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."

Comments

Lemme Get This Straight

[monkaduck]

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!.

Am I the only one who is a little suspcious?

[putko]

"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.

Raided?

[halcyon1234]

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.

Good for the engineers!

[Mostly a lurker]

I have a feel for what was happening here, reading between the lines of TFA. Top management was busy negotiating a merger with ScanSoft under which they stood to make a fortune. To maximise their profit from the deal, they wanted to make the company's financials look as good as possible. So, postpone any remuneration increases for staff and any capital expenditure on new equipment. Basically, the executives could not have cared a dime for whether the staff was happy provided they got their dream deal.

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.