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Yahoo Accused Of Raiding Workers
wellington map writes "Nuance Communications, a Menlo Park maker of speech-recognition software, has sued Yahoo for unfair competition and theft of trade secrets, accusing the Internet giant of raiding all but one of Nuance's research and development engineers. Nuance said 13 engineers from its Menlo Park and Montreal offices were 75 percent finished with a project that would allow people to search the Internet by speaking their queries into a telephone, rather than typing them on a computer keyboard. Nuance planned to sell the technology to companies like Yahoo."
Its not like yahoo will benefit. All they did was screw another company over. In the end, Google will buy Nuance Comm. and life will be good :)
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This guy doesn't pay his employees enough, fails to include any clause in their contracts (if they signed any) that prohibits them from making off with tech developed under his banner, and he gets mad at Yahoo! for it? He should be mad at his former partner for setting this up. I get the feeling from the article that he didn't follow through with obvious business procedure (procuring the rights of all technology devolped by the company's employees under contract to said company). There must have been something to make everyone jump ship to Yahoo!.
Napalm is nature's toothpaste
Treat your devs right and you wouldn't have this problem.
"Nuance said 13 engineers from its Menlo Park and Montreal offices were 75 percent finished with a project ..."
That sounds like they aren't very finished. Who knows if they would have finished in time, if they were at that stage. Even if I thought I was 75% finished, we know I might only be half finished -- that last bit to finish is always a huge effort, and that's typically where you blow your schedule.
You figure the business folks suing Yahoo have an interest in making it sound like they were more finished than less -- e.g. if they were 99% finished, and Yahoo! swooped in to recruit the whole bunch, that would look awful.
So perhaps they were "50% finished" -- however you measure that (sounds like their app is a totally new piece of work, so you can't really estimate it well), and they pump it up to 75% finished.
Also, why did so many of the guys split to go to Yahoo!? It looks to me like people were itching to leave. Considering this happened after a merger/buyout --and that one camper was pretty unhappy, perhaps the engineers were feeling bad and were looking to move somewhere nicer.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
Do they mean "microphone", or is this some sort of weird unholy spawn of VoIP and Internet search?
So, these people realise their on a sinking ship and get out, taking a job with another company. Apparently, conditions are bad enough that once one guy got the idea, everybody sees fit to join him. Probably they forsaw the product never getting finished, the company being unable to attract new hires, and tanking. So then the company gets in trouble, isn't able to get people to fill the positions left vacant, and who's to blame? Of course, the people who saw it all coming and got out of there; and the company that hired them..
Would I be wrong in thinking these engineers probably warned management multiple times that they weren't happy, that their employer should be doing a better job, that they should be getting the sort of facilities they now have at yahoo? And would I be wrong in thinking their employer just shrugged and said "meh", since what do these engineersy, non-MBA type people know? In other words, that they're a really shitty employer? I think the fact they're sueing their barely ex-employees almost proves it.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
Did they mirror and stripe them?
OK, for whatever reason, all your engineers desert one day.
Do you look in the mirror and figure that you really fucked it up big? Are you really going to tell that to the shareholders --- sorry guys, I lost your company.
No -- you reach for your lawyer, claim you got "raided" and try to build the biggest sympathy case you can.
And if it works, when you are over, you tell folks, "I went up against Yahoo!. They got horribly dirty and tried to raid us. They succeeded in raiding 92% of the staff. But I fought back, we settled and the investors were happy. The only reason we didn't lose everything was due to my nerves of steel."
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
another corp has ripped a page out of microsoft business practices.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/metricmusic
The problem is accuracy of the speech recognition which is known to be less than usable. And it is expected that anyone, with no previous training of the speech recognition engine is going to be able to speak any query including proper names into a low bit rate channel (telephony) and the engine will work? I think a few people are getting the cart before the horse on this one.
Speech recognition is really, really, really, really, really, really, really hard. And only usable under optimum conditions and when you can give the engine hints on what the user might say. Neither of which will be true for this usage of the technology. So this is a tempest in a teapot to be sure.
And do these guys get to leave with the entire speech recongition engine? That doesn't sound right. It is Nuance's flagship product. I would imagine that Yahoo will still have to license a SR engine from Nuance (since they just merged with Scansoft) or IBM.
And finally, why is this better than some WML or similar application designed for a phone that can leverage graphics and text on the screen? It seems that this is a complicated piece of technology looking for a problem to solve.
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
I feel sorry for the guy, yahoo should pick him up too and be done with it.
Arash
Arash Partow's Philosophy: Be a person who knows what they don't know, and not a person who doesn't know.
Okay, I must be behind on the current lingo... because when I read "Yahoo raided 12 engineers", I get an image of them hooking 12 engineers together to make some sort of Super Redundant Engineer.
