interpretation of your comment lands with some readers, but the ones who hear the provocative interpretation have a stronger tendency be provoked into replying—often in a fashion that is nastier than the original perceived provocation, because they feel like you "started it".
Many readers are locked and loaded for such responses to begin with, and since firing back provides a certain release, they don't tend to scrutinize the text they're reacting to very closely to see if it really does say what they're reacting to, or what other interpretations there might be. The HN guidelines specifically ask users to do the latter ("Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."), but that requires a slower reflective process than is available in the locked-and-loaded case.
This is compatible with what nkurz said, because shorter comments admit of more interpretations. It also implies a mitigation that, in practice, seems to work: include disambiguating information to rule out provocative interpretations. The more provocative a possible interpretation is, the more flame retardant you probably need to pack with your message. This sucks, because it makes you responsible for deflecting things you don't mean, which can be a tedious and political way to communicate. In practice, though, if you really aren't issuing a provocation (e.g. dumb ideological boilerplate), it often suffices to share more of your thought process, especially anything unusual or unpredictable about it, and that tends to make for a more interesting comment too.
A reliving Letter is document that your employer must (effectively) provide so you can resign and work for some one else, they can hold you hostage.
Bond in this term refers to "An employment bond contains a clause which requires the employee to serve the employer compulsorily for a specific period of time or else refund the amount specified as bond value."
Basically an indentured servant. A friend of mine who was head of UNI described it as "horrific".
UNI is a global union so they also work with textile workers in poor countries so describing working practices for professionals in India as "horrific" shows how bad it is.
OK, thanks, this is interesting. I'm learning something.
What is the enforcement mechanism for the relieving letter? Like, what stops someone from getting a new job without having a relieving letter from the prior employer?
Is this common in India for engineers?
You said the US does ask for relieving letters but I think from context you mean "at least the US doesn't ask for relieving letters." Right?
As an American, it makes me think of people who would charge 7(?) years of labor on a farm in exchange for passage to America in the 18th century. Sounds like a great deal to me!
People generally don't enter into agreements unless it's beneficial for both parties.
I used to work for Anthony at 510 systems. He tried to hire me for Otto as well. Watching this whole thing unfold from, obscure story in 2011 to the Waymo Vs. Uber trial to federal charges and national news is rather surreal. Anthony is one of the most creative, energetic thinkers I've ever encountered. If he stopped taking shortcuts he'd probably be the next Jobs or Musk.
That's tragic and awful. I think calling this a "shortcut" though is misleading, at least from what the times is reporting here.
It's one thing to own your own brain, it's another take 14K files, including circuit board designs and lidar designs. It's yet another to start using them at new-co that is a direct competitor to old-co. I'm by no means an IP fanatic, but that really does cross over to theft in my mind. But, on balance, the very specific details really matter here, so we'll see...
Taking PCB design files and using them at a competing company absolutely is IP theft. I'm honestly surprised anyone would think they could even get away with this; the old company just has to get their hands on one of the competitor's units and open it up and look at it.
> Taking PCB design files and using them at a competing company absolutely is IP theft. I'm honestly surprised anyone would think they could even get away with this; the old company just has to get their hands on one of the competitor's units and open it up and look at it.
I am not a Google employee but my understanding is that the biggest fear is not that Anthony Levandowski stole all the stuff but that Uber or another unscrupulous company would race ahead with inadequate self-driving causing a backlash that would bring down a legislative ban hammer on everyone, including Waymo. I think that is the real danger here.
Personally, I don't want Anthony Levandowski in prison. I just want him or people like him to not be able to work on self-driving cars.
I want self-driving cars to arrive and will gladly campaign to ban humans from being able to drive on public road when that day arrives.
A corporation (Google) who steals IP themselves. They steal from big fish to the little dreamers they inspired and such is well documented. See this popular HN thread... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18566929
I use to feel bad for Google and wanted this thief to face justice. But umm he's just doing what he witnessed and was taught(told) to do while working for the big G.
I have no idea about this guy, but in my experience, people like this always seem to be pleasant, creative types on the outside. Every now and then in conversation they hold weird viewpoints you just can't reconcile with their projected image, and wonder if you've misjudged them.
They usually turn out to have an underlying wonky or absent moral compass, and abusive personality traits.
The outward image is a confidence trick, and that's how they got where they are.
