[InGodsName]

It's on tangent but

I owned an agency before and my employees under NDA wrote opensource projects for celebrity developers.

It was effectively a GhostCoders for hire service.

Out of them a few developers got very popular. It was a matter of luck more than anything. Anything can catch wind anytime, we just needed to keep up with the trend.

One way to catch this is coding style. Since, we employed GhostCoders - style varied considerably if a person looked deep - they could detect it, tho we tried to create a guidelines per celebrity programmer still picking up a particular style is quite difficult.

Hammering out dozens of project every month for a celebrity programmer needed that we hire multiple coders as no one would work all living hours.

Every project was a greenfield project, so hiring ghostcoder wasn't difficult at all.

Once you've proved your Opensource worth, companies would employee you as a celebrity coder and you just need to blog, tweet and give talks. Illusion of work is sometimes more important than the real work.

But even the ones who didn't get that popular accured a portfolio of contributions which helped them get a well paid cushy job.

Once you've breached a significant popularity threshold, you don't have to go through any interview and people assume you possess superior knowledge about everything.

This is why we still offer ghostcoding service to turn you into a popular Opensource developer, you might also recoup costs through Patereon.

So reading this i am not very surprised.

[ritchiea]

How effective is an NDA in this case? A lot of NDA's are effective because BIGCO you signed the NDA with has piles of money & resources to sue you. If a developer is ghostcoding for ROCKSTAR and it gets out ROCKSTAR hires ghostcoders. ROCKSTAR is screwed and maybe he was making pretty comfortable money at BIGCO but his pockets are exponentially smaller than BIGCO's. And he doesn't have a legal department to handle the lawsuit either. He'll have to handle it himself, while he's being dragged & disgraced in tech news and on Twitter.

And even if the NDA is with you the agency, do you have a legal team? If you do is your agency big enough or is it worth business enough for you to get into a big fight with one of your former contractors to defend ROCKSTAR? Especially when ROCKSTAR is the one who looks bad to the public and not necessarily your agency?

I'm not saying you're not telling the truth, it sounds plausible but I wonder about the model.

[InGodsName]

1. Yea, we had a law firm on contract.

2. We didn't hire contractors, they are employees and have more skin in the game.

That said, no employee ever went on Twitter or court.

[yakshaving_jgt]

This is disgusting. I’m not condemning you for finding a gap in the market — that’s totally fair play. But the fact that this can exist and that we have a culture of celebrity in software development at all (especially in such a dishonest way) is just disgusting.

[jf-]

It also didn’t happen. This guy is trolling HN. Maybe it breaks the guidelines to post this, but take a look through his history, he just posts conflicting, self aggrandising statements and low content noise. It’s a shame to see people wasting their effort replying to him.

[InGodsName]

Yes, this is hacker news. We've to find hacks in the capitalism to get ahead in life. As long as it's legal, it's good for us.

Since we pay well, don't see any problem.