UTF-8: There and Back Again
Is it just me, or is there something wrong with the new CSS layout?
but do you see this sexy mouse? http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/akiba/hotline/20000 805/image/sms1.jpg
bottom line, is if i have experience in something and i'm good at it, i'll work for ever i want and anyone who has anything to say about it can just fuck off.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
If they were going to allow querying of search engines via telephone, how where they going to have the results returned to the customer? Where they going to have the computer at the other end "read-out" the results? Surely that would take a large amount of processing power, be hard for the user to take in (too much information being spoken without the ability to ask to repeat, like you would with a human), and take forever (computers talk slow: "You...have...(pause) [new voice]three[/new voice] (pause)...search...results. (pause)To...read...aloud...press...). If they were planning on using it with mobile phones and displaying the results on the screen, why not just browse with WAP (or a similar tech) to Yahoo's site and search the normal way?
Unless, of course, they meant for users to query by microphone whilst sitting at the computer. In that case, why not just use existing voice recognition software to tell your computer to go to Yahoo! and search for what you want?
Doesn't make sense to me. IMHO, it's redundant and it's not even finished yet. I can see why the engineers left.
I wonder what Paul Graham would think about this case after his essay "hiring is obsolete", maybe sould he renamed it "being hired is obsolete" ?
...is really regretting the number of times he used the "I think 3% is a pretty good raise in the current business climate" line during the last performance review cycle.
Hmm, an HR drone on pogey - I like the sound of that.
Scenario: this startup approaches Yahoo to be bought out. Yahoo, being a survivor of the Bubble, feigns interest (or perhaps is genuinely interested - we may never know). Nuance previews the technology they've developed to apply search queries over the phone. Yahoo doesn't care for that particular technology, but likes the engineers. They don't like all the engineers, and they don't like the management.
Rather than fund technology that won't fly, paying millions of dollars to a bunch of know-nothing empty suits, they decide to hire the engineers to work on something else, or on a better way to do the same thing.
The reason we may never know whether this was an underhanded theft of technology or a bunch of valiant sailors deserting a sinking ship is that Yahoo may now offer a settlement to the Nuance suits. They'll get their money, shut up, and go away. Yahoo gets the good parts of Nuance, but doesn't have to pay really big bucks to the parasites.
Or Yahoo could play hardball and stick to the story I've just painted. They could end up paying less to the lawyers than the Nuance suits would cost. And any publicity is good publicity.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
I've personally seen only one company before where the employees pulled a mass exodus like that, and let me tell you the boss was a _total_ asshole. He treated people like dirt. He just had to remind everyone that he's the boss and you're the peon, he pulled unreasonable demands like that everyone brings a sleeping bag and noone leaves until they're ready with some piece of software that the idiot fancied he wanted until tomorrow, he overrode any decision of those he delegated to do something, and berating was for him apparently like breathing.
It was one experience that made me feel a _lot_ better about my own employer at the time. I mean, geesh, whatever minor complaints I had, by comparison to that asshole... ooer, I was having a dream job.
And that's the thing that's IMHO necessary to really see an exodus like that.
Otherwise people leave, yes, but gradually. Just being in an useless project takes some time to sap your will to go on, and it takes different time for different people. People can go on for years just being comfortable in one place. And while there's a visible minority that just jumps from job to job for more pay with no regrets, a lot of us nerds prefer not taking a risk if we don't have to. A workplace that's not quite perfect can be preferrable to plunging into the unknows. So again, any turnaround for minor grievances and boredom will tend to be slow and gradual.
What we have here is basically a situation where everyone leaves as soon as the first one tells the others "hey guys, I got hired at Yahoo and guess what? They're hiring! Blow that joint and come over here." That tells me that they already wanted badly to leave, and probably just uncertainty kept them there.
The wake of a dot-com bust has left a lot of people just too affraid to leave even a bad job, and has given a lot of managers the idea that they can finally be the assholes they always wanted to be. And it even works for a while. But it just begs this kind of situation to happen: it only takes one "hey guys, this other company is hiring and they're not assholes" to just remove that barrier of fear, uncertainty and doubt keeping everyone in.
And much as I'd like to think that at least one manager has now learned a valuable lesson, he didn't. He'll blame it on Yahoo, he'll blame it on the employees, etc, and the go back to doing the same again.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Dogbert, evil HR manager, finally gets his due. Gotta love that!
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
I think I've figured out where their "75%" figure comes from:
1. Purchase speech recognition software
2. Purchase telephone
3. ???
4. Profit!
After all Yahoo is in the search business ...
Oh come on. This just gives them an excuse to get even CHEAPER engineering talent from places like India and Russia! These self-important engineers are doing them a favor by leaving. I mean they still have all the money-counting talent in house which is what's really important right?
Rats would be more funny if they could fart.
