It's pretty ballsy to use a company laptop, on company time, at a company office to do work for a competitor (which is essentially what the suit is alleging).
My guess is that if he was more circumspect in this - waiting until he quit, working on it after hours on a personal computer, etc - Tesla would not be suing him over this (if the allegations are true). It's rare to see lawsuits over these things if all of the activity is taken after the employee has quit.
If an ex company sues you, of course they will say that you did it on company time, at work, on the company laptop. That you did that or not, it's hard to prove you did not anyway.
> In the suit, Tesla also alleges that Anderson downloaded “hundreds of gigabytes” of proprietary data from his work computer to a personal storage device, and that he then manually hacked the timestamps on files to hide evidence of his acquisition of the information. He also wiped the iPhone issued by Tesla, the suit says, in order to erase evidence of his attempts to poach fellow employees. These attempts were met with only limited success, however, as only two employees apparently ever jumped ship to the new venture.
As soon as any company sues someone for 'poaching employees' I don't need to think more about the merits of their case because they clearly have none. The idea that such a claim doesn't just get your case thrown out with extreme prejudice is baffling. It's a market. You don't own your employees and if someone can take them from you you're underpaying them and or treating them less well than you should. Probably both. This restraint of trade bullshit treating employees like goods is just disgusting and totally unacceptable in any civilized society. It goes way beyond what is or isn't "legal"
Really? Legally obligating your employees to not try to hire their coworkers at a competing business on company time while using company resources is treating employees like goods? That's a pretty bold statement, though I suspect you simply "didn't think about the merits of their case".
Usually I actually share your opinion. But last year I was in a situation where I spent a lot of my work time, spare time, and private ressources (e.g. invites to lunch or cinema, even letting a new coworker use my apartment for free while looking for an apartment of his own).
My goal was to build a real team out of the random bunch of coworks and actually succeeded. In the end we were a competitive, cooperating, efficient machine putting out about 10 mandays of customer value in 2-3 real time days if necessary.
In that example I really felt compelled to leave WITH the coworkers. True they were hired by my employee, but the team was built by my coworkers and me.
PS: So, considering examples like that, maybe next time you could try to formulate yours a little more open for alternatives. E.g. "Interesting point of view. Let me add another one: [...]" What do you think?
I'm missing something in your anecdote - at what point did you and your current coworkers leave? Who was the employee that hired them?
If you built a team for the benefit of your company on company time, and that team decides to leave as a whole, that's one thing. If you spend company time on recruiting people to another company, that's very different!
You are assuming there are no malicious employees who are economically inclined to steal from your company. If this is allowed as the norm, your wonderful "friends" from work who stay at your place would smile the entire time they are making millions selling you out.
> You are assuming there are no malicious employees who are economically inclined to steal from your company.
Why do you think that? I don't. And I don't want to allow anything as the norm. So, not sure where you are coming from. Did you respond to the wrong comment?
Does it really matter whether it's on "company resources," in any sense other than the outmoded legal sense? Or company time? Perhaps for termination, but it's not against the law to hurt your employer, nor should it be.
Perhaps you may want to refresh your perspective by remembering some of the times managers have colluded to keep wages down. "Poaching" is such a ridiculous term for "offering somebody better rewards for their work and them accepting."
Stealing proprietary information is another story though, let's not make this whole thing binary.
> Does it really matter whether it's on "company resources," in any sense other than the outmoded legal sense? Or company time? Perhaps for termination, but it's not against the law to hurt your employer, nor should it be.
As was mentioned elsewhere in this thread, even California's Labor Code contains such a provision:
“An employee who has any business to transact on his own account, similar to that entrusted to him by his employer, shall always give the preference to the business of the employer.”
> Perhaps you may want to refresh your perspective by remembering some of the times managers have colluded to keep wages down.
How exactly does a senior manager using his position to recruit his subordinates fight that? In fact, it seems like a great way to put employees in precisely that position.
