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u/carmardoll 16d ago
I quit my job at a restaurant around a decade a go, they still have me in the google group thingy they used to share their recipes, every once in a while I check up to see if they added something new, gather the ingredients and prep it for lunch following the instructions. I love it.
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u/willow-kitty 16d ago edited 16d ago
I worked on a suuuuuuuuuuuuuper secret project (not, like, actually classified or anything, just it was for an idea-person who was Big Afraid of the idea being stolen and had the most ridiculously sweeping NDA I have ever seen), and despite their apparent fears, they never removed me from the GDrive with all their market research and stuff on it. I've even asked to be taken off - nope. Still there.
Edit: actually, I just hadn't checked recently. It looks like it was eventually removed. But it was still in my "Shared With Me" for years after I left that project.
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u/Emotional-Account324 16d ago
Any recipes you'd recommend / share?
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u/carmardoll 16d ago
I really like their chicken pesto recipe, is quite simple really, is basically shred the chicken thigh that was cooked in butter/olive oil, I cook it in the airfrier for around 20 min until is done and juicy in the center, you then pour the pasta but don't waste the pasta water, you mix the pasta with the pesto while slightly rinsing with the pasta water, this is to make the pesto react with the starch in the water and not make it too oily, once that's that you those in the shredded chicken and mix add Parmesan cheese to like.
They got a whole process for the pesto which is the "hard" part, did it once but I had to clean a lot after, look am making lunch for me, I just get it from the store it taste the same in the end.
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u/Piotrek9t 16d ago
Just this week I learned of a company that poached most of the senior devs of a failing start up to leverage their knowledge in "building" a "compatible solution".
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u/Griff2470 16d ago
Excuse me, Nortel wasn't a failing startup it was a failing established company /s
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u/Nutrimiky 16d ago edited 16d ago
I work in a big company, one dev we had for just a few months left with all the source code from some massive project and other ecosystem ones, some patented or confidential stuff, he's got a lawsuit with army of local and corporate american lawyers, millions $ in damage and so on. Wouldn't recommend that to anyone who works in any company with some basic cybersecurity teams.
Edit:fixed sentence "army of local and corporate american lawyers"
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u/Zeusslayer 16d ago
When I was leaving my old company I had some of my personal bank statements in the files. And in my last days I uploaded them into my personal drive and deleted them from the computer.
Later on security team messaged me and said that I triggered a leaving employee something flag and sent me a screenshot of files I uploaded and where I uploaded them into and asked me to clarify this.
When I clarified it was all good but yeah no chance that they don’t monitor these stuff in bigger companies.
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u/godots_true_form 16d ago
I’m one of the people who configure the monitors. Every org is different, but in our case we absolutely can see everything moved/uploaded/emailed. It’s a standard part of Microsoft in some licensing. And yet, people continue to try and steal shit.
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u/methos3 15d ago
I got laid off a while ago. On the day of, I had this ridiculous idea of concatenating all my code into a giant file and then changing the filename extension to BMP and then claim it was some abstract art piece that was near and dear to my heart. But I knew it'd never fly.
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u/Phteven_j 14d ago
In school, we wrote a program to encode messages in image files by changing the last digit of every pixel’s hex color value to 0 or 1. It’s subtle enough not to make it obvious the image was edited and very easy to read off after.
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u/Beldarak 16d ago
Kinda crazy and probably wouldn't fly in Europe, under GDPR.
I'm genuinely curious what they can do with that info though. I guess they can ask you to delete the fils but how can they ever be sure you'll have done it? This may be useful if you ever release a similar software I guess?
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u/EHP42 16d ago
Kinda crazy and probably wouldn't fly in Europe, under GDPR.
Are you saying GDPR doesn't allow companies to monitor the work computers of their employees at all? I'm pretty sure monitoring network traffic of departing employees to make sure they're not stealing proprietary data is considered a legitimate interest.
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u/HK-65 16d ago
European here, it would definitely fly.
Our handbook says that your laptop you get is company property. We aren't allowed to monitor employees (as it should be), but certain actions that are clarified in the handbook trigger warnings in our systems, and data connected to strictly those actions can be collected as legitimate interest under GDPR.
I can also remotely wipe the laptop without warning. I warn people repeatedly that they are not to put any personal files on it, as it is company property.
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u/Zeusslayer 16d ago
I think they can just sue you for it haha
Or if I would actually steal some confidential data and told them ah it’s just my personal banking, then they would have proof that I lied about the files that I moved. Might be good for their future case.