People have such an impetus for Musk's downfall but a few off colour or poorly thought out tweets is nothing compared to something as criminal as downloading everything from your company before starting a competitor. Or worse while you work on the competitor on the side even before leaving the company.
Anthony should have known that files are easily tracked in a place like Google and that he'd put a giant spotlight on himself by competing with Google's future golden goose.
There are a lot more problems with Musk's conduct than a few tweets. Just yesterday there was a post on the front page of HN effectively accusing him of nepotism and saving his family's dying business and merging it with Tesla. There is still a lot of controversy over the marketing/state of Autopilot. There are whistle blowers claiming unsafe working conditions at Tesla and Musk censoring/firing anyone who is pro union. The list goes on.
I'm not saying Musk hasn't created some impressive companies or that he is bound to fail - but he is not without controversy.
What does that have to do with Anthony getting arrested? I wasn't comparing how controversial they are on Twitter.
So far the worst thing that has happened to Musk legally is some dropped SEC charges and new controls for one of his companies. The Solarcity deal isn't being investigated by authorities and was approved by 85% of shareholders in 2016, where its connection to his cousins was well known. Otherwise none of what you listed is illegal or in the same ballpark as what Anthony did.
> People have such an impetus for Musk's downfall but a few off colour or poorly thought out tweets is nothing compared to...
I thought we were talking about questionable characteristics of these people and how it might lead to their downfall. I could easily see Elon Musk get sued for unsafe working conditions from years ago, or a fraudulent claim about Autopilot's capability, or for libel by attacking people unnecessarily on twitter (accusing a diver of being a pedophile is pretty fucking weird).
I remember talking to extremely well-paid lawyers in the industry before the Alphabet vs. Uber case saying there was nothing they could do to Levandowski. Let's circle back in 5 years and see how Musk is doing then.
From what I can see, Musk took tremendous risks with his wealth and time and is reaping rewards from it. It is one thing to be rewarded for your risks (good) — it is another thing to be rewards for other people’s risks and work.
All pretty pale in comparison to a faked $75 billion buyout tweeted out during market trading hours. Or the blatant self-dealing and faked product unveil used to push through the SolarCity bailout.
FTA, the significant aspect of this new twist in Levandowski's ongoing legal saga:
> It is not uncommon for tech companies, which fiercely guard their intellectual property, to sue former employees or the firms they join after they leave. But criminal charges of a senior executive for theft is unusual.
"According to the complaint, Mr. Levandowski, who worked on self-driving cars at Google, downloaded more than 14,000 files containing critical information about Google’s autonomous-vehicle research before leaving the company in 2016. He then made an unauthorized transfer of the files to his personal laptop, the complaint said."
If the allegations are true (always important to bear in mind from a one-sided view of the complaint), I can see why they took that step in this particular case. Any "senior executive" should know that's illegal.
>never liked when rules got in the way of progress.
Yes, that seems to be the Silicon Valley Culture.
"Move fast and break things"
"Its better to apologize and seek forgiveness, than ask for permission"
"Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter."
I used to go back to my university and speak at the ethics class in my recruiting trips. I stopped after people’s questions changed to “Uber, Airbnb, etc all succeeded because they broke the law. Why are ethics important?” and I had no real answer.
> “Uber, Airbnb, etc all succeeded because they broke the law. Why are ethics important?” and I had no real answer.
I'll try my hand at an answer.
First, what is legal and what is ethical are not the same. New York City's pre-Uber taxi industry was racist, exploitative and ripe with fraud. Uber disrupted that cesspool. As recently as 2015, Uber was popular enough among average New Yorkers that it could mobilize grassroots support to rival the mayor [1].
Second, there are degrees of lawbreaking. Jaywalking is lawbreaking. Civil municipal regulation violation, which encompasses most of Uber and Airbnb's early mischievousness, is lawbreaking. Sexual harassment and fraud, on the other hand, are criminally illegal. We have different bands of consequences for different bands of infractions for a reason. Lumping together fraud and jaywalking is facile.
When Uber was busting taxi trusts, they were popular and powerful. When it abused that trust with their god mode and promotion of workplace harassment and overrunning of drivers' rights, their CEO got axed. Society innately and politically recognizes ethics, particularly if the public (e.g. activists, journalists, et cetera) document gross violations.
>I stopped after people’s questions changed to “Uber, Airbnb, etc all succeeded because they broke the law. Why are ethics important?” and I had no real answer.