> even California's Labor Code contains such a provision
Again "Any sense other than the outmoded legal sense." I hope you aren't arguing that something not being illegal in California is evidence that the thing is morally good?
> "Using his position to recruit his subordinates"
What's your implication? That somehow Anderson threatened their careers? Because I don't see anything suggesting that in the article. And frankly, it's disingenous to promote that kind of theory with no evidence and a clear knowledge that such a threat would never fly (I.E. any employee could go to HR and say "he's firing me because I won't join his company with that google guy" and they'd get rehired and potentially win a whistle-blower lawsuit).
If you're not implying that some threat was involved, then I have no pity on the people he so maliciously offered superior jobs to.
I was responding to the later sentence where you asserted that it wasn't illegal. No, I don't think everything in the California labor code (or any other for that matter) is in accordance with what is moral.
You can have an unhealthy power dynamic without ever directly threatening someone's career. Do you generally hold that when an employee is put in an uncomfortable position by a superior, they can't complain if they could've just gone to HR and hoped that they would be receptive?
Calling my speculation disingenuous when you tried to use the fact that managers have colluded to keep employee wages low without any evidence Tesla's in fact did that is pretty hypocritical.
>>> Do you generally hold that when an employee is put in an uncomfortable position by a superior, they can't complain if they could've just gone to HR and hoped that they would be receptive?
What I'm contending is that there is absolutely no evidence any employees were made uncomfortable by what happened. And moreover since I know I at least would much rather receive a poach offer than not from my manager, it's hard for you to make a blanket statement that these anti-poaching rules are somehow to protect employees.
I'm not suggesting that Tesla colluded to keep wages down. My point is that many C-level executives and investors see their dynamic with their employees as antagonistic (i.e. 0-sum-game). Without the opportunity to get bought by other companies the competitiveness of the market is undermined, and employees get paid below their value. Preventing poaching does exactly that.
I think he was making the argument that even if the employee violated anti-poaching terms in the contract, that any such violation shouldn't be legally suable because anti-poaching rules should be legally invalid, since they violate a fundamental right.
At this point I'm starting to wonder what doesn't constitute a fundamental right these days.
It's not unreasonable for an employer to expect their employees not to spend their time at work working/advertising/recruiting for a separate business. Of course no such protection exists for conversations had down the pub after work.
We've no real idea what the case in question involves - it may be that tesla cannot make it stick. It's all about context
I'm not advocating "revenge," I'm challenging the attitude that employees have a moral calling to care about the overall welfare of a corporation that ultimately exists to make shareholders richer. Not to say it's an "invalid" goal, if you want to do that, but make no mistake that these corporations generally don't have a reciprocal moral concern for their employees (and often no moral concerns beyond "what is legal?").
There are blurry lines though, which is what the court case will determine.
If you have your laptop at home and are technically on call ( for example, in Spain, if you are paid above average for a position it can be claimed in court that you were technically on call. Happened to a friend of mine )
Also director that have the "unlimited holidays" could be considered on company time whenever they didn't book holiday in the system.
Companies put abusive clause in contract, saying that everything you develop, anytime, anywhere, automatically belongs to the company.
Director time is a funny thing too. A lot of those director level that work 100+ hours per week include lunch with people, going to a party, playing football with peers, ... and in any case, company encourage bonding outside working hours. Technical people, developer are expected to have their work as a hobby and train outside business hours.
The room for liberal interpretation is vast and Tesla is a thin skinned company. But well, court will tell.
What is not company time nowadays? For a salaried tech employee it's a pure tossup.
Just because you were physically at your workplace doesn't in my mind make it "company time", and the concept for a place like Tesla where people keep track if you do too little but certainly not the opposite seems completely inane.
Apparently he recruited them while working for Tesla, which is immoral whether or not it's illegal: if you're in senior management, people feel like their job is on the line when they say no to you. That's why you're not allowed to ask them things unrelated to the company's interest where they might want to say no, such as asking them on a date. The same power dynamics are at play when asking someone to jump ship to your new venture - while you remain employed at the old one, you have power over their reviews and their working relationship with the rest of the company.
