Does industrial espionage exist between Fangs?
Say FB wants to collect intelligence on Googles internal infrastructure down to the code level, or to know what Googles new products are in then works. Is it feasible for fb to send one of their employees to interview at Google, say a E6 to an equivalent position at Google. So to boost his chance of getting offer, fb will form a team to help him, from resume to phone screen to onsite. His phone screen will be on speak phone with 5 other fb top performer swes in a conference room and as soon as the question is revealed the all five fb'ers will do their best to solve it on a white board and the guy will just be typing in the answer. For onsite, he will go through 8 hours a day of LC and system design training from the same team with mock interviews twice a day and his performance analyzed via video and any gap in his skill identified and plugged, whether it's dp or consistent hashing. And as he starts the Google job he will report back to fb anything he sees and any project he's given will be complete by five fb'ers full time so he'll be a top performer at Google and promote all the way up until he's close to the leadership....
No
Lots of people at Facebook used to work at Google. Why would they do a complicated conspiracy to learn what they already know? It's a small world. Basically, nobody would do something that would get them crushed in court when it got out.
No. Primarily because first Google, FB... Are so massive that it would be hard for anyone to know all the pieces of the puzzle down to the last bit. Second, all of the infrastructure is inter-dependent. So to implement one piece of the infrastructure, you need to implement everything else as well. High level concepts do get implemented such as MR, GFS, Dremel, bigtable etc.
But ideas like bigtable were published by google anyway. And I’d be shocked if nobody independently reinvented it otherwise.
And if you have a team capable of reimplementing competitors design it'd be better off building its own system tailored for the existing environment and infra.
What you describe are multiple state and federal felonies. Besides, what you describe is from the perspective of code monkeys at the bottom. If the big companies want technology, they hire away the person that came up with the technology in the first place. There is no need for them to train up a team of junior developers with support infrastructure just to steal technology.
When was the last time something being illegal stopped Silicon Valley or big tech? Uber has it’s illegal taxis, Amazon skimped on sales tax, Facebook sells housing and credit ads that exclude unprofitable protected classes, Apple stole the name iOS, oracles entire business model is extortion...
When the return is vastly lower than the opportunity costs. Uber’s IP theft, for example, didn’t involve low level code monkeys.
Lol if only tech jobs were this exciting and make you feel like you work at for the CIA!!
No. Easier to just poach them from there.
This kind of thing happens between hedge funds. People interview elsewhere to try and understand their competitors trading strategies. Companies also interview competitors employees to get information out of them
That sort of thing would actually be useful. It’s not like companies like Facebook or Google are actually creating much novel tech. It’s mostly just implementation details, integration with their other products, and engineering related stuff (ie make it scale) Nobody in tech secretly has a one pager proving that P=NP.
No but it does happen between Chinese companies, especially Huawei, and major US tech companies. I’ve got Huawei recruiters on LinkedIn who are essentially asking me to come work for them and reimplement a MSFT product of which I’m very familiar with the internals of.
Yes. There’s a reason Microsoft acquired LinkedIn. Many people out there profit using data pulled from there (to predict M&A, and more). Someone working there showed me a graph database visualization of profile views that he correlated with acquisitions, and I’m sure people there trade options accordingly.
Nurse, I'll have some of what he's having.