You should go back to it, as those are examples of why ethics are needed more than ever.
As someone in the "trenches" and who sees the damage done by them everyday, I'd suggest you can point to the trail of damage they left in their wake and the real lives that have been negatively effected.
In the case of Uber I would simply start with highlighting the number of drivers who now have criminal records as a result of doing nothing more than driving for Uber. How Uber as a matter of policy would fire drivers who were charged criminally for illegally operating rides for hire for Uber. Perhaps most shockingly for these students perhaps informing them of the reality they are far more likely to become an Uber driver than the founder of the next Uber.
I would also recommend hanging out on subreddits like /r/uberdrivers, /r/lyftdrivers, or /r/lyft and look for every instance of drivers using "we're independent contractors" to justify abusive behavior towards customers that would get them fired if they were actual employees and in some cases behavior that is straight-up illegal.
Some things I've actually seen on those subreddits:
* Give three-star ratings (or worse, one-star) to any passenger who has a wheelchair or a service animal to make sure you're never matched with them again. Straight-up ADA violation.
* When you mark that you've arrived, keep your doors locked until the destination shows up, and if it's a "sketchy" (read: majority black) neighborhood, keep your doors locked, wait five minutes, call them, immediately hang up, report them as a no-show, and collect a $5 no-show fee from them (waiting five minutes and calling is a requirement to collect the no-show fee). Redlining is illegal, and this is straight-up fraud.
* If you get a request to pick someone up at a supermarket, drive just close enough to the supermarket that the "arrive" button becomes pressable, then do the above and collect your no-show fee. Again, straight-up fraud.
* One-star every passenger who doesn't tip. Retaliating against people who don't tip would get you fired from any other service job.
* One-star every passenger who orders a shared ride, no matter what. Again, that kind of retaliation would get a real employee fired. (Yes, shared rides suck for everyone involved, but retaliating against a customer for ordering the most annoying thing on the menu wouldn't be tolerated at a restaurant, yet Uber and Lyft are a-OK with it.)
* One time, a woman complained about how a Lyft driver kicked her out of his car in the middle of the ride because she just nodded along to his stories and didn't engage him in conversation, and he told her "if you don't want to talk, order an Uber instead". The response on the subreddit was universal: he's an independent contractor, so he has every right to kick her out for any reason, and Lyft isn't even allowed to fire him for it because that would count as interference in how an independent contractor does their job. At any other job, flipping out on a customer for not making enough conversation with you would get you in huge trouble, and advertising your employer's biggest competitor would get you fired in a heartbeat.
* This came from the Rideshare Guy blog and not Reddit: since repeatedly cancelling rides after accepting it will get you in trouble, drivers used cancel rides by putting their phones in airplane mode because a loss of connectivity would auto-cancel without penalties. When Uber started detecting that a few years ago (2014-5 maybe?) and counting it against a driver's cancellation rate, drivers started picketing Uber's local hubs over it. In the rest of the service industry, lying to your employer over this would get you in huge hot water, and publicly complaining about it even more so.
Every single one of these was justified by saying "we're independent contractors, we can refuse service to anyone for any reason". Again, a few of these are straight-up illegal, but since only the contractor is liable and not Uber/Lyft, enforcement is exceedingly difficult, and for the ones that aren't illegal, they're still unethical, and any reputable employer would fire an employee engaging in that kind of behavior, but Uber/Lyft drivers get to hide behind "we're contractors and not employees, so Uber/Lyft firing us for how we treat customers would violate our rights".
Unethical behavior is actively harmful to customers.
I guess you never used taxis before Uber was invented! The whole industry has been a huge racket for decades.
>Redlining is illegal, and this is straight-up fraud.
I guess you were never black and trying to get a taxi in NYC to go to the Bronx. There were countless complaints from black people about this practice with the cabs.
Basically, while your complaints are justified, though they definitely seem like cherry-picking the worst horror stories, the situation wasn't actually any better before these services existed. People didn't have any recourse when cab drivers treated them poorly, or made up bogus fares, turned off the taximeter and made up numbers, drove them around in circles to make more money, etc. It didn't matter that the drivers were technically employees; the cab companies had an oligopoly enforced by law, and didn't have to worry about customer service or reputation. And there certainly was no way for customers to inform each other about lousy drivers.