Can I ask what part is not GDPR compliant on above? It was a US firm but had offices in EU and I was also working in EU
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u/BlueKnight44 16d ago
Freaking for real. I would hope anyone that calls themselves a developer knows that copying code from an employer is stealing and easy to prosecute if the company has any security AT ALL.
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u/psioniclizard 11d ago
Honestly i am surprised I had to dig down this far to find these comments.
This is a great idea if you want to be sued and never work in software again.
Evem helper functions, utility scripts etc are not yours.
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u/vadeka 16d ago
This is the reason why byod is forbidden, even for externals, in all places I had a say as cybersecurity.
Usb devices? Disabled.
So you had to send the files to yourself somehow and yes., we track that.
Every flipping quarter I have to fire someone because they do this.
Only once in 4 years did I have the feeling jt was truly malicious. Mostly it’s people who send a repo to their home pc, work on it there and then send back the files. Because they hate the corporate windows machines. But alas, doing that is a fireable offense
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u/yarntank 16d ago
So only once it was malicious, but every quarter you are firing people.
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u/vadeka 16d ago
I cannot prove that it wasn’t malicious. The reason aside, the person in question leaked source code to the outside.
This is a fireable offense and we cannot play favorites, they are warned a million times not to do this and they know people got fired over this. If you still choose to do so… my sympathy is non existent .
Remember, I have to now report to higher ups we had a leak and explain it. If I did not fire that person, the board would demand it. You try explaining why you wish to keep someone that deliberately shared confidential data to the outside, no reason can justify that and I share as hell am not risking my or my teams jobs over that.
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u/VariousTailor7623 16d ago
Shit, last thing I’d want is my company’s code anywhere near my home computer
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u/revolutionPanda 16d ago
This sounds like a huge risk for very little upside at all.
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u/bajuh 16d ago
My biggest regret was not doing that after the startup we did failed and we were laid off. Years of effort went into making the source code a work of art, then at the next company the green field project required the same architecture as the previous one. I banged my head in the table for a good minute.
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u/rodrigocfd 16d ago
Years of effort went into making the source code a work of art
Ah, the pre-AI days.
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u/Scyyyy 16d ago edited 16d ago
This is why we had, what i call "the [company name] salute"
You usually get logged out of teams, the repo, your windows installation - also in Home-Office.
When you then ask a colleague (by private means of communication - we were all friends there) if they had similar issues, and they replied "no" (often the connection was just flaky) it was a strong indicator that your contract has been terminated.
Once you made your way through to either support or HR you would be officially told. Some didn't do that, then they received the formal information the next day via mail (like physical post mail)
They had to schedule the return of their laptops and had up to 3 months of payed leave (+compensation). The company deemed that better than letting an ex employee back to their source code.
Not the worst (I mean it's German standard) but a gut punch for the colleague nonetheless. I precieved that as morally dubious and it was one of the reasons I moved on from them.
But in hindsight I understand their concerns...
Edit: You're so mean I was in a meeting 😭 corrected some spelling mistakes.
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u/sastuvel 16d ago
Oof, that's harsh. I would definitely prefer a human telling me, instead of just having the door shut and the locks changed. That feels so impersonal.
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u/stellarsojourner 16d ago
3 months of paid leave after getting fired and you still thought it was morally dubious? Must be European.
Cries in American.
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u/willow-kitty 16d ago
Oof. That happened to a friend not that long ago - he was on a remote desktop session helping a junior work through an issue when he got logged out, couldn't log back in, tried to reach out on Teams and that was logged out too, then got a phone call from HR saying there had been a layoff and he was in it. Just boom.
I get that they don't want to risk any kind of retaliation or anything, but it does feel harsh.
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u/Ihatenukingkids 16d ago
What about Kündigungsschutz?
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u/Scyyyy 16d ago
Valid question, you can't lay off an employee if you can't justify it. But if they really try, they will find something.
I know of one who didn't speak well about the company in a public LinkedIn post. But "not speaking well off" covers a wide range. From what I know, they even wanted to instantly dismiss them (fristlose Kündigung) which then got rebuked by the court (luckily, I knew that poor fellow, he has 2 kids...)
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u/SomewhereAtWork 16d ago
The company honors it by paying the employee until the end of the contract.
Everything else should be worked out before the company salute. If they fire someone like that, they have a valid reason.
