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Comment by Exuma | Hacker News Reader

I think the CEO is absolutely nuts here.

With that said, I also think certain employees though have a very slippery mentality of this sort of vibe where they do things that might be sketchy or on the borderline not OK (but JUST on the line), and then rationalize as "but ... reason!". The tone of this whole article is very subtly reminiscent of that... the type of person that when given an inch will take 10 inches (not even a mile, not that severe), and always do it under the guise of many bullet points and being nice, like this article... but the undertones are there that they're really trying to push the boundary.

That's my unsolicited .02

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The tone here is "uhhh, I did this thing and it turns out it might be bad but I dont think so". Tbh, the tone he kept here is quite well mannered comparing to the situation at hand.

The vibe is more about a person being excited for doing something cool with tech and a company where they interned (not worked, interned!) feeling threatened because it crosses into their domain. If "let’s see what else can I maake with this" is an offense, then to hell I'll throw my lightbulbs away.

I understand your perspective.

What do you make of the comment about "hardest intern we've ever worked with."

I understand the CEO is feeling very emotional and is clearly manipulating/exaggerating, but I would imagine he wouldn't say this if it were entirely 100% fabricated.

Do you believe any part of that statement might be true?

Why would they offer him a job right before saying that? Some of it could be true, absolutely, but it seems more emotionally manipulative than anything else, to me. The CEO was mad so he said something.

> Why would they offer him a job right before saying that?

A few people have mentioned that on this thread, but I don't think it's in sync with the reality of how incredibly hard it is to hire technical talent right now, esp talent that knows your systems well.

It's entirely possible for someone to be the most demanding intern a co has ever had and still be a great hire; hell, it might even be _correlated_. Interns usually haven't figured out workplace norms yet, and combining that with being smart and driven could easily yield good-faith behavior that nevertheless is "demanding" (for example, asking lots of questions about tasks he's given, asking for guidance with parts of the system he's not working on, etc etc). In that case, I would absolutely want to hire that intern, with the understanding that he'd need to get better at the cultural aspects of the job once he joined full-time (as all intern conversions do).

That being said, no question that it was a bizarre and immature thing for the CEO to bring up, and I don't disagree with your characterization of it as "emotionally manipulative".

I'm looking at this from the perspective of "is the emotion/frustration felt by the CEO valid". In other words, did this open source author actually do ANYTHING which could cause frustration in a previous employer. An important part of that is whether they were actually a 50% pain in the ass employee who repeatedly was pushy (but still perhaps is hireable because they were net positive)

I'm disregarding any commentary on actual action taken by the CEO, because as I said I think it's incredibly stupid and immature.

This reply below by @treis is a good explanation of how i feel about the answer to your question.

> Lots of CEOs/Owners will definitely be salty about that. And they're not totally wrong to feel that way. You pay someone a bunch of money only to watch them walk and help your competitor take your market share. It's understandable why that's upsetting. But they should have the maturity to understand that's how the world works and not throw a tantrum.

"...but I would imagine he wouldn't say this if it were entirely 100% fabricated."

How many of the CEO class have you interacted with? This is approximately Step 3 in the psychology: "OMG, I have to convince myself and the rest of the world that this person is not only wrong but also bad." He likely spent several minutes rehearsing the comment before writing. (No, really, I've sat there and watched someone repeat similar comments before a meeting, to make sure they believed it enough to be convincing.)

What boundary do you think they pushed though? I understand the sentiment in general, but I didn't get it here at all because I can't see anything wrong, bad or questionable that OP did.

Honestly there is nothing technically or legally wrong but I would say this was bad faith by the intern in a minor way. Like, its just not nice nor smart to do things that act against the interests of those that have put faith and trust in you. In this case, he's created a web site that at a surface level makes Replit look trivial to implement - boasts that in a weekend or two he's supported massively more languages. And absolutely, part of his knowledge as to how to do it came from what he probably learned there. So intentionally or not, he's done something that hurts the interests of his former employer.

So if you hired an electrician to fix a light bulb and then after they left they told everyone your house sucked. Illegal? no. Unprofessional? yes, slightly. Would you hire them again? no. Would you sue them? that would be ridiculous.

On balance, the CEO is clearly the one more in the wrong here and definitely acting in a dumb way. I would run away from investing in this company with him at the helm. But I would say there is a little bit of bad faith on the other side here too.

Wow, someone who sees more clearly than black and white. I said the same thing and get downvoted into oblivion.

yeah the downvotes were quite unfair

This is the best summary of the situation, on this thread. Thanks!

The area that seemed gray here particularly was the "internal decisions part." As someone who has designed maybe... 40+ interfaces, I know the tremendous amount of effort and thought that goes into the simple placement of a button being on the left or the right, with huge impacts to usability and user experience.

So when he posts a few images of other sites that "look" similar, I don't quite buy the fact that he didn't liberally borrow from the many hours of decisions by Repli. Thats purely a guess though, and I could absolutely be wrong.

I would imagine it would be easy for the author to rationalize it in his head that "well, lots of other sites have a button in the top row I can do it too!" and in effect, ends up copying a lot of Replit features without innovating on them simply because other sites "look similar"

I picture myself as a CEO seeing a previous employee with something that is very clearly using a lot of the decisions we worked out together, and then see a list of 20 bullet points trying to rationalize why it's ok, that would be super irritating to me, but that would be the limit of it. Definitely not worthy of anything more than a polite conversation, that's for sure.