Having recently been part of a mass exodus after a substantial layoff, there might be another scenario to play. He may say "I went up against Yahoo!. They got horribly dirty and tried to raid us. They succeeded in raiding 92% of the staff. But seeing as we were totally screw, we sold the company and the investors were happy. The only reason we didn't lose everything was due to my nerves of steel." Anyone left with the company below top brass will be screwed, but the investors will be happy and the boss will get a nice big bonus for salvaging a bad situation. It's a sad event to see, but all the signs are there for people to take a hint. Anyone who doesn't get out of that situation has only themselves to blame. I really hope anyone left at that company has plans to move on.
...but when I viewed the page, there was this topical ad beneath the article. Do you think that someone is hoping to jump in and pick up the pieces when these two flame each other out? :)
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
I was going to respond to one or two other posters, until I realized that about 90% didn't make it past the first section ofthe article...either that or we are reading completely differant articles...Somehow I am missing the "they should have gotten a raise", "the company was a sinking ship", "the company was looking to get bought out by Yahoo", etc comments that I have seen so far...
Tech company that already has speech products on market and is working on better one, is bought out by competitor. VP of R&D ``began agitating for more authority'' as company is being acquired. Denied. Pissed off VP. Said VP then emails his resume and list of 13 coworkers to himself as well as a proposed organizational plan for a new R&D dept. Also starts swapping emails with Yahoo. Goes off to a job at Yahoos brand new speech lab, soon followed by all of the people on his list...
To me this sounds like they were gutted by yahoo, but passively. It doesn't look (from this one article) that Yahoo actiavely recruited them away, but that one pissed off manager asked Yahoo to more or less bribe him, then took everyone he needed to build a new speech lab...I think, if this article portrays things acurately, that the VP is at fault, but that Yahoo might be a little complicit for accepting his plan.
As far as the article claiming this type of litigation is "emerging over the last year", I have to disagree. Maybe it was only newsworthy for the past year, but it was going on before that. Hell, my company was sued two years ago because one of our guys got two other previous coworkers hired on. Their original company attempted to sue us, though I believe it was thrown out since we are in another field completely, didn't actively recruit them, etc. Kind of the opposite of the article in fact (even numbers wise, we hired 3 out of 30+ I think).
Whee signature.
The R&D department, after bitching about what is happening for months, finds a way that they can cut themselves a much better deal. Now the executives are bent out of shape because the employees will not agree to get shafted for their benefit.
Nuance had every opportunity to keep the guy (give him more control, better wages) and to keep the other guys (bump their wages, work conditions). If I had a good work relationship with my boss, and the execs were being trumping him over, and other company offered to encompass the whole team, I would go with him... especially if that meant a wage bump, and good work conditions.
Contract work is NOT slave work. Everyone can leave at the moment he/she wants. It's the frecking JOB of a company to keep workers interested in staying.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
would fall for this BS. If there is a mass exodus, if I was top brass, I would be certain that the boss is at fault. I've seen good (as good as possible) PHBs retaining a group of 20 developers, 3 months salary behind, for one year, everyone with work proposals outside doubling their wages.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Great parody of a copy-paste troll!
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Firstly, it's not contract work. Second, it's at-will employment. Anyone can leave or be fired, anytime.
The lawsuit is not about people leaving Nuance. It's about an employee colluding with his future employer to hire away an entire department at a vulnerable moment. It's a pretty serious betrayal.
If Heck couldn't get what he wanted, fine let him go to Yahoo. But Heck bringing along the entire R&D dept in his back pocket to make his transition to Yahoo a slam-dunk is clearly going to far.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
When the 13 engineers went to Yahoo, Nuance was being acquired by Scansoft. That acquisition has since closed and Nuance is now part of Scansoft. Scansoft is infamous for buying out its competitors, "laying off" all the acquired employees, and "retiring" the acquired products. They've done it over and over again.
For example: Last year Scansoft bought a company called Rhetorical. Rhetorical sold a speech synthesizer that was better and cost less than Scansoft's. Just one year later Rhetorical is a dead product. Scansoft has fired all but one Rhetorical employee and they are pushing Rhetorical customers to buy the less-capable Scansoft RealSpeak speech synthesizer for a higher price.
Thanks to this notorious reputation, the Nuance engineers knew they had at most one year of employment left after Scansoft takes over. Scansoft would probably pay them to finish the project - but they almost certainly would then get canned.
Would you stay in these circumstances? I wouldn't.
PS: Yahoo isn't the only one hiring speech research engineers left and right. Google has hired dozens of speech engineers from Nuance, Scansoft, and other companies in the last year. Remember the guy in China Google hired that Microsoft got all pissy and sued Google about? Guess what he and many of his Chinese co-workers were hired to do at Microsoft originally: Speech research.
