IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

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Borzak

Bronze Baron of the Realm
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31,637
A question someone who freelances or contracts might can answer. A guy I know works at a company and they talked to a freelances to code something. They have a detailed deal of all the calculations and what order and how to make them and such. They used to hire people who were in college as interns and 20+ years ago one of them programmed it and made the list. Anyway they want to modernize it and our standards book is changing for the first time in 35 years and they want the ability to pull in from different databases and such.

They brought a guy in and showed him the stuff and he said no problem and would work up a quote. A few days later a competitor called my friend and said the guy contacted them and he would have something that they might be interested in, the same program they asked him making.

Obviously they won't use this guy and I assume a normal contract would discuss who owns the rights to the program, but anything else?
 

alavaz

Trakanon Raider
2,001
713
A question someone who freelances or contracts might can answer. A guy I know works at a company and they talked to a freelances to code something. They have a detailed deal of all the calculations and what order and how to make them and such. They used to hire people who were in college as interns and 20+ years ago one of them programmed it and made the list. Anyway they want to modernize it and our standards book is changing for the first time in 35 years and they want the ability to pull in from different databases and such.

They brought a guy in and showed him the stuff and he said no problem and would work up a quote. A few days later a competitor called my friend and said the guy contacted them and he would have something that they might be interested in, the same program they asked him making.

Obviously they won't use this guy and I assume a normal contract would discuss who owns the rights to the program, but anything else?

I suppose that was bad form for the guy to start shopping the program around before he's made it. But realistically it's pretty impossible to stop things like that from happening. The code itself shouldn't really be what you are protecting, but rather your data anyway. Unless of course you believe that your competitors having the same type of software would put you at a disadvantage.

You're right though on the contract, make sure you own the source code, they sign an NDA regarding your data and if you want to mitigate scenarios like this you may want to make some sort of clause where they can't develop for your competition for x amount of time.
 

Khane

Got something right about marriage
19,789
13,298
A question someone who freelances or contracts might can answer. A guy I know works at a company and they talked to a freelances to code something. They have a detailed deal of all the calculations and what order and how to make them and such. They used to hire people who were in college as interns and 20+ years ago one of them programmed it and made the list. Anyway they want to modernize it and our standards book is changing for the first time in 35 years and they want the ability to pull in from different databases and such.

They brought a guy in and showed him the stuff and he said no problem and would work up a quote. A few days later a competitor called my friend and said the guy contacted them and he would have something that they might be interested in, the same program they asked him making.

Obviously they won't use this guy and I assume a normal contract would discuss who owns the rights to the program, but anything else?

This contractor doesn't seem very bright. What a stupid way to burn bridges. No company on earth would ever contract work out to him again if they found out he did that. That said I doubt there is any recourse for this since it would be difficult to prove and he did the work on his own personal computer.
 

Lendarios

Trump's Staff
<Gold Donor>
19,360
-17,424
Borzak Borzak As an advice always NDA before showing/asking for anything.

Also if there is no NDA and you haven't paid him yet, you can't go after him. And even if you pay him as a contractor and not as an employee, it is hard to say that it is implied the exclusive rights to the algorithms.

With that being said. I have a copy of all the code I ever done, for my own personal reference. I use it to see "who i did this before", and it is very frequent practice to reuse old code/strategies.
 

Borzak

Bronze Baron of the Realm
24,422
31,637
The program would be of no use or limited use to most anyone else. I think the guy looked online and picked out companies like the one he talked to and saw potential customers. I'll mention the NDA thing. Not for me and the guys who brought him in have nothing to do with computers mostly and it's a small company. I knew they used that deal but I have no use for it. Now their re-pad rolling software I would like to get, it was made by an intern engineer long time ago.
 
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Lenas

Trump's Staff
7,458
2,208
I haven't done it with xcode but yes when I'm working on react native I plug my phone in and send to the phone with command line, something like `react-native build android`.

Just have to enable USB debugging in phone developer options.
 
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Needless

Toe Sucker
9,146
3,263
I haven't done it with xcode but yes when I'm working on react native I plug my phone in and send to the phone with command line, something like `react-native build android`.

Just have to enable USB debugging in phone developer options.

Neat, i'll look into this. Thanks!
 

Needless

Toe Sucker
9,146
3,263
lol jesus setting up android is a nightmare, i think im having java version conflicts
 
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a_skeleton_03

<Banned>
29,948
29,762
Trying to search for and move a bunch of files into the proper folders but I am not super amazing with grep and regex.

find ./|grep "kinkycoeds" | xargs mv -t /storage/videos/birthday

It will find all the files I am looking for but it isn't moving them because it is trying to move the file name from the search string and not the entire file name.
 

Jalynfane

Phank 2002
719
563
Still looking for work as a developer. Pretty Entry level/Cusp of Junior Software Developer stuff. Been working for 8 months with a real small shop doing some web pages. Very slow shop, not busy, need something real. Willing to pay 5% of my pre-tax salary (65-70k ish salary) for the first year to anyone getting me a job hook up. I live in the Portland area, JavaScript/Java
 
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