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Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

I have never gone from one job to another where the new job was in the same exact industry I was in prior, but I'm glad I never have to be thrown into such a scenario where I'm accused of taking confidential data, I can only imagine for some employers that makes you a red flag, very dangerous territory to be in.

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The only time I did that, the company I was leaving begged me to take one of their corp laptops with me so I could offer "consulting" to them on the side. I never called them on their plausible deniability, I just said I felt that would be a conflict of interest and they shut up real fast.

Can you elaborate on the plausible deniability part.

Was your past employer trying to make best of the situation by hoping to fish for information about your next employer's projects via the consulting gig?

I said "never called them on their plausible deniability" to mean I never pulled off the veil of the conversation, so there's nothing to talk about in front of a judge.

FWIW both the company I was leaving and the company I was joining were startups selling dynamic seat pricing systems to airlines. Your call if that's a conflict of interest :).

Ehmm... offering "consulting" should come with a contract specifying scope of work, data/device access, and expectations.

I have moved between clients (as a contractor) within the same industry every couple of years for nearly two decades, often cycling back around to the same clients more than once.

There have also been cases where a previous client kept my contract open after I had left and started with the next client. This gets disclosed to the new client, and my previous client gets informed of where I’m moving to so they have the option of immediately closing the contract if they feel there is a conflict that cannot be managed.

None of this is hard. It simply requires transparency and not doing dumb or nefarious things.

I agree it feels scary from the employee's perspective, but at least in this case, it doesn't seem like it would've been difficult to avoid: simply return your work devices when handing in your badge:

> [...] multiple former Apple employees now working at OpenAI reached out to discuss returning Apple-issued work devices they kept when they left Apple.

By not doing that you effectively just cry "sue me", this is stupidity on the employee's part (or malice). Oh and maybe don't take "screenshots of confidential documents".

Return your work devices immediately upon leaving. Don't even attempt to access any internal systems or accounts you previously had access to. It's real easy to avoid this sort of trouble.

Yep a lot of this falls under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act which can lead to criminal prosecution of an individual.

You lost access officially when you left the employer. Just because you still had some vestige credential that _could_ let you see old employer data does not mean you are legally entitled to use it.

I really think this is apple feeling really threatened rather than confidential data really being stolen.

Apple is known for threatening companies that hire from them, and occasionally having secret agreements with other companies not to hire from each other.

People move from a company to a direct competitor all the time (i have a number of friends that went from working at aws to working on gcloud for example) and guess what, no one of those companies really went bankrupt due to this.

So really long story short: i think apple is being a sore loser at the employee retention game.

I don’t know where you’re drawing your conclusions from but they literally have messages from the OpenAI exec laughing at how he can still access data at Apple and talking about copying it, as well as messages encouraging candidates from Apple to bring unreleased prototype hardware to demonstrate during interviews.

I thought those were just allegations they made in the lawsuit, not necessarily something they had written evidence of in the form of messages.

If you check page 16 of the filing here it certainly seems like they have specific messages with quotations: https://9to5mac.com/2026/07/10/apple-sues-openai-trade-secre...

This is one of those times where I wonder if I'm a genius for knowing not to generate evidence of a crime by talking about it in recorded media, or if we're just seeing the bottom 5% of wrongdoers.

Which in fairness should be blamed on the candidates, not on the company.

I might as well do the same just to be able to filter out candidates willing to do that.

And laughing about the possibility of copying data doesn’t necessarily mean anything was actually copied.

And in the end the know-how is in the people, so whatever apple has it getting out anyway when people leave.

Yeah Apple does have a history of doing these things. There was Palm, where Jobs told them if they didn't stop recruiting Apple employees he would destroy Palm with patent lawsuits. Jobs was also one of the main architects behind the no poach cartel in SV between Google, Adobe, and Intel, and Apple.

More recently there was Nuvia, which the lawsuit was dropped, and Rivos, which was settled.

> I [...] imagine for some employers that makes you a red flag

Maybe. It also advertises a moral flexibility that is high in-demand here in America. Clearly OpenAI has no scruples entertaining a turncoat of this scale, I can believe that businesses will be lined up out the door to hire these people.

These guys are pushing boundaries knowingly.

A good company also doesn’t want you to take IP bc it creates the liability.

It's not hard if you are honest

People in silicon valley do this every day. California has a lot of laws to protect employees. Companies need tangible proof of a violation, not just "this guy had vague company IP in his head".

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