Tesla sues ex-Autopilot director for taking proprietary info, poaching employees
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
My guess is that if he was more circumspect in this - waiting until he quit, working on it after hours on a personal computer, etc - Tesla would not be suing him over this (if the allegations are true). It's rare to see lawsuits over these things if all of the activity is taken after the employee has quit.
> In the suit, Tesla also alleges that Anderson downloaded “hundreds of gigabytes” of proprietary data from his work computer to a personal storage device, and that he then manually hacked the timestamps on files to hide evidence of his acquisition of the information. He also wiped the iPhone issued by Tesla, the suit says, in order to erase evidence of his attempts to poach fellow employees. These attempts were met with only limited success, however, as only two employees apparently ever jumped ship to the new venture.
That's ballsy.
My goal was to build a real team out of the random bunch of coworks and actually succeeded. In the end we were a competitive, cooperating, efficient machine putting out about 10 mandays of customer value in 2-3 real time days if necessary.
In that example I really felt compelled to leave WITH the coworkers. True they were hired by my employee, but the team was built by my coworkers and me.
PS: So, considering examples like that, maybe next time you could try to formulate yours a little more open for alternatives. E.g. "Interesting point of view. Let me add another one: [...]" What do you think?
If you built a team for the benefit of your company on company time, and that team decides to leave as a whole, that's one thing. If you spend company time on recruiting people to another company, that's very different!
Why do you think that? I don't. And I don't want to allow anything as the norm. So, not sure where you are coming from. Did you respond to the wrong comment?
Perhaps you may want to refresh your perspective by remembering some of the times managers have colluded to keep wages down. "Poaching" is such a ridiculous term for "offering somebody better rewards for their work and them accepting."
Stealing proprietary information is another story though, let's not make this whole thing binary.
As was mentioned elsewhere in this thread, even California's Labor Code contains such a provision:
“An employee who has any business to transact on his own account, similar to that entrusted to him by his employer, shall always give the preference to the business of the employer.”
> Perhaps you may want to refresh your perspective by remembering some of the times managers have colluded to keep wages down.
How exactly does a senior manager using his position to recruit his subordinates fight that? In fact, it seems like a great way to put employees in precisely that position.
Again "Any sense other than the outmoded legal sense." I hope you aren't arguing that something not being illegal in California is evidence that the thing is morally good?
> "Using his position to recruit his subordinates"
What's your implication? That somehow Anderson threatened their careers? Because I don't see anything suggesting that in the article. And frankly, it's disingenous to promote that kind of theory with no evidence and a clear knowledge that such a threat would never fly (I.E. any employee could go to HR and say "he's firing me because I won't join his company with that google guy" and they'd get rehired and potentially win a whistle-blower lawsuit).
If you're not implying that some threat was involved, then I have no pity on the people he so maliciously offered superior jobs to.
You can have an unhealthy power dynamic without ever directly threatening someone's career. Do you generally hold that when an employee is put in an uncomfortable position by a superior, they can't complain if they could've just gone to HR and hoped that they would be receptive?
Calling my speculation disingenuous when you tried to use the fact that managers have colluded to keep employee wages low without any evidence Tesla's in fact did that is pretty hypocritical.
What I'm contending is that there is absolutely no evidence any employees were made uncomfortable by what happened. And moreover since I know I at least would much rather receive a poach offer than not from my manager, it's hard for you to make a blanket statement that these anti-poaching rules are somehow to protect employees.
I'm not suggesting that Tesla colluded to keep wages down. My point is that many C-level executives and investors see their dynamic with their employees as antagonistic (i.e. 0-sum-game). Without the opportunity to get bought by other companies the competitiveness of the market is undermined, and employees get paid below their value. Preventing poaching does exactly that.
He signed a contract. If Tesla's lawyers are worth beans, that contract has a number of clauses which such behavior flagrantly violates.
It's not unreasonable for an employer to expect their employees not to spend their time at work working/advertising/recruiting for a separate business. Of course no such protection exists for conversations had down the pub after work.
We've no real idea what the case in question involves - it may be that tesla cannot make it stick. It's all about context
And they got sued for it and lost. Besides, a bad actor at company A is not an excuse for getting revenge on company B.
For example, stealing from a thief may be considered karmic justice, but it still makes one a thief.
If you have your laptop at home and are technically on call ( for example, in Spain, if you are paid above average for a position it can be claimed in court that you were technically on call. Happened to a friend of mine )
Also director that have the "unlimited holidays" could be considered on company time whenever they didn't book holiday in the system.
Companies put abusive clause in contract, saying that everything you develop, anytime, anywhere, automatically belongs to the company.
Director time is a funny thing too. A lot of those director level that work 100+ hours per week include lunch with people, going to a party, playing football with peers, ... and in any case, company encourage bonding outside working hours. Technical people, developer are expected to have their work as a hobby and train outside business hours.