Being in a leadership role and saying to your team(s) "Hey, lets all take the knowledge we have that this company has paid massive amounts of money in prototypes and testing and overall business, and go start a new business selling the product."
Thats why anti-poaching is a thing. When you're investing into researching and creating products, you are investing in the people who do it, along with all the materials and contracting and such. Being able to take the experience of the results of all that and go sell a competing product is stealing and is a major blow to R&D.
I don't know the extent of the poaching, or whether its the same thing here, but in this case it was on company time, which is pretty bad.
If someone takes R&D that the company paid massive amounts of money for, then the company can sue for theft of intellectual property, but people should be free to leave to start other ventures with any knowledge they have that isn't covered by IP laws. Even in groups, as they have right to freedom of association.
"Investing in the people who do [R&D]", then suing when they leave, is far too close to owning people.
I was just discussing the general principle (in response to the preceding comment) and my opinion about what the law should be, not the merits of this specific case given current law.
And those products are intellectual property. The laboratories, prototypes, documentation, data, and parents are all proprietary and belong to the company, not the individual. All the individual can take with him is his experience and a sense of which direction he could pursue in the future.
That's not nothing, of course. But real products require all of the above in order to proceed to market, and all of the above takes a fairly long time for a company to build up, regardless of the experience of the people it hires, because the most those people can do is reduplicate their efforts without the mistakes, and even then pure reduplication is illegal because of parents etc.
I suspect (correct me if I'm wrong) that a large part of your opinion is based on the fairly offensive word "poach" that implies that employees are the employer's property in some way.
If that were taken out of the article, perhaps it would make more sense? I think that as 'geofft points out, the fact that this person was trying-to-recruit (not "poach") employees for a future startup while on the job is one of the reasons for Tesla's suit. I think the other reason they give (allegedly stealing data) is far more compelling if true.
Yet we consistently agree to "non solicitation" in our contracts. Even if people came over by their own desire, its hard to prove, and a pissed off company with more resources may be more willing to pursue that on the offensive side than one on the defensive one.
Agreeing to non solicitation, and doing it anyway while still employed on company time with company resources, is not an honorable thing to do.
If you don't intend to abide by the terms of a contract, then don't agree to it. Nobody is making you work for Tesla. Besides, all contracts can be negotiated. Negotiate for the contract you want.
If a contract contains unlawful terms then as far as the law is concerned, the contract does not contain the terms in the first place. So you are well within your rights to ignore such terms.
Put differently, my employer pays me to write code, not to review the validity of terms in their contract. If their legal department is incompetent then that's their problem not mine.
If they expect me to perform (or not perform) actions on their behalf when I am not at work, and especially once my employment ends, then they are free to offer a consideration in exchange.
if you don't agree with the laws and social norms of a country, do all your business elsewhere. Treating such clauses with utter contempt seems morally just fine to me.
If you don't agree with the laws and social norms of a country, you're free to break them in protest and suffer the consequences. People nowadays seem to think that civil disobedience should not involve any sacrifices for the disobedient.
An "agreement" made under duress is not actually an agreement, therefore not morally binding. A clause in your employment contract is only actually an agreement if:
1. Society defines having a job as an optional luxury.
2. The employer is willing to strike out that clause, and the candidate employee can reasonably know this.
What employer is willing to strike "Must perform assigned duties"? Or any of the many other clauses which are essential to an employment contract?
There are always things in contracts which can't be struck out. You can always ask to strike it out, and declare your intention to find future employees at their company.
From their point of view, you'd be saying that when you left you'd potentially take millions of $s of other employees with you and disrupt their operations. Why would they employ you?
Not poaching your employer's employees within a certain timeframe is a perfectly normal and reasonable clause.
