

Google forces employee to disavow MVP status - madair
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/02/google_microsoft_mvp/

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willwagner
I think this is bad PR for Google but the fact that Microsoft makes MVPs sign
non-disclosure agreements might be a contributing factor.

IANAL, but if it were me and I had been working on technologies for which
there may be information that I potentially couldn't disclose to my day job, I
would be worried about the conflicts that might result. For instance, if you
are spending several days working around a bug in the OS and Microsoft gives
you a pre-release version of a service pack that fixes that bug, would you
continue to work on the work around or just tell your boss it's not worth the
effort? As an employer, I'd be even more worried about a bogus lawsuit that
might result.

Sometimes you can't have it all.

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prat
Unless there is a contractual clause saying that google employees shall have
no services provided to them from another company (and from the word "forces"
I assume there is not), google should not have forced this employee.
Insecurity is not a hallmark of a genuinely better company.

~~~
natrius
It is perfectly reasonable for Google to discourage employees from entering
into non-disclosure agreements with competitors.

~~~
patio11
But its an NDA about their upcoming C# news, something Google has less-than-
zero interest in. This rationale makes about as much sense as a corporate
directive to avoid signing NDAs for MMORPG betas.

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nixme
Jon Skeet also has the highest rep of any user on stackoverflow:
<http://stackoverflow.com/users/22656>

~~~
Evgeny
Not only that, but his status there is of a legend.

"Jon Skeet Facts" - <http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/9134/jon-skeet-
facts>

Some of those are quite hilarious

Oh, and this site <http://askjonskeet.com/>

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madair
It's like being a vassal. People can worry about contract this and contract
that, but that's all a distraction from the feudal servitude that developers
are under to their corporate lords.

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jrockway
Google is pretty nice to this guy, though, as it's clear from SO that he must
not do very much work for them.

~~~
wyday
I must say this is pretty shitty thing to say about someone. A backhanded
compliment at best.

~~~
jrockway
His post rate is around 15 answers a day. Considering that most of these are
highly-rated (and thus, not stuff like "lol you r dum"), it is likely that
this eats up a good portion of his workday.

~~~
kevingadd
Maybe that's what he spends his '20% time' on?

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hussong
Heh, I'm amused by the term "Mountain View Chocolate Factory" -- but where's
Charlie?

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jriddycuz
Did anyone else catch that guy's name? Ah Skeet!

