Not sure how talented OP is. This can as well be a case study of who not to hire.
Trust is destroyed as soon as your first reaction to something is to summon lawyers.
I actually somewhat agreed until I read "I will be engaging our lawyers on Monday if it is still up by then."
I don’t get what you’re saying here. It’s not a breach of trust to speak publicly about someone threatening legal action against you.
Rather than downvoting your comment I opted to reply to it since it may provide a bit more information for you to base your judgement on about "things being muddier".
As for your last comment about their abilities - forgive me but that sounds incredibly unfair and unwarranted and verges on being a personal attack.
But then I believe this is legal (depending on your jurisdiction).
Amjad, replit's CEO, offered to hire OP, later accused them of copying their "internal designs", then threatened them with lawyers replit's millions can buy, eventually to stonewall and stop replying to their emails. What kind of trust is that?
> Not sure how talented OP is. This can as well be a case study of who not to hire.
That's a valid perspective, alright. One that's minority I sincerely hope.
Which means that the legal threats levelled against OP are presumably coming from a place of emotion and personal resentment, and I'm very much not prepared to extend the benefit of the doubt to replit under those circumstances.
Different Principals have different ways of evaluating threats, and reacting to them. At first glance, this seems like an awful mistake, on the part of the Replit people (Can you say "own goal"? I knew you could!).
Maybe there's more to the tale than appears here, but it does seem fairly straightforward; assuming that the emails shared tell the whole story.
I hope that everyone finds a way past this, and comes out OK.
One thing that I will say, is that the OP seems to be pretty sharp. He's young, and maybe he reacted more quickly and naively than a cynical old bastard like Yours Truly would, but he has done a pretty cool job on his project. It might not be "ship-ready," but it sounds like a great demonstration of his capabilities.
Also, as Elon Musk shows, CEOs can cause tremendous damage, if they go off-script. Being a CEO of a public/funded company is a fairly awesome Responsibility. It needs to be taken seriously.
I'd say that this very thread shows the damage that can be done to the company. Having this pinned at #1 on HN for all this time is devastating. It's actually kind of horrifying. Like watching a slow-motion train wreck. A lot of Replit employees and VCs are going to take it in the shorts from this. He's probably got some 'splainin' to do...
I can't remember the company, but there's a famous object lesson of a UK CEO that destroyed his life's work and corporation, by mentioning an upcoming product too early in a BBC interview.
The founders seemed to get upset, I still don't really know why, presumably because of the short tenure. They then proceeded to not pay me my last month's wages while attempting to feed me various excuses or just failing to reply to messages.
I eventually got the case in front of a judge (self represented) and discovered that despite them telling me about their lawyers they were also representing the case themselves without any idea about the legal situation. The judge basically laughed them out of court, starting off by pointing out that even if all of their statements were correct they still had no legal basis for not paying the wages. The judge then checked their accusations (that I had lied to them during the hiring process) and found they were not correct.
Despite them having no legal basis the whole process was pretty stressful since until the court case I had been assuming they had some reason to not just settle. (I was mostly worried the recruiter had done something genuinely dodgy during the hiring process.)
I'm still surprised that those people can run a company for more than 5 years.
The problem with applying the "rational actor" test here, or anywhere really, is that to a first approximation people are not rational actors.
So when a CEO makes legal threats against some random dev's side project, seemingly out of a sense of entitlement to the very idea of a polyglot code sandbox, I'm going to be pretty harsh.
He willingly traded some percentage chance at a competitor using an open source project to steal some percentage of his business for this PR nightmare. Personally I think this effort shows the bar for such a project is pretty low so I don't think shutting it down was a good trade off. I think it shows immaturity, bad will, bad faith and honestly its more of a case study in whom not to work for. Most people they would want to hire are liable to have multiple options. They can ill afford to be an undesirable choice.
Based on the commit log in the article, he added support for running code in 79 programming languages in 4 days. I'd say he's probably pretty talented.
From reading the emails, it looks like the Replit CEO "trusted" that the OP was cowed into submission.
Well this can be developed into a great replit competitor
Personally, I think the Replit CEO could have explained what the specific issues were before threatening to sue. Since there was no explanation on the CEO's part, I think it's perfectly warranted for the author to make this public.
Thanks guys for the comments. Definitely helps to view this matter from more angles, and it's clearer now. This is certainly a case study of who not to work for. (I didn't know so much about Replit and its CEO prior and totally missed the totalitarian vibe he is giving)
Curious to see how much the Replit community & ecosystem would be affected this event.
This is now on the first page of HN Search https://hn.algolia.com/
That said, all the possible IP in something like this is in security, reliability, scalability and good UX.
Severely doubt the OP spent much time on that.
The CEO is probably just having trouble dealing with stress and is acting out. It happens.
I agree it's not uncommon for first-time founders/CEOs to see phantom ghosts and lash out; however, we should be careful to not normalize that kind of behavior. Founders often hold mentorship or supervisory positions over their current and ex-employees, so it's harmful when they react with aggression and manipulation.
At small companies, that betrayal of trust cuts deeper than it does in more common manager-employee relationships, IMO.
That doesn't give them a free pass to lash out at people.
It's also notable that Amjad used to work at CodeAcademy on up-and-going interactive coding experiences. Now he has his own company building up-and-going interactive coding experiences. What did Amjad learn while he was at CodeAcademy, being privy to internal business operations?
If that was the case almost everyone with a GitHub project could be sued to infinity, because almost everyone learns tons of things every day while working.
https://www.callahan-law.com/are-non-competes-enforceable-in...
Specifically California Business and Professions Code Section 16600,
“every contract by which anyone is restrained from engaging in a lawful profession, trade, or business of any kind is to that extent void.”
In addition such issues must by law be decided in California courts and if they forced the issue into court and lost they would be liable for the cost of his defense.
Even outside of California there are limits to what you can enforce. Judges aren't liable to find that an infinite duration noncompete reasonable.
Another example in Washington State its now impossible to obtain noncompetes for anyone paid less than a rate of 100k per annum as an employee or 250k per annum as a contractor and they are limited to 18 months duration.
If you improperly assert a noncompete you are liable for 5000 or actual damages whichever is greater.
They are probably not asserting a noncompete because it is functionally impossible for them to do so. They would have to assert that he was making use of trade secrets or that in some nebulous way his design belonged to them. eg trade dress
https://www.findlaw.com/smallbusiness/intellectual-property/...
The answer is you need a lawsuit to decide but probably not.