You've got confidential information on their employees, namely which ones are good, which work well with you, etc., things you'd normally spend a lot of time + money finding out. And they spent a lot of money advertising, vetting, hiring, training and integrating those employees.
> What employer is willing to strike "Must perform assigned duties"?
Indeed, and many employees have found themselves assigned duties that were not at all what they expected, and damaging to their health or otherwise harmful, but hey, they "agreed" to perform assigned duties, right?
Looks like my position isn't a popular one here. So be it but, if you live in a developed country, have you ever wondered why, for the last few decades, almost everyone has been getting poorer and more miserable every time the GDP goes up? Sometimes, astonishingly enough, beliefs do actually have real-world consequences.
> they "agreed" to perform assigned duties, right?
They aren't slaves. They can quit any time. No employer can force you to do anything - but they don't have to pay you if you don't do the assigned duties. Sounds fair to me.
If they start adding odious duties, in the UK we do have laws against that, you can refuse and if dismissed can argue "constructive dismissal". So if your employer asks you to start cleaning loos with a toothbrush...
In the UK these days you have to pay substantial fees to access an employment tribunal. These fees may seem trivial to you and I, but a person on minimum wage who finds that they have been underpaid will have to work for an insane 58 hours in order to pay the fee for taking their employer to tribunal! If they want to claim unfair dismissal then they have to work for 179 hours!
The guy was a highly paid executive. I don't understand how he could have been under duress. (Is Elon Musk really hiring desperate people who have no options?)
What if the employer hired a person under duress, like they were in desperate need of some particular skill. Does that mean they can decide not pay the person?
I've had employers strike clauses that I didn't agree with. Contracts are hardly written in stone tablets. If contracts were non-negotiable and were employees' only option, everyone would be working for minimum wage.
> The guy was a highly paid executive. I don't understand how he could have been under duress. (Is Elon Musk really hiring desperate people who have no options?)
That in combination with the claim that he asked other employees to come with him while they were his subordinates at Tesla, is the strongest argument the company has in this case, and maybe that combination has some merit. I'm arguing against the general claim that an "agreement" in an employment contract that the employee had no meaningful choice about signing, is morally binding.
> What if the employer hired a person under duress, like they were in desperate need of some particular skill. Does that mean they can decide not pay the person?
There is a classical thought experiment in ethics, on that very topic. Suppose you're stuck on a high window ledge with no way down, likely to lose your footing and fall in the next few minutes, and you see a man passing with a ladder. He offers to get you down for a million dollars. How binding is your agreement? Me, I figure since it was made under duress, you're entitled to renegotiate a more reasonable figure once on the ground. Some thinkers have given much stronger answers than that! What's your answer?
You didn't answer my question, but I'll answer yours.
I'll offer him much less. If I fall, he gets nothing.
It's not a realistic question anyway. If you were fired from your job tomorrow, are you really going to drop dead? I doubt it. Is the job you have the one and only job you could ever have? That somehow, when you were born, you were destined by fate to have only this job and there is nothing you can do about it?
I don't buy that people have "no meaningful choice" in employment, not even close. I've heard all kinds of justifications for stealing from others, cheating on exams, etc. Even justifications by well paid office workers for stealing office supplies. I'm not buying it.
I did answer your question. As for your answer, well, the vast majority of people do not choose to stand on principle when faced with the likelihood of falling from a fourth floor window, falling into a death spiral of unemployment and homelessness that leads to freezing to death on the street or suchlike dire fate. You claim you would; the two obvious possibilities to account for your claim are:
1. You are a man of principle, to a degree that is highly unusual.
2. Your intuition, from a position of safety and comfort, about what you would do in dire straits, is inaccurate, to a degree that is highly usual.
The difference in prior probability of these two scenarios is equally obvious.
> If you were fired from your job tomorrow, are you really going to drop dead? I doubt it.
