February 28th, 2006
Yahoo! Employees Use Yahoo! Instant Messenger to Defect to Start-Up
By Alice Hill
RealTechNews
The technology world is a world of extermes. When there are no jobs, you can’t throw a rock without hitting an out-of-work engineer. When times are fat, comanies do whatever they can to pull away talent from well respected companies. Case in point: Yahoo! Inc. While this is not news, the fact that the defecting employess used Yahoo’s own IM software - Yahoo! Messenger to chat and scheme their departure, is just too ironic for words. It’s also stupid. As in lawsuit stupid. So Yahoo is suing sartup Mforma and its own ex-employess on theft of trade secrets. And no - switching to AOL’s AIM didn’t help the situation at all.
According to the suit, the defection of the tight-knit group of Yahoo engineers and business development staffers began with a single employee, who then began recruiting his former colleagues, in violation of contracts he’d previously signed with Yahoo. As the team left, they took with them financial forecasts, business strategy documents and even Yahoo source code for technologies designed to send content efficiently to cell phones, the suit alleges. Much of the evidence is drawn from back-and-forth instant messaging conversations conducted on company laptops. At several points, the employees switched to using similar chat software from AOL, apparently in an attempt to avoid detection, the suit claims. Source: news.com via TechDirt
Bill King says:
That’s just plain stupid. You sign employment agreements. You sign NDA’s. It’s a common part of the tech industry. They’re also watertight and enforceable. Did these idiots forget about them? Or did they think they could get around them? I know IANAL is a common acronym thrown around the industry, but in this day and age, you almost have to be just to survive in the minefields.
February 28th, 2006 at 2:34 pm
John Kim says:
Wow. I worked with all these guys at Excite@Home and EarthLink. We all left Excite@Home for EarthLink as a group in October 2001 — which was pretty understandable since Excite was bankrupt, in the process of dissolving, and had screwed over its employees. But they’ve done it twice since then (to Yahoo and now to MForma). I don’t know anything about these latter two, but it seems like a dangerous game.
February 28th, 2006 at 4:27 pm
David Johnston says:
Wow. It’s one thing to talk about leaving your current employer, but it’s an entirely different story when you decide to steal from them and then use that stolen information or property to compete with them.
February 28th, 2006 at 4:49 pm
Thor says:
If they are stupid enough to do this, they shouldn’t be working for any company.
February 28th, 2006 at 6:48 pm
neeti says:
its good
March 1st, 2006 at 2:29 am
Matt says:
can y’all say “black-balled in the industry”? serves them right, obviously they thought they were smarter and wouldnt get caught.
March 1st, 2006 at 5:44 am
Jimmy says:
And to use Yahoo’s instant messenger, obviously they aren’t as smart as they think they are.
March 1st, 2006 at 6:54 am
Alice says:
I like how they switched to AIM like you can’t trace and sniff out IM chat threads on your company network. Lame.
March 1st, 2006 at 9:03 am
shala says:
i havent used it yet!
March 1st, 2006 at 11:15 am
Shay says:
Did anyone ever think that the reason that they used Yahoo IM and AIM and communicated openly about leaving is that they weren’t actually stealing anything from the company and didn’t have anything to hide…and that Yahoo is trying to “spin” the fact that they are bleeding talent from every part of the company. Oddly, when Yahoo gutted Nuance’s engineering department a few short months ago (”recruiting” 13 of 14 engineers to specifically rebuild what they were working on at nuance - in effect wiping out the opportunity for that small company to exist — not, in this case losing like 6 out of 1000+ engineers to a small company that is not even a direct competitor) they generated page after page of publically available, sworn legal statements that companies couldn’t keep employees from leaving and that skill sets were not “trade secrets”, and on and on and on…
March 2nd, 2006 at 2:49 pm
Lynn says:
Is it true you can trace/locate ip addresses or find out who you are chatting to on yahoo? Some individuals are very curt and it would be nice to find out who they really or or where they come from.
August 13th, 2006 at 4:45 pm