The room for liberal interpretation is vast and Tesla is a thin skinned company. But well, court will tell.
Just because you were physically at your workplace doesn't in my mind make it "company time", and the concept for a place like Tesla where people keep track if you do too little but certainly not the opposite seems completely inane.
Thats why anti-poaching is a thing. When you're investing into researching and creating products, you are investing in the people who do it, along with all the materials and contracting and such. Being able to take the experience of the results of all that and go sell a competing product is stealing and is a major blow to R&D.
I don't know the extent of the poaching, or whether its the same thing here, but in this case it was on company time, which is pretty bad.
"Investing in the people who do [R&D]", then suing when they leave, is far too close to owning people.
That's not nothing, of course. But real products require all of the above in order to proceed to market, and all of the above takes a fairly long time for a company to build up, regardless of the experience of the people it hires, because the most those people can do is reduplicate their efforts without the mistakes, and even then pure reduplication is illegal because of parents etc.
If that were taken out of the article, perhaps it would make more sense? I think that as 'geofft points out, the fact that this person was trying-to-recruit (not "poach") employees for a future startup while on the job is one of the reasons for Tesla's suit. I think the other reason they give (allegedly stealing data) is far more compelling if true.
If you don't intend to abide by the terms of a contract, then don't agree to it. Nobody is making you work for Tesla. Besides, all contracts can be negotiated. Negotiate for the contract you want.
Put differently, my employer pays me to write code, not to review the validity of terms in their contract. If their legal department is incompetent then that's their problem not mine.
If they expect me to perform (or not perform) actions on their behalf when I am not at work, and especially once my employment ends, then they are free to offer a consideration in exchange.
1. Society defines having a job as an optional luxury.
2. The employer is willing to strike out that clause, and the candidate employee can reasonably know this.
3. Other employers are offering better terms.
Were any of those true in this case?
There are always things in contracts which can't be struck out. You can always ask to strike it out, and declare your intention to find future employees at their company.
From their point of view, you'd be saying that when you left you'd potentially take millions of $s of other employees with you and disrupt their operations. Why would they employ you?
Not poaching your employer's employees within a certain timeframe is a perfectly normal and reasonable clause.
You've got confidential information on their employees, namely which ones are good, which work well with you, etc., things you'd normally spend a lot of time + money finding out. And they spent a lot of money advertising, vetting, hiring, training and integrating those employees.
Indeed, and many employees have found themselves assigned duties that were not at all what they expected, and damaging to their health or otherwise harmful, but hey, they "agreed" to perform assigned duties, right?
Looks like my position isn't a popular one here. So be it but, if you live in a developed country, have you ever wondered why, for the last few decades, almost everyone has been getting poorer and more miserable every time the GDP goes up? Sometimes, astonishingly enough, beliefs do actually have real-world consequences.
They aren't slaves. They can quit any time. No employer can force you to do anything - but they don't have to pay you if you don't do the assigned duties. Sounds fair to me.
If they start adding odious duties, in the UK we do have laws against that, you can refuse and if dismissed can argue "constructive dismissal". So if your employer asks you to start cleaning loos with a toothbrush...
The guy was a highly paid executive. I don't understand how he could have been under duress. (Is Elon Musk really hiring desperate people who have no options?)
What if the employer hired a person under duress, like they were in desperate need of some particular skill. Does that mean they can decide not pay the person?
I've had employers strike clauses that I didn't agree with. Contracts are hardly written in stone tablets. If contracts were non-negotiable and were employees' only option, everyone would be working for minimum wage.
That in combination with the claim that he asked other employees to come with him while they were his subordinates at Tesla, is the strongest argument the company has in this case, and maybe that combination has some merit. I'm arguing against the general claim that an "agreement" in an employment contract that the employee had no meaningful choice about signing, is morally binding.
> What if the employer hired a person under duress, like they were in desperate need of some particular skill. Does that mean they can decide not pay the person?
There is a classical thought experiment in ethics, on that very topic. Suppose you're stuck on a high window ledge with no way down, likely to lose your footing and fall in the next few minutes, and you see a man passing with a ladder. He offers to get you down for a million dollars. How binding is your agreement? Me, I figure since it was made under duress, you're entitled to renegotiate a more reasonable figure once on the ground. Some thinkers have given much stronger answers than that! What's your answer?
I'll offer him much less. If I fall, he gets nothing.
It's not a realistic question anyway. If you were fired from your job tomorrow, are you really going to drop dead? I doubt it. Is the job you have the one and only job you could ever have? That somehow, when you were born, you were destined by fate to have only this job and there is nothing you can do about it?
I don't buy that people have "no meaningful choice" in employment, not even close. I've heard all kinds of justifications for stealing from others, cheating on exams, etc. Even justifications by well paid office workers for stealing office supplies. I'm not buying it.
