Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview

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.

On the specific idea: The idea is not unique, and really low hanging fruit for a mass site.

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.