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Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview

(patentpandas.org)
1798 points jerryX | 13 comments | 30 Nov 18 05:25 UTC | HN request time: 0.835s | source | bottom
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CryoLogic ◴[30 Nov 18 06:27 UTC] No.18567172[source]▶
Something very similar happened to me.

When I was at university studying CS I was running a Arduino fansite and a fansite for a videogame - both of whom made most of their money from affiliate revenue (a couple hundred bucks per month).

I thought it would be cool to work at Reddit (was close to graduating), and I had read blog posts from here and various other sites and IRC about how hiring managers liked projects.

I took to it to build a JS library that converted links to affiliate links, for example amazon and some other small retailers I had used.

Basically you just parse any URL you embed in the page with this library and it would convert the existing (non-affiliate) links to affiliate links with your signature attached so you got a revenue share.

In addition to this, I had done research on Reddit's traffics and crawled reddit to see how many affiliate-capable links existed. I talked about this in the interview and suggested they could make around 2 million per month if they hired me and used my script.

--> I was rejected after the interview, but a couple months later Reddit announced it was experimenting with a new feature that would re-write links as affiliate. They ended up implementing this feature that I am 95% sure I came up with and someone else stole.

It was one of the shittiest experiences I have ever had interviewing, especially since I didn't get a job out of it but I believe they have made millions off of this idea so far.

I huge put off, but I've learned since then backstabbing and stealing ideas is a big part of politics in most corporations. What a bummer.

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1. anilgulecha ◴[30 Nov 18 06:32 UTC] No.18567191[source]▶
On the specific idea: The idea is not unique, and really low hanging fruit for a mass site.
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2. CryoLogic ◴[30 Nov 18 06:38 UTC] No.18567219[source]▶
At the time, I could not find a single social media site that was using link-rewriting to make affiliate money.

Blogs and fan sites for niche products had been using this to make money for a while, social media sites had not yet tried it.

The close proximity with the announcement and my interview is what really bothered me. I have a strong feeling (but cannot prove) that someone I interviewed with took the idea and ran with it. I had done a lot of research into how much money Reddit would make off of this and how to implement it at scale without breaking existing affiliate links and such.

I had literally planned it as my pitch for what I wanted to work on and why they should hire me.

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3. manuelflara ◴[30 Nov 18 06:38 UTC] No.18567220[source]▶
Agreed. Not sure how long ago your interview was, but I remember seeing plug & play services that would add affiliate codes to links of any site via a JS snippet even 10 years ago. A friend who ran a blog network used it.
4. spullara ◴[30 Nov 18 06:53 UTC] No.18567271[source]▶
We did that at Bagcheck in 2010. It was super common. They may have taken your idea and ran with it but it wasn't a novel idea. Generally though, at scale, you run into problems with the affiliate programs and they cut you off.
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5. dkfmn ◴[30 Nov 18 06:54 UTC] No.18567276[source]▶
I believe you independently derived a very old, but lurcrative, idea. Kontera started off back in 2003 although I don't recall when they actually got to double-underline links. Viglink has been doing this more subtly as a commercial service since 2009, and AOL actually had a flavor of this built into Instant Messenger. There were also a number of affiliate networks that built this infrastructure to parse the Commission Junction offers database and update their networks with match/near-match products & services.
6. amenod ◴[30 Nov 18 06:56 UTC] No.18567287[source]▶
Not sure if it helps, but - sometimes the time is just right for some ideas and they crop all over the place. While it may seem to you it was your idea, they could have been working on it for days / months / years... I agree it sucks for you not to be able to know that though.
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7. ce4 ◴[30 Nov 18 07:03 UTC] No.18567312[source]▶
Think of it from another angle: You're interviewing this guy that has this idea that would be hugely rewarding for you with a payout of n% if you proposed it via the internal idea program. No one will notice. Or hire that guy and leave that to him.
8. CryoLogic ◴[30 Nov 18 07:03 UTC] No.18567314{3}[source]▶
Yeah it is definitely possible it was just a coincidence. But that was a couple years ago, and if Amazon has taught me anything it's that backstabbing is definitely part of the culture in many of these tech companies.

While it could be totally an accident, I could also see it being stolen. Truth is, I will never know if it was just bad timing or an actual malicious interviewer.

9. rhizome ◴[30 Nov 18 07:41 UTC] No.18567440[source]▶
Metafilter has had it for, oh, looks like almost 13 years:

https://metatalk.metafilter.com/11174/Im-proposing-a-small-c...

10. CobrastanJorji ◴[30 Nov 18 07:54 UTC] No.18567482[source]▶
I worked for a medium-sized community that did this in 2009, I think. At the time, I don't remember it being novel.
11. 8note ◴[30 Nov 18 08:31 UTC] No.18567610[source]▶
they did have examples of individual contributors doing it, and had been wishy washy on who should benefit from affiliate links for a long time prior
12. StudentStuff ◴[30 Nov 18 09:26 UTC] No.18567835{3}[source]▶
Is affiliate stuffing adding any value? In most cases, it doesn't seem to drive more customers towards the business paying the affiliate commission.
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13. spullara ◴[30 Nov 18 21:36 UTC] No.18572881{4}[source]▶
It might. For example, it was one of the potential revenue sources for Bagcheck to keep it running such that people could post their product reviews to the service. Without that revenue it is possible it isn't feasible to run the service and that would decrease the number of reviews pointing to them which could reduce the number of sales they get.