The real problem here is a lack of decent government regulation, and worse, when the (local) government does try to regulate, it just results in cronyism and high prices rather than better service and experience for the taxpayer.
I'll also point out that Uber doesn't have much presence in Japan, because their taxi drivers are actually highly professional and aren't a bunch of lying crooks like the ones in America, so people don't feel the need to flock to it. The fundamental problem is obviously the culture and the people in America, and that's why Uber is successful there.
> In the case of Uber I would simply start with highlighting the number of drivers who now have criminal records as a result of doing nothing more than driving for Uber
Do you have a link? I found nothing of the kind on google.
However, there are additional facts not included that are pretty egregious, including Uber being aware of the law and local law enforcement's position (I think they previously operated there and stopped), then in anticipation of spring break Uber recruited drivers from outside the county (including monetary payments for drivers to do this), they never disclosed the status of the law to the drivers, and within a day the first driver was arrested.
They succeeded at building companies, but they also externalized a lot of issues. Tenants being evicted to turn rentals into Airbnb hotels, additional traffic in cities, jobs turning into precarious gigs, etc.
Ethics are important, because they change the criteria for decisions from being only dollars matter to "what's the right thing to do." A society full of ethically challenged dollar maximizers is not that good a place to be in.
Well, obviously this is a complicated subject, but if they're going to cherry-pick the offensive, you can cherry-pick the defensive. Theranos is an obvious counter-example where being unethical didn't really work out for anybody. uBeam will likely go the same route, and there are some other less well-known examples.
A much more interesting debate is directly between Uber and Lyft, because most people (even many investors) would argue the main difference was that the founders of Lyft weren't as morally reprehensible as Kalanick.
The sad reality is it seems like poor ethics is rewarded by those who know how to exploit it properly. What most people are really interested in is where is the line? Because let's be honest - most people aren't studying ethics in entrepreneurship because they care about ethics. Most people want to know what they can get away with and still get rich.
The regulations that Uber and Airbnb violated were in a grey area. In addition, the violations were largely supported by the general public. The generous spirit of the regulations on taxis where to protect the general public. Uber were for the most part just as safe as taxis. The not so generous reasons for taxi regulations was to increase the income of taxi companies. In many ways, Uber and Airbnb had the moral high ground of forcing governments to remove regulations that benefit a select few at the expense of the general public.
What might your answer be now? Does commercial success necessarily mean that ethical violations are unimportant? (not trolling, just curious how you'd articulate the importance of ethics in the vacuum of legal or economic consequences)
"It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission" is actually a Grace Hopper quote, so not Silicon Valley. Depending on the circumstances, it can be good advice.
And "move fast and break things" was about code, not about the world at large. It's a coding "philosophy" for getting shit done, that worked very well for Facebook and did not actually harm people.
Sadly not an unusual attitude. I've known (and occasionally worked for) people who felt that rules were for chumps. Their reasoning was always a variation on;
"winning is good",
"chumps slow themselves down by following rules",
"in your evaluation at the end of the year the bonuses go to 'winners' not losers."
It is a rather narcissistic perhaps even sociopathic view of the world in my opinion, but it does exist.
Isn't that attitude what 'disruption' culture is all about?
Find a business that takes forever because of regulation, then ignore the regulation, and profit? Uber, that's an example of this. AirBnB in a lot of instances, too, I think.
The company was less than a decade old, but it had almost seventeen thousand employees, including a thick layer of middle managers. Levandowski recently told me, “One of the reasons they wanted us was because Larry Page knew we were scrappy—we would cut through red tape.” Page, Google’s co-founder and chief executive, often complained that the company had become bloated, and had lost the hacker mentality that had fuelled its initial success. By the time Levandowski arrived, Google’s apparatchiks were in ascent.
“Hiring could take months,” Levandowski told me. “There was a program called WorkforceLogic, and just getting people into the system was super-complicated. And so, one day, I put ads on Craigslist looking for drivers, and basically hired anyone who seemed competent, and then paid them out of my own pocket. It became known as AnthonyforceLogic.” Around this time, Levandowski went to an auto dealership and bought more than a hundred cars. One of his managers from that period told me, “When we got his expense report, it was equal to something like all the travel expenses of every other Google employee in his division combined. The accountants were, like, ‘What the hell?’ But Larry said, ‘Pay it,’ and so we did. Larry wanted people who could ignore obstacles and could show everyone that you could do something that seemed impossible if you looked for work-arounds.”
