Google forces employee to disavow MVP status | Hacker News Reader

Google forces employee to disavow MVP status

theregister.co.uk

32 pointsmadair34 comments

I think this is bad PR for Google but the fact that Microsoft makes MVPs sign non-disclosure agreements might be a contributing factor.

IANAL, but if it were me and I had been working on technologies for which there may be information that I potentially couldn't disclose to my day job, I would be worried about the conflicts that might result. For instance, if you are spending several days working around a bug in the OS and Microsoft gives you a pre-release version of a service pack that fixes that bug, would you continue to work on the work around or just tell your boss it's not worth the effort? As an employer, I'd be even more worried about a bogus lawsuit that might result.

Sometimes you can't have it all.

Unless there is a contractual clause saying that google employees shall have no services provided to them from another company (and from the word "forces" I assume there is not), google should not have forced this employee. Insecurity is not a hallmark of a genuinely better company.

I don't see what's different about this and, say, the Minnesota Vikings asking Brett Favre not to wear a Packers hat.

This is more like them asking him not to receive an honorary degree from the University of Wisconsin.

The honorary degree doesn't include a contract.

If signing a contract is prohibited, do any Google employees have credit cards, bank accounts, or mortgages?

Because none of those contracts affect Google's IP.

Nor does the MVP contract.

He would have to sign a Microsoft NDA. So he does X at Google based on his knowledge of something he can't disclose. MS says "Google did X because their employee broke NDA."

Come on -- basically any prudent company would do what Google did. That doesn't make it good or bad, in and of itself, but it seems silly to say some of the things people are saying on this page just because a company took the standard, cautious route.

Neither does MVP status. Does google force its employees to forgo doctor patient confidentiality, or attorney-client privilege? Does google force its employees to avoid signing up for game beta programs that might require an NDA?

Don't be silly. Doctor-patient confidentiality and attorney-client privilege are matters of state and federal law. NDA's are matters of contract law. Google and Microsoft are archcompetitors. Any number of things could happen that could cause MSFT to sue GOOG over violation of that contract, starting with tortious interference.

Google is not party to the contract, so they have nothing to fear. You can not be sued over a violation of a contract that you are not a party to, that's just plain silly.

In fact, any number of google employees could have singed any number of NDAs with other companies without ever having disclosed those to google or being required to do so.

And google could never be sued for violating those contracts, tortious interference would be limited to those cases where google would force the employee to breach their NDAs, naturally limited to any confidential information that that employee might have (my guess: not much).

As long as that's not the case I really don't see why simply letting this guy have his 'status' could ever be a problem.

If microsoft wants to sue google I'm pretty sure it won't be over something as petty as that, and if they do it'll be a minor blip on googles legal bill and a bit of bad PR for microsoft.

Now it's significant bad PR for google, they come across as petty and paranoid.

You absolutely can be sued over a violation of a contract that you are not a party to.

One way is called interference. MSFT needs a reasonable expectency of a valid business relationship with the MVP. GOOG would have to know about the relationship between MSFT and the MSFT. MSFT would have to argue that GOOG intentionally interfered with the relationship with the MVP (such as by exploiting the MVP's NDA to get sensitive information about product plans), and then argue that GOOG's interference damaged MSFT.

I'm not a lawyer, but been at companies where things like this have happened over noncompetes and NDA's.

Obviously, if GOOG and the MVP do nothing to violate the NDA, nobody should get sued. Obviously, it is possible for the MVP to work at GOOG with any number of tricky relationships with MSFT. But saying "GOOG didn't sign the contract, so it could never (your word) be GOOG's problem" is a drastic oversimplification of the legal risk.

It would work slightly different (but that may be just to locality) here: MSFT would have to sue their MVP for breaking their NDA, they could then implicate that their employer forced them to, then their employer could get sued.

Alternatively, but this would be a completely roundabout route, Microsoft might get wind of google having access to inside information, with some proof, during discovery it would be found that it was leaked by the employee (with, for instance google acting in good faith since they could not know that this was internal MS information). The end of that one would probably be google being unable to use the 'tainted' information, and microsoft suing the MVP for breach of contract.

I think this latter scenario is what causes google to 'prefer' it if their employees would not have such contracts with third parties. It's a stretch, but it could happen. Best not to have even the possibility.