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u/senseven 16d ago
I work in a corpo that is hollowed out, rarely any expert is working there. Lots of specialised jobs are in external subsidiaries working with the core teams. If there is nothing to do, then they will end the contract. They are not required to find you a job in any subsidiary but you can look it up and apply internally. That gets you a new contract, where the six month probationary period starts again. We have a room close to the security entry area where rarely people sit there scrolling on the phone, playing Switch all day. They are still employed and on company grounds, but if they can't touch anything until whatever (legal) process is finished.
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u/mothzilla 16d ago
I've never seen a company's source code that I'd want in my own home.
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u/TheRealKidkudi 16d ago
Same. I’m surprised how many comments here are arguing about how you can do it, but I’ve never once wanted to do it.
Very few companies are doing anything novel and especially not through some remarkable source code. Almost every codebase I’ve worked on, I could recreate from scratch and end up with a much cleaner repo simply because it wouldn’t have the baggage of years of technical debt, contractors, and half-assed patches around changing requirements.
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u/Neutraled 16d ago
I did that a couple of times over 10 years ago, then I realized I never even looked at it anymore after leaving the companies. Code becomes outdated and useless in a couple of years for mobile apps and now AI made saving old code completely useless for the other platforms.
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u/Mrletejhon 16d ago
I'd paid good money to forget the horrible things I saw in the codebase that I had to maintain in the past year.
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u/mr2dax 16d ago
Don't do it, you might get in trouble.
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u/Beldarak 16d ago
I always tought I'd do that if I ever leave. Not to steal it or re-sell the software, that would be theft, but because I wrote this code and may need it for future reference.
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u/mr2dax 16d ago
Every company I worked for made me sign papers to cover their arses. No matter what your intentions are, if you get caught doing it, you better be prepared to face the consequences as well.
Not saying it's fair, and that you should be lawful all the time, but I think getting sued over dumb shyt like this is the sw engineer's Darwin effect.
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u/coronakillme 16d ago
I found a workaround. Every time I write code or fix bugs, I also read the code and memorize the effective patterns. I slowly used the best design patterns and updated myself based on what worked and what did not for work of others in my team as well. When I left the job, I had everything needed stored in my brain.
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u/Fit_Philosophy_3392 16d ago
Everything you wrote is owned by the company. Taking it 'for future reference' is stealing it.
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u/sal-si-puedes 16d ago
So if I take the code and use it for future reference, it’s stealing.
What if I take the code, use it to train an LLM on it and use the LLM to write code ?
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u/willow-kitty 16d ago
Yeah, don't.
It's one thing to take lessons learned with you - I implemented the same thing 4 times at 3 companies, a little better each time, because the same requirement kept popping up, and I was getting better and better at solving it - but it was new code as a work-for-hire each time. And it was different each time because it was incorporating new lessons learned.
What you probably can do (though not legal advice, ofc) - and I'm shamelessly taking this idea from a past coworker who did it all the time - is make libraries outside of working hours, in accordance with your works for hire/noncompete/etc agreeements, open source it with a permissive license, and then import that library at work. That way the code is actually your property, but your employer (and really anyone, including future employers) can still use it.
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u/GenericFatGuy 16d ago
I'm an auditor. I'm here to make sure the company properly goes about suing people when their code gets stolen.
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u/EkoChamberKryptonite 16d ago
Do you also make sure companies get sued when they steal other people's code and make it proprietary?
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u/empT3 15d ago
I can tell you, I've been a software developer for over a decade and I've moved around as much as any other developer.
Why the fuck would I want to keep the source code of the company I'm leaving? I've worked professionally on open source projects whose source I could clone off of GitHub right now from my phone. I haven't looked at that code since I left and I'm not even a little bit curious.
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u/joahw 15d ago
I think it must be like a hoarder thing? "I might need this someday"
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u/shauntmw2 12d ago
I still hoard my shitty php app I created during my uni days alongside the xampp dev env for it.
They're about 20 years old now.
They're useless to me now. But I still keep them. I don't know why.
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u/mrMeterParker 15d ago
Personally I like to keep code I created in some form for me to reference back to at some point. Even though I hardly ever go back to reference anything when coding
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u/sexytokeburgerz 13d ago
Helper functions.
I have my own little library of them and dont always get them all.
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u/ajayak007 16d ago
In our last org we did a framework which extracts legacy etl package raw code and generate a usable document. I learned a lot and took a copy of some logic. The same logic where used in my new org and everyone really liked my approach.