> What Serge did not yet know was that Goldman had discovered his downloads just a few days earlier, months after he’d made the first of them. They’d called the F.B.I. in haste, just two days before, and then put their agent through what amounted to a crash course on high-frequency trading and computer programming. McSwain later conceded that he didn’t seek out independent expert advice to study the code Serge Aleynikov had taken. (“I relied on statements from Goldman employees.”) He himself had no idea of the value of the stolen code (“Representatives of Goldman told me it was worth a lot of money”) or if any of it was actually all that special (he based his belief that the code contained trade secrets on “representations made by members of Goldman Sachs”).
I would have a lot more sympathy for Levandowski if he had taken trade secrets and created his own company.
But he didn't take the engineer/entrepreneur route. He took the corporate espionage route and just stole stuff from one company so that another company would profit, in the process further enriching himself.
At one point he was a good engineer. Then he became just another greedy executive.
> But he didn't take the engineer/entrepreneur route. He took the corporate espionage route and just stole stuff from one company so that another company would profit, in the process further enriching himself.
Levandowski actually had his own startup Otto which was acquired by Uber.
It was acquired in eight months, and founded specifically after Levandowski and Kalanick had a meeting. Otto looks like a prearranged sham legal entity to justify a huge payout, than a bonafide startup.
> The prosecution is being handled by the Office of the U.S. Attorney, Northern District of California’s new Corporate Fraud Strike Force
I'm curious if this explains the delayed timing... New agency team gets started and looks around for the biggest fish to fry. Everyone already dislikes Uber and AI is big right now so it's win-win. Smart move by the prosecutors if so.
(Or it could just be a long process due to the other civil trial happening first or just the FBI criminal investigation taking long, and the new group simply took up the prosecution, I'm just speculating)
IIRC, there was a criminal referral made by the judge during the (civil) Uber v Google proceedings. It probably took time for the grand jury to be set up and complete its investigations after that.
It's pretty common for the DOJ to take a very long time to get all its ducks in a row before bringing charges against very well-heeled defendants. Because there are so many avenues for the extremely wealthy & connected to escape legal accountability, the case needs to be as airtight as possible before filing charges. If anything this is actually pretty quick action relative to when news of the offense was made public.
Great article, I liked that it illuminates the question--whats a trade secret vs knowledge from on-the-job-experience? And where's the line across which a company can say you've used a trade secret? It's scary to think that one of the outcomes of this case could be a precedent that allows companies to go after what's in your head.
Is levandowski actually exceptionally talented, such that one of him is worth 120-600 other employees?
What has he actually accomplished? All I've read is that he built a self-driving motorcycle for the Grand Challenge, but IIRC his motorcycle made it about 25 feet before falling over.
I am going to admit out loud something that I suspect many people here also feel:
I am envious of Anthony Levandowski
Not his unscrupulous behavior, theft, and all that. But rather the fact that his confidence, swagger, and the ability to talk to Thrun and Larry and Sergei and Travis as equals (or as inferiors, actually, in this technical domain) gave people such a high impression that they bestowed him with $centi-million bonuses.
I'm well-paid in silicon valley but my stock grants have been flat for years. I haven't been able to grow a large team (let alone 2000 people like Levandowski at Uber apparently). If I'm caught in an elevator with our Senior VP, I don't really know what to say (and I'm certainly not invited up to the executive floor to continue the conversation afterwards).
And yet here we have a guy who did all this by orders of magnitude and at multiple companies. I don't want to be a dirtbag like him, but I will admit I am envious.
No. “Centum” means one hundred. Of course, the SI prefix “centi-” does mean one hundredth, but “cent-“ can mean one hundred in other contexts. Consider a century is 100 years, a centurion commands 100 men, etc.
So I've been reading about this dude, and apparently he started _several_ technology companies _while working at Google_, and sold a couple of them back to Google. Clearly his Google employment contract terms weren't the same as mine. In fact "normal" employees would be fired the same day for some of the things he did even before he copied off a bunch of Google IP.
I kind of wonder what's so special about the guy that Google wanted him so bad that they let him basically write his own employment contract, allowed him to have huge conflicts of interest, and then also paid like tens of millions in bonuses per year.
I also wonder what else he wrote into that employment contract of his. You can charge anybody with anything, doesn't mean it'll stick.