I already pointed out that much depends on whether other employers are offering better terms. But as for your question, actually there are many people for whom being fired is a life-threatening crisis. For many people, the expected timescale to find another job is somewhere between several months and never. If you've been unemployed more than six months, your perceived employability drops sharply. Many countries have an inadequate social safety net, such that long-term unemployment is likely to lead to homelessness, which is a life-threatening condition from which it is very difficult to escape. I remember one person who spent some time homeless and barely escaped from it, saying if it happened again he'd just commit suicide on day one and be done. That is the reality for a large percentage of humanity today, and in most developed countries it's getting worse not better.
You can believe what you wish. My father told me that what separated men from animals is men have honor. People have a choice - but nobody said it was an easy one.
If you are unusual, well and good, but that makes you, well, unusual. For my own part, I would like to believe all sorts of things about what I would do in dire straits, but I'll remain agnostic unless and until I get to find out.
Anyway, your father sounds like a wise man. It is dishonorable to break an agreement, certainly. It is also dishonorable to exploit someone's desperate circumstances to coerce them into signing an extremely one-sided and unreasonable contract. We are all bound by a set of implicit agreements regarding basic standards of civilized behavior; that's a prerequisite for civilization itself.
Sigh. Get off your high horse and actually read the article and the suit. This ex employee is said to have actually stolen gigabytes of data from Tesla and taken it with them to use at their next job. That is clearly wrong.
"The suit accuses Anderson of having tried to recruit away employees from Tesla"
...
I hope not, since that's not a thing that's illegal.
Tesla should certainly know that most non-solicits are not enforceable in california (and i only say most because occasionally, one is found valid, but the vast majority are not)
> most non-solicits are not enforceable in California
To clarify:
"Provisions preventing former employees from competing with their former employers by soliciting their customers (absent use of trade secrets) are...void... The law regarding agreements prohibiting an employee from soliciting employees from former employers, however, is far less clear at this point.
...
Provisions that outright bar the hiring of employees are likely to be found unenforceable in many circumstances and should generally be avoided. Where such provisions are used, they should be narrowly tailored, apply only to employees with whom the restrained individual works or becomes aware of during their employment, and/or make any hiring contingent on the payment of fixed sum liquidated damages.
Separately, non-solicitation agreements between employer and employee, like the one at issue in Loral, are likely permissible with the caveat that they should be limited in term and scope. The term of such provisions is typically limited to one or two years, and large employers should consider limiting the scope to employees that the individual worked with and/or became aware of during the individual’s employment."
Regarding Loral:
"The court noted that unlike a no-hire provision, the non-solicitation agreement 'only slightly affects’’ Loral employees, because they were not prevented from seeking employment by contacting [the defendant] – they were only affected insomuch as [the defendant] could not contact them."
TL;DR It sounds like Tesla's ex-employee broke his non-solicit by soliciting employees he worked with at Tesla.
TL;DR It sounds like Tesla's ex-employee broke his non-solicit by soliciting employees he worked with at Tesla.
The complaint is clear. This is about more than non-solicitation, and Anderson was not an ex-employee at the time.
From the complaint:
"Anderson worked to recruit Tesla's engineers, eventually making offers to at least a dozen people — all in direct violation of his contractual non-solicitation obligations and the duty of loyalty that he owed to Tesla as an employee."
This is about breach of duty of loyalty, and interference with contracts.
Wait, is there a legal concept of "duty of loyalty" outside of fiduciary relationships? That's the first I've heard the term in that context. Or did Anderson have a fiduciary relationship with Tesla?
Yes there is. In California it's governed by the Labor Code:
Section 2863 states, “An employee who has any business to transact on his own account, similar to that entrusted to him by his employer, shall always give the preference to the business of the employer.”
There are other aspects to it as well, but that's the nut.