1. You are a man of principle, to a degree that is highly unusual.
2. Your intuition, from a position of safety and comfort, about what you would do in dire straits, is inaccurate, to a degree that is highly usual.
The difference in prior probability of these two scenarios is equally obvious.
> If you were fired from your job tomorrow, are you really going to drop dead? I doubt it.
I already pointed out that much depends on whether other employers are offering better terms. But as for your question, actually there are many people for whom being fired is a life-threatening crisis. For many people, the expected timescale to find another job is somewhere between several months and never. If you've been unemployed more than six months, your perceived employability drops sharply. Many countries have an inadequate social safety net, such that long-term unemployment is likely to lead to homelessness, which is a life-threatening condition from which it is very difficult to escape. I remember one person who spent some time homeless and barely escaped from it, saying if it happened again he'd just commit suicide on day one and be done. That is the reality for a large percentage of humanity today, and in most developed countries it's getting worse not better.
You can believe what you wish. My father told me that what separated men from animals is men have honor. People have a choice - but nobody said it was an easy one.
Anyway, your father sounds like a wise man. It is dishonorable to break an agreement, certainly. It is also dishonorable to exploit someone's desperate circumstances to coerce them into signing an extremely one-sided and unreasonable contract. We are all bound by a set of implicit agreements regarding basic standards of civilized behavior; that's a prerequisite for civilization itself.
Anyone else planning to leave and poach people will have to do "a little more covering their bases".
It really comes down to what top level leaders within the org think the longterm payoff is.
Tesla should certainly know that most non-solicits are not enforceable in california (and i only say most because occasionally, one is found valid, but the vast majority are not)
To clarify:
"Provisions preventing former employees from competing with their former employers by soliciting their customers (absent use of trade secrets) are...void... The law regarding agreements prohibiting an employee from soliciting employees from former employers, however, is far less clear at this point.
...
Provisions that outright bar the hiring of employees are likely to be found unenforceable in many circumstances and should generally be avoided. Where such provisions are used, they should be narrowly tailored, apply only to employees with whom the restrained individual works or becomes aware of during their employment, and/or make any hiring contingent on the payment of fixed sum liquidated damages.
Separately, non-solicitation agreements between employer and employee, like the one at issue in Loral, are likely permissible with the caveat that they should be limited in term and scope. The term of such provisions is typically limited to one or two years, and large employers should consider limiting the scope to employees that the individual worked with and/or became aware of during the individual’s employment."
Regarding Loral:
"The court noted that unlike a no-hire provision, the non-solicitation agreement 'only slightly affects’’ Loral employees, because they were not prevented from seeking employment by contacting [the defendant] – they were only affected insomuch as [the defendant] could not contact them."
TL;DR It sounds like Tesla's ex-employee broke his non-solicit by soliciting employees he worked with at Tesla.
http://www.jonesday.com/files/Publication/49d21da6-33cb-45ff...
The complaint is clear. This is about more than non-solicitation, and Anderson was not an ex-employee at the time.
From the complaint:
"Anderson worked to recruit Tesla's engineers, eventually making offers to at least a dozen people — all in direct violation of his contractual non-solicitation obligations and the duty of loyalty that he owed to Tesla as an employee."
This is about breach of duty of loyalty, and interference with contracts.
edit: phrasing
Section 2863 states, “An employee who has any business to transact on his own account, similar to that entrusted to him by his employer, shall always give the preference to the business of the employer.”
There are other aspects to it as well, but that's the nut.
Non-soliciting agreement is a separate matter untested in court.
However, he was an employee at the time of soliciting, making it a very different matter. Directly prohibited by california work code.
It doesn't have to be illegal to be a valid point in a civil suit. Things that are legal can be prohibited by contract.
Whether it's illegal or not is irrelevant.
"While still employed by Tesla, and while assuring management of his loyalty, Anderson secretly set out to hire Tesla's Autopilot engineers for his own competing venture"
[0] - https://cmportal.scscourt.org/Portal/DocumentViewer/Index/dU...
The one tool companies have at their disposal in CA is the prohibition of using your old company's trade secrets in your new job. Mostly that means you can't take customer lists with you, but you also can't use confidential information to lure away former colleagues.
What that means in practice isn't completely clear to me, though it may just be that you can't take the org chart.
Very high senior management have been held to a non-compete if it is very specific and time-limited.
Self-driving is quite specific right now. So, if they limited it to a year, it would probably work.
However, the issue here is things he did while still working at Tesla, not after.
Tesla didn't have any good autonomous vehicle technology. They bought a Mobileye and a radar, hooked them up to get lane-keeping and auto-brake, and hyped that into their so-called "autopilot".
That's marketing for you I guess. (Don't get me wrong, would get a Tesla if money were no object)
For one Eye-Sight turns off if you come to a complete stop and won't re-engage until you get over a threshold(I believe 18mph). It has a pretty limited HUD to communicate what the system is seeing.