There seems to be an increasing amount of forced retention in the industry, where employees get sued over leaving. Microsot seems to be doing it wholesale, and now some startups are too... Usually, if employees leave, it means that the company they left has a problem -- not that the new company is doing something wrong (although there are examples of the latter). I've seen mass exoduses where a big company wants to kill a little company, so they hire away key employees (often making up jobs). It is a way of throwing money at the problem of a startup undermining your business. Microsoft did that to Borland, if I recall correctly. I'm wondering which this is.
"you see the church over there ? go the fuck out my office and go pray for the continuity of your employment ! Where doing business here, not preaching!"
You reap what you sow, etc...
Also, can you please explain how to conciliate those two sentences :
"it's at-will employment. Anyone can leave or be fired, anytime."
"It's a pretty serious betrayal"
It's not a trust party, it's a business. There is no betrayal, there is "Research unit matrix conservation"
"Heck bringing along the entire R&D dept in his back pocket to make his transition to Yahoo a slam-dunk is clearly going to far"
At least he drove his point to the ex-manager that now have a 25% unfinished project and a lone researcher that was so nerdy his co-workers didn't tell him of the switch plan.
Actually it's nice seing a company getting fucked up by it's employees, instead of the usual reverse...
You've been fucked off. Resistance is Futile, Pass the KY you will be ass-imilated.
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
Once again, code ownership will spawn lawsuits. How much of this can society really afford?
While I'm ordinarily inclined to feel bad for the victim of such obviously anti-competitive practices, it's hard to feel bad for software owners. Those who live by the sword, die by the sword.
Here's a good reason to use free software: It can't be stolen out from under you.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I don't know about other jurisdictions, but there is NO such thing in the laws where I live.
... and some more to boot. If Yahoo offered Heck a 50% raise, and a CTO position, and the others 25% raise, Nuance could have offered Heck a 75% raise, CTO position, company car, and the others 40% raise and bigger Xmas bonuses. Simple as that.
If I leave my current job for a better-paid, more enjoyable job, you bet I will try to take every well-qualified coworker I can take with me. Why? Because a company is an abstract entity. If I know of 15 better-paying-better-everything openings, it would be treason to my colleagues not telling them.
I repeat myself: if Nuance really wanted to keep everyone, it should have given everyone what Yahoo gave
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
If they had said "co-owners" I would have understand why they are upset, but the wording "worker" make the whole thing sound like, "we can get them in droves, so don't pay them too much".
Regards, Tommy
I was a long-term intern at another company when they got bought by ScanSoft and ScanSoft tried to screw me over too. Interns don't get any benefits, but I had negotiated with the company that was being bought to get paid holidays (not vacation, just holidays). ScanSoft tried to take that away. Unfortunately for ScanSoft, they didn't make me sign a new contract when they took over, so I just stomped my feet a little and they gave in. It couldn't have amounted to more than a couple hundred dollars overall, so I'm not sure why they chose to be difficult. The corporate culture at ScanSoft is very dreary. Not to mention the fact that they've bought what amounts to about ten different speech technology companies over the past 5 years, so the whole place is a technology and corporate culture integration nightmare.
I applaud those Nuance engineers for getting out. Yahoo is probably a much more exciting place to work, because Nuance has been a sinking ship, financial speaking, for quite some time.
You mean you can get information? For free? On the phone?
No way!
Interestingly enough, this tells us a LOT about what services Yahoo! plans! to! offer! in the future. It was an obvious next service offering, but this lawsuit confirms it.
Parent means 1-800-555-TELL (1-800-555-8355)
Yeah, right.
As a former Nuance employee reading all these comments, I find it pretty amusing. Just about everything everybody is saying here is very misinformed. This is quite understandable, as the article isn't terribly detailed, or indeed at all accurate about what the actual points of contention are.
The issue is not about r&d employees leaving. How can it be, when non-compete clauses are non-enforcable in California? The issue is whether those employees were actively recruited by the head r&d guy, who, presumably, signed an agreement not to do so.
It's a pretty difficult thing to prove, anyway. Did they all follow him to Yahoo on their own, or did he call them up and say, "hey, I'm putting a new team together at Yahoo, and I want to keep all the old gang together." The former is fine, the latter violates most standard employment contracts (even in California).
Whoops ... Yeah. (-1 Idiot) for me.
Companies want all the agreements and the H1-Bs, but they ought to have to compete on the open market for labor. If a company can't keep workers, then I guess the ones that left thought it was better at another company.
You know, Nuannce or whatever company probably wouldn't think twice about selling itself to another company for enough cash, and laying off all the employees that worked on the product. If they get to be greedy, market-driven businessmen, the people who left should get to be too. These days, I say, go for the best offer you have; companies don't have loyalty anymore, why should you?