Got it, that's helpful. So basically, you can't prevent a former employee from hiring your employees, but you can limit the extent to which the former employee can proactively recruit your employees, so long as the terms of the agreement are limited and well defined?
so if someone leaves and starts their own company you can prevent them from actively recruiting former coworkers but you cant prevent them from hiring former coworkers who went to join them on their own without any active solicitation from the former employee, basically if the current employee contacts the former employee first then it is ok but contract forbidding the former employee from contacting current employees to recruit them is allowed. Also contract forbidding the active recruitment of current employees that the former employee never met are not enforceable so you cant forbid recruiting employees who joined after you left the company
"While still employed by Tesla, and while assuring management of his loyalty, Anderson secretly set out to hire Tesla's Autopilot engineers for his own competing venture"
Ah, there it is. Not made as clear as it could be by TechCrunch. Even in the most generous reading of anti-non-solicitation agreement law would probably uphold a restriction on doing it while employed.
Even if the lawsuit is without merit, Tesla still wins because future former employees will be more reluctant to try and recruit their former coworkers if they know Tesla will sue them for it.
It would be a huge stress and inconvenience if a company sued me, even if I eventually won or the suit was thrown out. I'd have to find a lawyer, deal with the company's lawyers, show up in court, etc. That alone is enough of a deterrent for a lot of people.
Are you sure? The non-competes about working for a competitor is un-enforceable, but what about the ones that ban directly approaching former colleagues?
As ocdtrekkie pointed out, the key point here is he was soliciting former colleagues while there were still current colleagues. Even California won't protect you there.
The one tool companies have at their disposal in CA is the prohibition of using your old company's trade secrets in your new job. Mostly that means you can't take customer lists with you, but you also can't use confidential information to lure away former colleagues.
What that means in practice isn't completely clear to me, though it may just be that you can't take the org chart.
A non-compete is a different agreement than a non-solicitation agreement. The former is categorically unenforceable in California. The latter is much more of a gray area and dependent on circumstances.
Tesla is suing Chris Urmson, who never worked for Tesla. He worked for Google.
Tesla didn't have any good autonomous vehicle technology. They bought a Mobileye and a radar, hooked them up to get lane-keeping and auto-brake, and hyped that into their so-called "autopilot".
Yes! My previous (A6) and current (S6) Audi's can basically do the same (and could for years!) without all the hype. Whenever I show it to friends they seem to be amazed it's possible and, until then, thought only Tesla was capable of such a feat.
Agreed. My subaru forester can do this with just 2 cameras by the rearview mirror. And it was <<30k out the door with 7 year warranty and 3 year maintenance.
That's marketing for you I guess. (Don't get me wrong, would get a Tesla if money were no object)
Having owned an Eye-Sight Subaru and AP Tesla at the same time I can attest they aren't nearly the same.
For one Eye-Sight turns off if you come to a complete stop and won't re-engage until you get over a threshold(I believe 18mph). It has a pretty limited HUD to communicate what the system is seeing.
In comparison the Tesla will do full rush-hour traffic flawlessly and does a much better job of communicating what it's seeing in the vicinity of the car. It also bounces the radar under the car ahead of you so it has the ability to see heavy braking conditions much sooner.
C&D did a pretty good comparison recently[1], it didn't include the A8/S8 but most of the other competitors but Tesla was far and away the better system.
Yes the eyesight disengages if you're stopped for more than about 2 seconds (will acknowledge it's annoying), but you can restart it at the touch of a button even from a stand still. This might be a recent change.
That car and driver review doesn't fully explain the features.
I'm sure the Tesla is a bit nicer and more autopilotey, but it will cost you 70-80k MORE out the door which is the point. Eyesight gets you 80-90% there. The tech is otherwise similar features wise.
If anything what you could argue is that the Tesla can get you on the freeway on its own which is pretty cool. Can it do that?
How many times are you pressing that button in 40 minutes of rush hour traffic? That to me is where Tesla's AP really shines, 70mph AP is nifty but not nearly as useful.
I was just commenting since we've owned both systems, if you haven't had a chance to give Tesla's a spin they are happy to do free test-drives, on paper they look similar but in execution I found Tesla's to be miles ahead(and constantly improving).