Assume I am an employee. Assume I take a year or two of these internal decisions during my tenure at an org to my next employer. Would you be equally upset that my work experience was used elsewhere? Where is the line between your trade secret and my hard earned work experience?

Because that’s what work experience is: showing future employers where not to make mistakes that were previously learned in the course of work. That knowledge (that has a half life) is part of my compensation, arguably the most valuable of my total comp.

Lots of CEOs/Owners will definitely be salty about that. And they're not totally wrong to feel that way. You pay someone a bunch of money only to watch them walk and help your competitor take your market share. It's understandable why that's upsetting. But they should have the maturity to understand that's how the world works and not throw a tantrum.

> You pay someone a bunch of money only to watch them walk and help your competitor take your market share. It's understandable why that's upsetting.

No, it really isn't because that's how business works. This is like getting upset that my plumber might fix my competitors' pipes, too.

That's not at all an analogous situation

A truly analogous situation would be the CEO of Repl.it working on Codeacademy Labs as an employee, a similar product to Repl.it, before leaving and launching Repl.it itself, which is what happened.

Yeah and well you don’t act petty and unprofessional as the CEO of any company. Tech does not get a pass on it. I fully enjoy watching an intern evoke this level of response from a well funded CEO. I was employee #1 for a start up still in business so I know how they can be your ‘baby’ but give me a break on this one... the CEO literally is projecting what he himself did onto this intern.

Being upset about something and acting on it are 2 very different things.

I don't know many people who would not be upset about investing many hours into something only to have someone copy it in 24 hour period and repost it with only slight modifications as theirs.

Acting on that, however, is a very different story. If someone is going to act on such emotions they shouldn't be a CEO to begin with probably.

If someone invested "many hours" into something for it just to be copied in 24 hours - maybe not the best idea.

It’s almost entirely within the employer’s power to make it worthwhile for key employees to not leave for their competitors.

That wouldn't upset me because that is simply knowledge not implementation.

As I said in the other reply, my post is at an emotional/personal level (as an owner/creator and also employer), not necessarily a legal or more political one. On that basis i 100% side with the author here.

I was merely saying this situation definitely smells like one where there's more to the story than "big bad replit picking on poor innocent open source guy". Just the tone of his writing seems, and the "one of most difficult interns" gives me gut reaction that he might actually be someone who tries to be pushy while being nice.

> Just the tone of his writing seems, and the "one of most difficult interns" gives me gut reaction that he might actually be someone who tries to be pushy while being nice.

You took a single sentence out of an entire article with plenty of other supporting evidence to construct a reality where someone in a similar position as you would have cover.

It's extraordinary.

You're acting as if my reaction is based on one sentence. It's most certainly not. I read the entire post, looked at all the screenshots, looked between the lines of the words, looked at the emotion behind why/what is being said.

My current "constructed reality" is that the author built something in a very short time, likely liberally re-using design decisions from his previous employer. And that the CEO, who is a douche, got emotionally upset over this, probably from his perspective/shared history which is something NO ONE ON HN CAN SEE, and there's likely more to the story. Emotionally I can understand why this might upset Replit CEO. One can be frustrated, while still being mature enough to not let it affect action, and certainly not threatening to sue or any of that.

HN is so black and white sometimes it's painful. Just because I can relate emotionally to one person being frustrated, doesn't suddenly mean I fully support all their actions or live in some fantasy land tiny projects should be sued for exaggerated claims

He interned during a summer at repl.it 2 years ago. So even if he took some results of internal discussion on how to place buttons on the website, this is not like they had a cure for cancer.

If you ever move between two big tech firms, they'll sit you down in a room with a lawyer who clarifies exactly where that line is.

IANAL, but roughly, general knowledge is ok, but specific results aren't. If you were party to user research findings at company A, it's likely against your NDA to tell company B "we should do X" based on the remembered outcome of that research.

this is precisely why companies poach employees from their competitors...

But the UI is public. Did Replit copyright or patent the UI design?

Patents can apply, but it’s really only used in novel and unique situations. Even if Replit had a patient on its UI/UX design, if you were able to find evidence of prior art, you could petition to invalidate.

Not to disagree with you. Didn't Apple sue Microsoft for copying the Mac UI on copyright ground? I know they settled, not sure what's the real legal outcome of it.

Edit: Ok, just looked it up. Apple lost all claims on copyrighting the Mac UI.

The author's excuses about "not intended to compete" or "it's free and open-source" (paraphrasing) aren't relevant when it comes to whether he stole anything or is competing. That said, the CEO is out of line IMO.

I agree about the tone, but I think it comes from youthful inexperience and a lack of (legal) knowledge. OP has no idea where the line is, what the lines are, or what professional legal defense would actually require/entail. And so they're stuck trying to rationalize every possibly-defensible point in the court of public opinion.

Also, a good way to get employees that aren't testing boundaries is to hire experienced developers rather than interns who are still learning the world.

Overall I don't see what leg repl.it has to stand on here - their product relies on taking numerous free software packages and bundling them into proprietary software, and yet they have the gall to consider button placement some secret sauce?! But it also depends on what OP's employment contract says and when he actually developed this. Altogether, this really just looks like a case of a CEO personally bullying someone else because they can.

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