

Wall Street Techs Take Secrets to Next Job at Their Peril - r0h1n
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-07-17/wall-street-techs-take-secrets-to-next-job-at-their-peril.html

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josgraha
This is a disturbing trend by IBs flexing their legal might against their
(former) software engineers. Before automated trading systems there were
traders who carried their strategies around in their heads. On the surface it
appears to be a game of scale because these strategies and systems are so
costly if a trader walked off with a strategy it was one less bonus check they
would have to pay. But if an engineer walks off with the design of a trading
system and some strategies, then the firm might have to come up with some new
strategies which is a costly affair indeed. Given the extreme nature of modern
cybercrime laws to thwart terrorism and safeguard our economic infrastructure
should they be used against ex-employees to safeguard intellectual property?
Perhaps an interesting legal debate given the stakes.

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xophe
This is why no one wants to work at [Your Stupid Hedge Fund Here].

A while ago there was an article about how Wall Street was bemoaning the
difficulty of recruiting top talent from tech.

Surprise: It isn't the money. There's plenty of money there. It's the total
lack of understanding on how programmers create value. And this is the result.

There's so much to expound on here, it's truly amazing.

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suls
"He continued to view information he wasn’t allowed to see on his home
computer, and repeatedly e-mailed confidential information to his personal
Gmail account, including research on trading in China and a new method to
improve models, the hedge fund claimed."

Wait, what? Did they wiretap him at home?

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o_nate
Most likely he was logged in remotely to work from home and they monitored his
activity. They make it sound nefarious, but it sounds pretty much like a
standard day working from home, except that he looked at some code he wasn't
directly working on out of curiosity. I think that bringing criminal charges
in a case of a minor violation of the employee handbook, as this appears to
be, is ludicrous. But I guess it's supposed to send a message to all the tech
geeks on Wall Street - don't get too uppity, and think twice about leaving for
a better job if you might have ever violated the employee handbook.

