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I have a sneaking suspicion that part of the reason for the sudden radio-silence after his on-campus interview is that someone up the chain realized he is also the creator of Sonarr and just nobody wanted to take ownership of that potential liability.



In the post, he says the deal was going to be getting hired and getting a bonus as compensation in exchange for him bringing AppGet's code into Microsoft and leading the project. That's a very simple deal in which no ownership of other projects is being transferred.

I'm not a lawyer but I'm pretty sure that hiring someone doesn't mean that you grandfather their liabilities. If that were the case the world would be chaos.

If Sonarr was the reason to reject him then it was done out of complete pettiness.


Large corporations often have more to fear from the liability of bad PR than they do from lawsuits. Most CEOs hate bad PR more than paying out a billion dollar fine — the billion dollar fine isn’t their money, and doesn’t cost them any status at the country club.


I'm actually having a hard time imagining something like Sonarr making much of a negative pr splash.

It doesn't download pirated shows, nor does it play them. It just organizes and renames and creates lists of missing episodes for files that may or may not be pirated content.


Mmmm... There is a certain segment of the tech industry that is morally opposed to piracy, and actively pursue those people. I know because I've seen the negative connotations they've received. Had a candidate with a homelab, peer inferred it was for piracy, didn't want to hire him because of that.

I've also seen it in the weebs and also brainwashing Japanese Corp culture.

I have a feeling because its m$ their cture dictates that they at least appear they were disgusted with his sonarr authorship.


A candidate had a device unrelated to the job which might be for piracy and you turned him down for that?

What sort of self-absorbed narciccist are you?


Well, they’re getting bad PR now for screwing the author over ...


No, they're not. That's the point. The problem is that nobody cares outside of here. If it shows up on a prominent Windows news site/blog, then I would consider it a PR disaster. But that hasn't yet happened.


Microsoft is a tech company. Getting bad PR among techies is pretty bad for them. Maybe not as bad as bad PR with general public, still bad...


Bit early to call that one.


There is no liability of a pre existing side project that they had no part in.


No but there is bad press

"Microsoft is paying someone who develops piracy software"

The half assed articles from TechCrunch and such will cause a lot of drama around MS they simply don't want.


Why? From the way you were talking about Sonarr, I expected it to be something more than... a bittorrent organizer. It has nearly 6k stars on github and seems wildly popular. Why would that be taken as anything but a strong "hire this person" signal?

I mean, I believe that it's possible you're correct. But this is just such a foreign "does not compute" situation to me. Is the thought process something like "Sonarr is often used to download things against copyright law -> that's a no-no -> we don't do no-no's here"? I'm trying to phrase this as positively as I can, so I apologize if it sounds like I'm belittling the mindset or something. It's not like that.

(It's mildly unfair to Microsoft to imply that this could be the reason, since as a company policy Microsoft can't show up and say "Well actually, the reason we didn't hire was because X" – and this seems like it would be an outstandingly bad decision. Old Microsoft may have made decisions like this, but in recent years they've made some pretty impressive reforms.)


Pretty easy to understand if you understand how risk-averse big corporations are, and how the image of BitTorrent has been forever polluted by "but, it's copyright infringement!".

Anything mentioning or using BitTorrent is scary for these huge companies, because it's associated with piracy.

Sure, your deploy times to your container fleet can be 70% faster, but if you're using BitTorrent, it'll be very hard to push that through leadership.


Guys, the usual "but BitTorrent can be used for so many legitimate purposes!" fig leaf argument doesn't work here. Sonarr isn't for downloading Linux ISOs. The only thing it does is schedule downloads of TV shows as soon as they air. You can't even use the "but my library is only composed of DVDs I purchased and ripped myself" excuse here. Sonarr only makes sense in the context of automated downloading of stuff that's on thetvdb.com (which is 99.99% copyrighted material).

You may or may not think that's a fine thing to do, but it is the only thing you can pretend Sonarr is for.


> Sonarr automates your TV downloads from public and private trackers (newsgroup and bittorrent)


A distinction should be drawn that Sonarr does not actually download from Usenet or BitTorrent. It merely interfaces with other programs and apis that can do so.


Not sure why. A torrent client is at least general purpose. The only use for sonarr is automate piracy of TV shows.


What's the liability, really?

Let's be honest, if it's a concern they speak up and say shelving this is a condition of employment.


This.

Choose your side projects wisely.


I really doubt it was it. Sonarr was one of the topics we talked about during the first meeting at Microsoft Vancouver.

Even if that was the case, I have no regrets.


I would say engineers have a different perspective than upper management.


You are making a total shot in the dark guess


I love Sonarr, it has saved me so much time, and is truly a great project. Thank you for all your hard work.


So that you don’t ruin your chances of being not ghosted by a company you barely want to work for.


Guilt by association.

This kind of behavior stifles innovation and attempts to limit what people can do.


Not to me, but to some people, definitely.

I was about to hire a guy and discussing him with the president, it came up that he was into ASICs for crypto mining (years before it was a big thing)... president didn’t like it, figured the guy to be a get rich quick type and through his direction we passed over hiring him.

Turns out in this case, it was a good call, but right or wrong it was enough to push the guy back in the pool as he was already on the edge anyhow.


You passed up a guy that had an interest outside your business and that was extremely technical?

I can understand the justifications for culture fit, however, to me it sounds like you passed over someone because he was ambitious outside of work. That's fine if that's your culture, but you should consider that as a red flag.


>> you passed over someone because he was ambitious outside of work

Many see that as a sign that they won't be 100% focused on the task at hand.


He was fine with it the president of his company wasn't.


As the other guy wrote. Wasn’t my final call. I understood the presidents point. If it was just me, I probably would have given him a try.

And also like I said, it worked out in this case, the guy was a get-rich-quick type. He went to work for someone I know and didn’t last there. Sub par work, rushed and didn’t really care. That’s all besides the point.

The point that yes, your outside interests can possibly effect your hiring prospects.


or stop attaching your real identity to online identity.


If you are so ashamed of your work that you need to do it under a different name, then maybe you shouldn't be doing it?

I'm proud of the work I've done on Sonarr. If someone doesn't want to associate with me because of it, then the feeling is probably mutual.




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