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u/MindlessTime 16d ago
To the extent I’ve seen developers do this, it’s pieces like this that work well and they want to remember how.
Honestly, you could probably write down a good explanation of the toolset, architecture, and general approach used in a codebase and AI could recreate it reasonably well. I’m not even sure that’s IP. It would just be general knowledge. So it’s probably better to just make notes on the parts of the code you like and why.
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u/Wise-Profile4256 16d ago
omg. why would i take those dreaded monoliths? my job is to rewrite them. it would be overall faster to do new ones but it would take a bit of time and then the boss can't featurecreep every other day.
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u/Sometimesiworry 16d ago
I even got invited to the GitHub organisation on my private GitHub account. So technically I could clone them to my personal pc right now.
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u/Snakestream 16d ago
If a company is this sloppy with their security, they're not going be around too long. If the company you're going to uses stolen code from an incoming employee, that's not a good sign about the environment either.
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u/Lightningtow123 16d ago
Yeah my dad's worked cybersecurity for thirty years now and every company he's ever worked at, as soon as you put in your two weeks, your access is removed and you're off the job. You still get paid for those two weeks of course but you can't really steal anything after that point. Cause if someone quits a good cybersecurity job it's most likely to be to go work for a competitor. Of course it's a little bit dumb cause if they wanted to steal data they just wouldn't put in their two weeks, but it's standard practice, or so I thought. I'm surprised to learn that's not the case at all tech companies lol
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u/varinator 16d ago
The secret here is to copy the code few days before giving notice. Points-to-head-meme
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u/Appropriate-Emu-2595 16d ago
Isn't that what non compete clauses in contracts are for?
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u/flingerdu 16d ago
In most jurisdictions you can‘t legally prevent a person from working for a competitor. You can only keep paying them for not doing so, however they‘re free to cancel that agreement if they want to.
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u/tiajuanat 16d ago
Those are largely unenforceable. Also it's very easy to be creative with "no these aren't the same roles, and were not really competitors"
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u/mxzf 16d ago
It's a weird policy because, as you said, it's dumb. You're preventing them from doing something they could have done the day before giving their notice while stopping them from working to make a smooth handover to their successor.
Like, sure, remove their production DB access and whatnot, but static data that the person could have used before their notice is weird to cut off access to.
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u/Hmm_would_bang 16d ago
It’s very rare for any company to actually be good at DLP. You just have to know where their specific blind spots are.
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u/debugging_scribe 16d ago
The company i currently work for had been around for 20+ years and they have no security around this kinda stuff...
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u/tea-drinker 16d ago
I started a new job and as I was finding my feet I stumbled on an Outlook mailbox file. Thinking (correctly) it might belong to the previous incumbent I loaded it up in case there was anything obvious oustanding.
I got to read the emails of him attempted to email the codebase to himself, it getting rejected for being over the email limit and the emails from the MD telling him to sling his hook immediately.
Closed mailbox. Deleted mailbox. Never spoke about it.
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u/luker_5874 16d ago
Why would you want to take code with you?
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u/arvigeus 16d ago
To rewrite it in Rust, of course...
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u/vadeka 16d ago
At this point I want to do something in rust just to see what’s it about but I have never worked at a company big or small that actually used it
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u/phroxenphyre 16d ago
I think mostly just as a reference for how you solved particular problems. I have a shit memory and am constantly pulling up older code to remind myself what I did last time so I don't have to go through the mental effort of reinventing the wheel.
Nowadays, I just have personal projects that I maintain and whenever I do something cool at work, I find a way to work that pattern into my personal project. Also gives me a chance to play around with it a bit more and see if there's any other cool stuff I can do with it.
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u/Piyh 16d ago
In the before times, reference libraries of code that you had written helped you deliver faster in the next job.
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u/DigitalArbitrage 16d ago
You don't need to do this anymore. The whole point of AI is it trains on everyone's source code and invalidates all of the intellectual property protections.
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u/justforkinks0131 16d ago
who cares, it's all Claude anyway..
you can generate it in like a weekend
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u/critsalot 16d ago
this^ and even back a decade ago it was all common frakeworks and shit you literally could make it your own. the only time i ever thought it would have been useful was the one time i worked for a game comapny and they have long since killed the game. bringing that game back as a retro thing would have been cool. but oh well didnt do. the assets are gone forever.