Prove that an employee with MVP status neither opens Google up to a lawsuit today, nor opens them up to a lawsuit in the future, where the entity filing a lawsuit is a multi-billion dollar competitor and who may be motivated to drop a seemingly-innocuous clause into the next MVP agreement solely to screw over Google.

You can't. And if you put on your lawyer hat for a moment, everything else makes sense after that. And if you're saying "Yeah, but they wouldn't do that...", you still don't have your lawyer hat on. (And I'd question your understanding of Microsoft's past, too. You don't have to be a hater to notice they play hardball.)

You can't prove any negative. Prove that you won't ever commit a violent felony in the rest of your entire life. Prove that the easter bunny doesn't exist.

It's not okay for google to be crazy because they believe MS is evil. Being paranoid about the MVP NDA agreements is about at the level of psychosis of web developers who "disable" right click on sites in order to "prevent" viewing the source or media companies who insist on releasing music and video only after it has been festooned with draconian DRM.

Plain and simple, google is being unprofessional here. They are stepping away from being a good, "cool" company that "gets it" and turning into a big, crazy, paranoid company just like any other big, crazy, paranoid company.

"You can't prove any negative."

You found your lawyer hat! But you couldn't believe what it was saying. Remember, lawyer shoes are not your shoes. There's a reason they are detested so. But it's worth it to learn where they are coming from.

doesn't say he was forced to just suggested. If he didn't want them to say "no" he shouldn't have asked.

Ah, yes, "suggested"

It is perfectly reasonable for Google to discourage employees from entering into non-disclosure agreements with competitors.

But its an NDA about their upcoming C# news, something Google has less-than-zero interest in. This rationale makes about as much sense as a corporate directive to avoid signing NDAs for MMORPG betas.

Jon Skeet also has the highest rep of any user on stackoverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/users/22656

Not only that, but his status there is of a legend.

"Jon Skeet Facts" - http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/9134/jon-skeet-facts

Some of those are quite hilarious

Oh, and this site http://askjonskeet.com/

It's like being a vassal. People can worry about contract this and contract that, but that's all a distraction from the feudal servitude that developers are under to their corporate lords.

Google is pretty nice to this guy, though, as it's clear from SO that he must not do very much work for them.

I must say this is pretty shitty thing to say about someone. A backhanded compliment at best.

I usually refrain from making 'me too' comments, but sheesh, really, what a lousy remark to make.

His post rate is around 15 answers a day. Considering that most of these are highly-rated (and thus, not stuff like "lol you r dum"), it is likely that this eats up a good portion of his workday.

Maybe that's what he spends his '20% time' on?

Everyone talks about Jon Skeet's reputation.

But Alex Martelli ("Google Uber Tech Lead") is far more ridiculous. He has netted 37,778 rep / 130 day = 290.6 rep/day.

Jon Skeet only has 102,115 rep / 371 day = 275.2 rep/day.

I know this because I started my goal of getting 10k rep shortly before Alex joined Stackoverflow, and I saw him answering every day, usually within 1 minute of people asking a question, and even when I was on vacation.

@codexon, my deepest respect for _noticing_ this -- I had kind of started to wonder if anyone ever would (except a couple of my colleagues, also active on SO but less openly, had already commented privately to me about this;-). Still, seniority counts for A LOT on SO, and of course I'll never catch up to Jon -- if I keep gaining 15.4 points/day on him, bridging the 64337-points gap would take me almost 12 years from now... I kind of doubt it will happen!-)

BTW, I made a "lateral career shift" within Google -- since about a year ago -- I'm not "uber tech lead" now, I'm "senior staff engineer" (no people-management chores -- I get to hack on code/design/debugging/architecture, nag^H^H^H evangelize on proper development methods, &c, in >80% of my time, vs ~40/50% of my time -- and that, with an effort!-) -- averaged over the many years in which I was uber tech lead, saddled with people management, budgets, strategy staff meetings, and the like... management at google is cooler than anywhere else I had ever managed, but, it IS still management in the end;-).

Oh hi Alex, I didn't expect you to notice this little comment here especially so late.

I don't think I really deserve the praise as I am not normally this watchful. I just did behavioral surveys of people with high reputation gain rates in order to figure out how to get 10k rep without spending too much time.

Heh, I'm amused by the term "Mountain View Chocolate Factory" -- but where's Charlie?

Did anyone else catch that guy's name? Ah Skeet!

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