It doesn't change the criminality of his actions, but something I haven't ever seen any info about: were the designs he downloaded and took with him for LIDAR systems that he had played the primary role in developing while at Google or were the designs largely the work of other Googke employees?
He stole schematics, does a senior executive draw schematics? Likely no. He probably considered it all his own and didn't think about how many people played a role in building this tech.
>downloaded more than 14,000 files containing critical information about Google’s autonomous-vehicle research before leaving the company in 2016
Just generally as the act has been described it sounds like the information downloaded was pretty massive and wide ranging.
It seems unlikely he always "played the primary role in developing" all of it. And really you can debate what that quoted phrase means and what the legal ramifications of that are if you were to presume that he could take the things.
That line of thinking may technically help him substantially. The actual document theft isn't something he can walk away from, but the amount of harm it caused can definitely be argued in court. It is public knowledge he worked on lidar systems prior to working at Google so the scope of the processes and ideas that went into the stolen documents may simply be refinements from his Darpa days. Those refinements could ultimately be argued to be worth a LOT, but it does help his case- IMHO.
I seriously doubt this will result in any jail time. Levandowski's lawyers will do everything they can to see to it no time is served. But he will probably pay a fine.. chump change to this man.
And this pisses me off; people in America get thrown in jail for stealing chewing gum.
Most engineers I have met in Silicon Valley have a very high standard of personal ethics. For example, I have seen engineers risk their own careers to insist that their employers give back to open source projects when the employer is in violation of an open-source license's terms.
But I've also seen a few, rare bad apples. There are some people who are borderline sociopathic, who don't think twice about theft, misdirection, misappropriation of credit, and throwing co-workers under the bus for personal gain.
Usually, such people are not caught, and are not punished ... ever. People who learn about such sociopaths, just avoid them.
But sometimes these sociopaths go too far. This seems to be one such case.
This prosecution will discourage the very worst behavior and it will feel therapeutic for people that have felt victimized by various sociopaths who used them as ladders on the climb to fame and wealth ... but the less criminal kinds of sociopathy in the workplace is probably never going to go away. And there's no real way to stop it.
I haven't been to Google or worked with Google in a long time, but for a while there, say between 2010 and 2015, I felt like it was chock full of sociopaths in mid-level management. I don't even think Anthony would have stood out as particularly sociopathic in that environment.
I'm just here to thank whoever changed the title that used this as an opportunity to smear engineers. Levandowski was not an engineer. He was an executive and this type of behavior is completely in line with executive behavior.
> It is not uncommon for tech companies, which fiercely guard their intellectual property, to sue former employees or the firms they join after they leave.
Is it really that common?
I feel like most software engineers don't really take intellectual property all that seriously. Most will not think twice about backing up emails when leaving the company which might contain code diffs, design docs, etc.
Friends from different companies usually talk about internal system designs and technical problems pretty freely. One of the circles I hang out with even backup and share the interview question database from every company they've been at.
So while it's probably crossing a line, it's still not something I expect they will ever get sued for, let alone criminally charged. (This is in contrast with friends from the finance industry who are a lot more tightlipped about everything and you do hear stories about regular employees getting sued)
> I feel like most software engineers don't really take intellectual property all that seriously. Most will not think twice about backing up emails when leaving the company which might contain code diffs, design docs, etc.
You can't be serious. I would never think of doing this, and I can't imagine who would.
I know a lot of engineers at a lot of companies who look at porn on their work laptops (which isn't illegal). I don't know a single engineer who would take documents from their previous company to their new company (which is very illegal).
Not rare at all in the software industry, is very common. I'd say people are more split than OPs letting on, but plenty of software engineers are extremely serious about IP.
It's red-line different to take one's skills and know-how and experiences with you than to copy documents and designs from one's current employer and take them to a new gig, especially at the executive level.
> Most will not think twice about backing up emails when leaving the company which might contain code diffs, design docs, etc.
Why would you even do that? I don't get the purpose of that. The email backups are worthless at that point--you can't reference them later, you'd have no reason to refer to them later, and backing up emails for a previous employer isn't your responsibility.
Interesting this is only against Anthony and not Uber this time. The stakes seem much smaller here. I would be surprised if he actually goes to prison for this. And max fine of $8 million or so is small for him
This was long expected. Waymo’s suit against Uber was civil, and they settled in the middle of the trial. The judge in that case referred the matter to the US Attorney’s Office given the facts at hand.
