My whole career in technology is because of a "Who's Hiring?" thread back in 2012 or so.
Emailed the hiring email address in the thread for a company that seemed to suit my interests and abilities at the time and was off to the races. I moved from a rural area to a Midwestern state for the gig. Every job I've had since that job has been with companies comprised of permutations of those same coworkers from the first gig.
I'd probably still be doing roofing or something if I hadn't been an HN reader at that time.
I was lucky enough to be resupplied by a Super Cub air taxi service multiple times while on a long mountaineering trip in Alaska many years ago. It was incredible to see all the random places that the pilot could land, including a gravel bar similar to the video in the article.
I served jury duty, and the reverse happened. The plaintiffs sued a social worker, but the case revolved around things the Department of Human Services (where he worked) advised him to do, as well as things other members of the organization did independently of him.
In that case, I found it easier to decide when the question was "is this one guy responsible for everything that happened?" rather than the more complicated "is DHS as a whole responsible?"
Thanks for that perspective. I feel like we're constantly looking through the lens of "Uber is doing something shady", so projecting a large scandal onto the company is very easy. The inverse of that being that it could be quite easy for someone, Levandowski in this case, to orchestrate something for himself illegally.
> So what if it turns out that Uber is totally innocent?
I honestly can't see this as an outcome; either Uber's wrong in they completely and miserably failed due dilligence, or they're wrong in that they actively coerced [him] to create a shell company with Google assets so it could "launder" them into Uber.
We can't say for certain which it is at this point. All we know is that Uber's trying their level best not to say which by refusing discovery and worming around the issue. That alone signals to me that the preponderance of evidence bar is going to be a fairly easy one for Google to clear here. There's just too many dots that even when left unconnected draw a pretty clear picture of what happened.
Why would Uber allow discovery if they think they are already going to win?
There is nothing wrong with Uber talking to Levandowsky while he was at Google, and nothing wrong for him to do it as long as he didn't violate his NDA. If Uber said, "hey, we really want to build a strong team for self driving, you should leave Google and come here", that's totally fine as well.
It's even fine if they say "start a separate company and recruit a team, and we'll either invest or buy it".
Google has a high bar here. They have to show their assets were "laundered" into Uber. And they have to show that Uber knew it and encouraged it. In the first case they'd only have a case against Levandowsky and a very limited one against Uber. It's only in the second where Uber's liability becomes substantial.
So what happens if Uber is "innocent" and Levandowski is guitly as an individual? Seems odd that they could benefit from him stealing the tech, even if they didn't know.
It is if you happen to buy stolen property. You might not be held responsible for stealing, but you'll have to return the property and say good buy to the money, I think.
IANAL, but... They owe you and it is a question if they can get it back to you, but the rightful owner has precedence in many (most?) cases. That's the setup for many kinds of scam. The scammed party buys something, but the transaction of the property is in some way faulty, while the money quickly disappears.
The law is also going to ask hard questions about "unknowingly". If you're walking around Market St. at 11 PM and some dude stops you and tries to sell you a fancy new bike for $200, complete with a U-lock holder but no U-lock, the law is probably going to say that you should have expected it to be stolen property. If you gave the guy $200 in cash without asking any questions, you probably won't get away saying "I unknowingly purchased stolen goods".
Sure it is; that's why it's called "due diligence". You are legally required to engage in some amount of diligence when acquiring a company. As a very related example, a US company acquiring a foreign company is obligated to make sure the foreign company isn't engaged in corruption/bribery, and is expected to show a certain amount of competence in investigating the foreign company before the acquisition. Going ahead with the acquisition after an incompetent examination is illegal.
More generally, the law recognizes the concepts of negligence, reckless endangerment, a "reasonable person," the idea that you're responsible if you "knew or should have known" about some problem, etc., all of which I would classify as specific ways of stupidity and incompetence being illegal. Of course if you keep your stupidity and incompetence entirely to yourself, you're fine. But if you act stupid or incompetent in a way that affects other people or the public, chances are high that you're in legal trouble.
It might seem obvious to you, but the bootcamp crowd really underestimates the impact of computer science on their day-to-day work. I know because I used to be among them.
At least in my case, I was indoctrinated by my bootcamp to put a standard CS undergrad degree into the same bucket as the rest of our broken education system. So at my first job I focused on keeping up with the trends, trying to master web development by becoming hyperproductive with my day-to-day tools. I was trying to emulate the most visible engineers I saw at conferences, figuring that to shape the trends I'd have to be on top of them. Very naive of me, but then again, I didn't have much exposure to the world beyond web development, and you don't know what you don't know.
I wish I could have seen this post years ago! Would've saved me a ton of time.
I think the problem with asking for anecdotes is that people don't necessarily separate their decision-making-due-to-CS knowledge from decisions they make due to experience. But if you don't have CS knowledge there are many types of projects you'll probably never be assigned or might not even try for, so you won't have the chance to use-or-not-use it.
I can totally see that, but it clashes a bit with self learning and research towards figuring figuring out whatever the problem is, or the domain space. Surely, a self taught web developer wouldn't want to take a job building a compiler for a DSL if they didn't have that skillset, but maybe they know or can learn enough about compilers to be able to track down a crazy bug?
I've always gone towards projects which may need a lot of research on my part, and I've had plenty of trusting peers and managers with hard CS educations who believed I could do it.
If I wanted to change problem domains to something much more grounded in CS (say operating system schedulers, robotics or microcontroller programming) Id read these books.
I'm trying really hard to see what the value is of learning this pattern or that pattern, and what sorts of worlds it can open for me, but so far (for me) it's usually been roads I don't want to go down professionally. Maybe my imagination itself is stunted by my lack of formal education, I don't know.
One of my favorite assignments in high school (2007) was after reading 1984 and Brave New World. The teacher of our Dystopian Literature class prompted us to elaborate on who we thought was right overall, Huxley or Orwell.
It was a sobering exercise realizing that there's a fair amount of Orwellian and Huxleyan prophecies in our modern world, but we tend to focus more on the 'scarier' Orwellian ideas.
Something that beautifully summarises the Orwell/Huxley discussion for me is this quote by Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death:
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us.
Brave New World doesn't seem like a dystopia at all to me. You're always having fun and if you want to intellectualize you can also do that among your peers.
Emailed the hiring email address in the thread for a company that seemed to suit my interests and abilities at the time and was off to the races. I moved from a rural area to a Midwestern state for the gig. Every job I've had since that job has been with companies comprised of permutations of those same coworkers from the first gig.
I'd probably still be doing roofing or something if I hadn't been an HN reader at that time.