In comparison the Tesla will do full rush-hour traffic flawlessly and does a much better job of communicating what it's seeing in the vicinity of the car. It also bounces the radar under the car ahead of you so it has the ability to see heavy braking conditions much sooner.
C&D did a pretty good comparison recently[1], it didn't include the A8/S8 but most of the other competitors but Tesla was far and away the better system.
[1] http://www.caranddriver.com/features/semi-autonomous-cars-co...
Yes the eyesight disengages if you're stopped for more than about 2 seconds (will acknowledge it's annoying), but you can restart it at the touch of a button even from a stand still. This might be a recent change.
That car and driver review doesn't fully explain the features.
I'm sure the Tesla is a bit nicer and more autopilotey, but it will cost you 70-80k MORE out the door which is the point. Eyesight gets you 80-90% there. The tech is otherwise similar features wise.
If anything what you could argue is that the Tesla can get you on the freeway on its own which is pretty cool. Can it do that?
I was just commenting since we've owned both systems, if you haven't had a chance to give Tesla's a spin they are happy to do free test-drives, on paper they look similar but in execution I found Tesla's to be miles ahead(and constantly improving).
That extra 60k also gets you some really acceptable 0-60 times :).
You'd be surprised, during most drives home I only have to hit it 2-3 times.
Listen, I'm not trying to argue that my Forester is nicer than your Tesla. By no means is that the case.
My comment was more to point out that the tech is a lot more common than people think.
Auto braking and automatic speed adjustment cruise control, but no lanekeeping. It does have an alert when you leave a lane without signaling, but that's not the same as actually keeping you in the lane.
http://media.subaru.com/newsrelease.do?id=940&mid=141&allIma...
I feel like Tesla pulled an Apple on this.
The cruise control in Teslas cannot (yet?) drive you from point A to point B or even keep you driving in one direction forever without you holding the steering wheel occasionally or even hitting other objects. It can (just like cruise control in other cars) warn you if you are about to do something stupid (e.g. leaving the lane, about to hit an object etc.).
This is like people using foglights in cities at night to see better. You can use it for that, but it isn't made for that purpose. A light meant for FOG or other scenarios where the car itself is hard to see and not for you to light up everything in front of you (as it is quite bright if not used in fog).
Because of this, an aircraft under autopilot (especially one ascending and descending on its own) doesn't need to worry about hitting things. There is usually a distance of 3-5 miles¹ between the aircraft and other hard objects.
I would say calling the Tesla system an Autopilot is vastly understating its abilities.
¹ http://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/2806/how-much-is...
Seems like an engineering achievement to me.
If you read the biography, there have been times when an engineer has said "I can't meet these requirements," and he said "Ok, I'll do your job AND my job, and I'll get it done." And he did.
I think anyone believing he's not an extremely talented engineer has not read much about him.
There is a lot more to autopilot than lane-keeping and auto-brake. Tesla use a database of road conditions, and predictive models, that are separate from the MobilEye technology. What MobilEye chip provides is basically a video processor, customized for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems(ADAS) applications with a relatively low power consumption.
The biggest counter to your "Mobileye and a Radar" is that several other manufacturers use MobilEye and even nVidia boards, yet do not have Tesla-level automated driving.[1] The pushback from MobilEye after the Florida crash is another key sign that Tesla has more advanced autonomous driving [2]
[0] http://www.nvidia.com/object/advanced-driver-assistance-syst...
[1] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/05/from-audi-to-volvo-most...
[2] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/09/mobileye-and-tesla-spat...
Don't most of us wipe the phones before turning them back to the employer? They tend to have a lot of personal stuff on them - and not really any unique company data.
Ive noticed that work issued phones aren't the perk they appear, its a social pressure of 'we know you have a phone, we gave it to you' combined with the expectation you'll answer.
I was a software engineer at that job, I wasn't on call and I was salaried for X hours.
I still have two phones noe even though I work for myself, one for work one for home, I did think about dual-sim but I like the separation of concerns.
As for carrying two phones, I just leave my personal phone in my coat pocket, I don't get a huge volume of calls anyway since people long ago figured out I don't answer them (and I disabled voicemail), if it's urgent text basically.
Just don't do it.
Here is a link to the lawsuit with all the details of what he did: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3422711/17CV30564...
EDIT: other comments have clarified - the crux of the poaching issue in this case is that he was actively soliciting Tesla employees for his competitor while employed by Tesla. That's a far more specific scenario than trying to enforce a non-solicitation agreement after leaving the company.
~/.bash_history ? shred ~/.bash_history; clear; exit unset HISTFILE; shred ~/.bash_history; exit
Thank you.
Telsa's patent sharing announcement doesn't really amount to much IMHO. It was a press release, not a legal contract.