zlacker

>>lostms+(OP)
Keivan obviously got screwed.

Having worked at Microsoft, and seeing the nature of the bureaucracy, the only advice I would give for next time is...

Just realize you can't set terms with a large company like MSFT unless you get lawyers involved early.

Stealing from you outright is simply too tempting, given their resources.

I noticed there were some conditions Keivan tried to set regarding the future evolution of the technology before joining MSFT.

In a large company like MSFT, there were bound to be large internal email threads relaying a play-by-play of negotiations with Keivan to: inside legal counsel, developers who already gave t-shirt sizes for building the tech in-house, product managers, and dozens of others.

No matter what they tell you, they're internally weighing

- Should we just rip him off? - Should we hire him? Would that be better or worse for liability? - How IP protected is this? How much can we "borrow"? - Is it worth the hassle of dealing with an aqui-hire we can't control? Would that expose us to even more IP risk, or less?

Once companies reach this size, they simply can't be trusted to handle a negotiation transparently and in good faith, unless you have well paid lawyers fighting for you, or well established IP protection.

I guess what I'm saying is...

When dealing with any large tech company with near infinite resources -- like MSFT, GOOG, etc --, find a legally defensible upper hand, and assume they are weighing the cost-benefit of screwing you.

(Sadly, this is exactly why lawyers make so much money.)

>>ijidak+KA
Hopefully they also weigh in the fact that screwing developers over is terrible publicity. Assume 100k developers see this and are slightly less inclined to trust MS in future, this bad publicity could easily cost them 1mn USD plus. A good will gesture of 100k USD at the start for consulting could have saved everyone a lot of trouble.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23332123 elsewhere in this thread for an example of the consequences.

The cost of GitHub to MS was around 250 usd per user. If 4000 users leave that’s already a million USD.

>>ximeng+pQ
I worked for a brand & marketing company for 15 years and I observed that most of my clients had pretty short memories when it came to how they felt about me. If the last few milestones were really great they quickly forgot an incident. Obviously, the more impactful an incident, the longer/more positive milestones had to be. An incident too impactful got your fired - but, in general, this was my experience.

Even in their recent history Microsoft has repeated incidents, but also has some very big positive milestones. Also, keeping in mind, some customers will only see the positive milestones.