That extra 60k also gets you some really acceptable 0-60 times :).
I have a subaru crosstrek with the eyesight package, and it can't do lanekeeping. Are you sure your forester can?
Auto braking and automatic speed adjustment cruise control, but no lanekeeping. It does have an alert when you leave a lane without signaling, but that's not the same as actually keeping you in the lane.
So, I've made it from Burlington, Washington to the Canadian border without turning off Autopilot in Friday evening traffic (about 50 miles, including some pleasant winding interstate). As described by Subaru LKA "...can gently guide the vehicle back to the center of its lane if sway is detected". It sounds like it only corrects for small deviations rather than actually completely steering for you? Is Subaru under-selling it in their press release (which would honestly be sort of amazing)?
I am still surprised they haven't been sued. It's not an autopilot (like in planes). It's enhanced cruise control, which has been around since forever.
But it is like an autopilot in planes. Autopilot in planes does not do anything particularly complicated; it mostly just keeps it heading in one direction.
The next part of this discourse that I've seen played out elsewhere on HN is where someone mentions that the public perception of the word "autopilot" is that it flies the plane all by itself in a rather intelligent manner. That's what Tesla is leveraging by calling it "autopilot".
The autopilot in modern planes does a lot more than just keeping the plane flying in one direction. You can get a plane land on autopilot (well up to like 1 or 2 minutes before touchdown). You can make it increase altitude automatically at a certain waypoint, decrease to a different flightlevel at a certain waypoint, and adjust speed. It monitors pilot input and intervenes if the pilot tries to do something "stupid." Basically, an autopilot in the planes is more than just a cruise control for headings. It can fly from point A to B with some intervention (like changing some data based on what ATC gave you).
The cruise control in Teslas cannot (yet?) drive you from point A to point B or even keep you driving in one direction forever without you holding the steering wheel occasionally or even hitting other objects. It can (just like cruise control in other cars) warn you if you are about to do something stupid (e.g. leaving the lane, about to hit an object etc.).
This is like people using foglights in cities at night to see better. You can use it for that, but it isn't made for that purpose. A light meant for FOG or other scenarios where the car itself is hard to see and not for you to light up everything in front of you (as it is quite bright if not used in fog).
A significant advantage aircraft on autopilot have is that the majority of the aircraft routinely using autopilot are flying under Instrument Flight Rules [IFR] and can rely on Air Traffic Control to provide separation from other aircraft.
Because of this, an aircraft under autopilot (especially one ascending and descending on its own) doesn't need to worry about hitting things. There is usually a distance of 3-5 miles¹ between the aircraft and other hard objects.
I would say calling the Tesla system an Autopilot is vastly understating its abilities.
I would say it's more the engineering achievement of his staff. Obviously Mr. Musk gave the right working conditions and probably motivated people who had the idea, so there is that.
But then why does every single one of the engineers who have worked with him report that he's the single smartest person they've ever worked with?
If you read the biography, there have been times when an engineer has said "I can't meet these requirements," and he said "Ok, I'll do your job AND my job, and I'll get it done." And he did.
I think anyone believing he's not an extremely talented engineer has not read much about him.
Honest question - has Elon written any of the code for Tesla or SpaceX? Or has he designed any of the electrical or mechanical systems? I know he used to code at past companies, but a quick google search doesn't tell me he still does this.
Elon takes an active hand in all of the engineering discussions and contributes heavily to design deicions. Of course he doesn't write code or machine parts himself, that would be a really poor use of his time-- that's what he's hired thousands of engineers for, so that he can be head engineer overseeing the countless moving parts involved in manufacturing both rockets and cars simultaneously.
A significant part of the Tesla autopilot is powered by nVidia X1 based processors. The board is known as Drive PX1 or PX2 [0]
There is a lot more to autopilot than lane-keeping and auto-brake. Tesla use a database of road conditions, and predictive models, that are separate from the MobilEye technology. What MobilEye chip provides is basically a video processor, customized for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems(ADAS) applications with a relatively low power consumption.
