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Comment by vvanders | Hacker News Reader

I've been the point engineer in these types of interactions(over on the GPU space, but still plenty of IP to worry about there).

You're very, very careful to make sure this doesn't happen, up to and including having two discrete teams that work with different vendors to make sure it doesn't happen(sometimes mandated by contracts).

In my last gig where I did this our group was the one part of the company that most vendors came to precisely because we didn't disclose techniques or approaches. Someone just casually mentioning "Vendor X" does Texture Compression with "Y" in discussions is enough to get them to never talk to your engineers again.

(I've seen very senior engineers do this in order to try and move the needle with a vendor only to completely sabotage the whole relationship without even realizing it.)

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Not quite the same level but I remember before gen 4 game consoles were announced, for a while the NDA hoops we had to jump through and the care we had to take when discussing them internally was intense. For a long time we just called them "gen4a" and "gen4b" (a legacy that still lives in our code base to this day), and you weren't allowed to verbalise which one was which. This was followed by more code words, so you then had to remember which code name matched up with gen4a and which one was gen4b. SDK and firmware drops were strictly locked down of course, and we had to hide the dev kits when any kind of video crew or photography was taking place around our work areas even though the kits were pretty much unrecognisable and even if it was for an internal purpose (but that's to be expected, anyway). Also you could not stack one particular kit on top of the other one because it was known to overheat faster than a pug in summer.

Oh yeah, I was in gamedev before this and NDA process back then was quite involved. These days with the ability to run on production hardware that's a lot less restricted.

I'd say that SoC vendors are a bit more strict about NDAs vs GameDev where it was pretty wide knowledge who worked on what. Once you were in the industry there were very few secrets given how small it is.

On your final point, I hope the engineer realized how obviously dumb the move was.

Nah, not sure it really stuck. Both times I saw it they were more interested in being 'technically right' rather than see the trust between companies that they were destroying.

It's interesting because in that environment building trust was sometimes more useful then being the best GPU/perf engineer. I had developed a reputation of not reaching out to the support teams unless it was a problem that I characterized pretty well. I'd uncovered enough driver bugs with one vendor that I was given personal contact info of senior engineers on the vendor's side and told to reach out to them directly in case of any further issues.

That meant I could skip 3-4 levels of support and cut out ~1.5 weeks of back and forth verification of issues. As such I was able to close on actual critical perf/functionality problems much faster than just about anyone else.

Much like you should treat your IT/support staff with a ton of respect(because they never get a shoutout when things go right and always get thrown under the bus when things go wrong), showing you that respect people's time and only raise issues with in depth repros goes a long way. I'd much rather have a collaborative environment like that then resulting to escalating through your account rep/director/vp. Both gets the job done but one will have the other team dragging their feet every step of the way.

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