There have been a number of cases in the financial industry with trade secret theft and the perpetrator has been sent to prison. Why if he is convicted (likely imho) wouldn’t he also?
Maybe so. At the time, everyone wondered why Google did not sue him, just Uber. Now I wonder if Google's legal team wasn't already in touch with the FBI/US attorney's office. It might be that the reason why they didn't pursue him in civil court was to leave the way open for the criminal procedure to blaze the trail. That would be sick, if so.
Hmm... If Anthony ends up taking a plea deal I wonder if there might be some details about Uber that might come up. I could totally see Anthony selling out Travis at least
They can't sue him in a civil suit, because, as a Google employee, Google made him sign an arbitration agreement. There's already been an arbitration between him and Google, there was some settlement, and Google is now barred from suing him.
The judge from the Google vs. Uber litigation referred the case to the US attorney. Looks like they found enough evidence to charge him. Not sure how Google is involved in this "harassment".
Levandowski still lists his occupation on Linkin as "VP Engineering at Uber ATG".
How the !!@ can that still be true?
Hasn't Uber cut ties with him yet?
Can someone explain the difference between this situation and the following situation:
- engineer at Company A has expertise in a certain field, and is really, really good at solving problems in this field and knowing what to do next at any point in time. They bring quality to Company A's systems.
- engineer moves to Company B to do the same kind of work, and uses their expertise to bring Company B's systems up to high quality as well
- Company A says that this engineer must have stolen trade secrets.
The indictment[1] sheds some light on the difference: "On or about December 11,2015, he downloaded approximately 14,000 files from SVN. These files contained critical engineering information about the hardware used on Project Chauffeur self-driving vehicles, including schematics for the printed circuit boards used in various custom LiDAR products."
In other words, the accusation is that he stole technology that was the output of the entire Project Chauffeur team, not simply stuff of his own creation. Presumably, those materials were non-trivial and represent the combined effort of many engineers over many years.
Imagine you're toiling on a team for years and your absurdly compensated boss decides they want the whole pie, clones the repo their laptop, and dips out to found their own start up based on everyone's work.
> In other words, the accusation is that he stole technology that was the output of the entire Project Chauffeur team, not simply stuff of his own creation.
Even "stuff of his own creation" that he created for Google while an employee there would be Google's intellectual property (assuming the usual terms of employment), and if he took it with him after leaving, it would still be theft.
In this case the engineer literally downloaded proprietary files and took them with. You're welcome to take your intelligence and experience with you, you're not welcome to take the work product that the company you're leaving was literally paying hundreds of millions for.
"Must have stolen trade secrets" won't stand up in court. They'd have to enumerate which specific trade secrets were allegedly stolen, prove that they were indeed trade secrets and not something that lots of senior engineers could figure out on their own, etc.
Levandowski was charged with stealing specific files and designs, not trade secrets in general.
I use to feel bad for Google and wanted this thief to face justice. But umm he's just doing what he witnessed and was taught(told) to do while working for the big G.
Google blatantly steals IP from the biggest fish to the little dreamers they inspire and such is well documented. See this popular HN thread... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18566929
You might too if the company who inspired you to dream and create tech invited you to demo and then treated you like a dog(possibly stole from u). I met with other names like Samsung, Intel, Black n Decker and no deal was made there too but I was treated respectfully with dignity!
I told my story for years here then last December lo and behold Ji Qie of MIT tells the same story I've told for awhile but with emails/evidence clearly showing Google getting caught stealing IP. She met with Google ATAP too!
Overall the narrative shouldn't be only about Anthony doing wrong rather he was mimicking what he witnessed and was taught (directly or indirectly) by his employer, Google to do; steal IP!
Anyway, Levandowski was a lousy leader, and was really detrimental to Uber's ATG. He bloated ATG from fewer than 100 people to more than 2000 within less than a year, without paying the slightest attention to culture. As a result, the number of people grossly exceeded the quantity of work. Political infighting quickly became rampant. Chaos ensued. Morale nose dived. Worse yet, instead of aligning and uniting the teams in Pittsburg, he created a huge fight with the Pittsburg teams, so much so that Travis, then the CEO of Uber, had to fly to Pittsburg every few weeks to resolve the conflicts.
It's sickening to even think about what he did in Uber.