The biggest counter to your "Mobileye and a Radar" is that several other manufacturers use MobilEye and even nVidia boards, yet do not have Tesla-level automated driving.[1] The pushback from MobilEye after the Florida crash is another key sign that Tesla has more advanced autonomous driving [2]
> He also wiped the iPhone issued by Tesla, the suit says, in order to erase evidence of his attempts to poach fellow employees.
Don't most of us wipe the phones before turning them back to the employer? They tend to have a lot of personal stuff on them - and not really any unique company data.
Wouldn't wiping a company phone without permission be akin to destruction of company property? Especially if you did it with the intent to... destroy company property (records of activities you took on company time using a company device)?
The status of your private info on a company issued phone is an excellent topic to discuss with the company HR department when you are issued the phone (and laptop).
I just had two phones, work issued and mine, after 6pm the work phone went on 'do not disturb' until 9am next day
Ive noticed that work issued phones aren't the perk they appear, its a social pressure of 'we know you have a phone, we gave it to you' combined with the expectation you'll answer.
I was a software engineer at that job, I wasn't on call and I was salaried for X hours.
I still have two phones noe even though I work for myself, one for work one for home, I did think about dual-sim but I like the separation of concerns.
For me its not about checking with HR (and even trusting them) its about the complete seperation of work/life devices, I don't want my employer having access to any of my personal data/metadata and using a work phone as a personal phone does that.
As for carrying two phones, I just leave my personal phone in my coat pocket, I don't get a huge volume of calls anyway since people long ago figured out I don't answer them (and I disabled voicemail), if it's urgent text basically.
This goes above the regular poaching lawsuits... he downloaded data from Tesla to a external hard drive, returned the laptop but not the drive, tried changing the timestamps and secure erasing his laptop.
So non-solicitation agreements are valid in CA? I know that non-compete's are not (to be clear, as I understand it, this means that Anderson is completely free to start a competitor to Tesla, but it does not in any way allow him to use any resources of Tesla in the formation and operations of said competitor), and had sort of just assumed that non-solicitation agreements fell into the same category.
EDIT: other comments have clarified - the crux of the poaching issue in this case is that he was actively soliciting Tesla employees for his competitor while employed by Tesla. That's a far more specific scenario than trying to enforce a non-solicitation agreement after leaving the company.
It seems that the current state of the law is that they're not categorically unenforceable in the way non-competes are, but that courts have found some limits in their scope. It also seems that there hasn't been a direct challenge to them yet. Either way, the issue in this case is Anderson's behavior while employed, so it doesn't seem like it will come up.
Elon Musk has said that Apple is "The Tesla Graveyard" because they hired so many of his top engineers away. But I guess that Sterling Anderson's tiny startup is a much more convenient victim to pick on than Apple.
I feel like the most interesting part of this is the effort to stop Aurora from using their tech. Anyone know if there is legal precedent to doing that from a civil suit?
"DOES" are 'John/Jane Does". These are placeholders for potential defendants unnamed at filing of the lawsuit, but who may be added to the named defendant list later.
Tesla has a number of patents on this, which they made available on a reciprocal basis. They can easily refuse to allow the startup ANY USE of the patents. The startup can do the same, but may not have much in it's patent portfolio. Whatever it has are likely to be stole Tesla stuff
Startups don't typically go out and look to see if they violate any IP. Likewise, forward thinking companies like Tesla don't typically go around suing startups for using their IP. They would rather buy them up if they are doing really interesting things. IP lawsuits only get filed if there is a real threat to the business.
Telsa's patent sharing announcement doesn't really amount to much IMHO. It was a press release, not a legal contract.
My guess is that if he was more circumspect in this - waiting until he quit, working on it after hours on a personal computer, etc - Tesla would not be suing him over this (if the allegations are true). It's rare to see lawsuits over these things if all of the activity is taken after the employee has quit.