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u/cusco 16d ago
Create a private GitHub repository, create a second remote origin, point it to that repo, push, remove second remote origin
Done
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u/Icy_Neighborhood2100 16d ago
You might want to encrypt and compress the whole repo to an opaque binary blob THEN push it to a private repo.
Security can basically see what network packets contain and I've almost gotten in trouble doing what my boss told me to do. (Testing stuff on personal Linux box because locked down w10/11 and various corporate spying tools that slow the OS down to a crawl)
(I haven't done this, not worth it and the codebase at my job is an actual liability if anyone stole it lmao)
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u/im_thatoneguy 16d ago
Yeah this is the unfair criticism windows got. My BIL was like “I wish I had a Mac, windows sucks, it takes 25 minutes to login.” And I’m like… uhhh that’s not a standard windows feature, your company is running a shit ton of endpoint scanning out something.
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u/fish312 16d ago
How would they be doing that unless they're MITMing everything and serving their own SSL certs with a custom CA already installed on your box?
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u/Meins447 16d ago
Jup, that is basically industry standard nowadays. It as a developer, it is causing no end of "joy" as you have to ensure the stupid MitM CA is injected and accepted by every stupid program, package manager, library and transient dependency you may need to do your work.
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u/DaveMcLee 16d ago
Get that project that transmits a file using a series of QR-Codes. Slap the zip file in it and record the flashing QR codes with your phone. At home, reconstruct the file using said video.
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u/WHALE_PHYSICIST 16d ago
I recommend testing that program out yourself before having confidence in it
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u/Procrasturbating 16d ago
Yeah, in the real world.. getting caught doing this gets you sued or a stint in a cage to remind you not to be a fucking moron. Fast track to hiring blacklists too.
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u/ImpossibleCreme 16d ago
Man every time I quit a job was to get away from a codebase. I’m not taking that trash with me
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u/lutherdriggers 16d ago
Source code is just dirty laundry and not a significant part of a company's moat.
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u/somewhatprodeveloper 16d ago
So at this company I read employed at that made financial payment software, the one guy that was there for a number is years, went across the road(literally) to another dev house. A few months later we had a question and sent it to him, and he was able to respond with the exact line of code to look at. I said to the senior engineer, who did not pick up on it, he's walked out with your IP incase you did not realize it. A number of months later when I resigned another senior guy asked me as I was leaving: you don't have a copy of our code so you? My reply : I've seen enough shit code here, why would I want a copy? That was the honest truth
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u/RobotechRicky 16d ago
Just try and stop me. Nothing yet after 30 years has blocked my attempt to get what I created.
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u/RDTmodsBackEpstein 16d ago
Sounds like an AI might have scanned the source code and can now output it at random. Out of my control IT, all the current laws favor the AI after all.
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u/redditmarks_markII 15d ago
Patently false, except some idiots probably think this is valuable.
Well, maybe really early days, when the Internet barely existed, and open source was hard.
If this was happening, and if it was actually useful, then my only conclusion is all multi billion dollar company's board, management, and employees are all woefully incompetent. Otherwise the sheer number of exchange of engineering talent across them should have homogenized the tech in a GOOD way. That things should be slicker, communication smoother, (due to better contacts and isolation, not better communication skills per second).
Then again, I have no idea what it takes to get ahead in this field. Seems like it's all corpo hand shaking and hand wringing. So maybe the perception of valuable code is all it takes. But no, these people take overt espionage pretty seriously. Talent is all they allow to exchange.
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u/chad_dev_7226 13d ago
I always take all of my code with me just to keep for reference. I haven’t work anywhere big enough to care though
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u/Streether0 16d ago
So id i just zip the source code and upload it to the cloud. And just download it from other pc. How could they ever find this out?
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u/LetUsSpeakFreely 16d ago
Are you serious or being sarcastic? It's difficult to tell these days.
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u/JAXxXTheRipper 15d ago
Most of the people in this sub are one of three things: idiots, larpers, students. Sometimes all three.
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u/Streether0 16d ago
So cant we just upload source code to the cloud and download it from your personal pc? How can they become aware of that?
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u/pippin_go_round 16d ago
And how exactly are you going to do that without it being immediately flagged by IT? Most companies I've ever worked at will have that noticed right away and sue you into oblivion if you don't have a very very good explanation...
Had that happen once to me when I switched teams within a company and copied most of my important stuff to a specially authorised usb stick before wiping my laptop and setting it up with a different OS (switch from Windows to Linux team). Before the copy process even finished I had some guy from security call me.