Comment by jrockway

I've tried to comment on this article a few times, because I'm horrified, but can't really find the words.

I guess the thing I keep coming back to is whether or not a CEO even has the power to engage "top lawyers" to settle a score with a former intern. I'm just kind of imagining the board meeting, where someone asks "how is that hiring going for a new principal engineer for the foobar team" and the CEO replied "we scrapped that position, I'm using the money to go after this intern that duplicated our website over the weekend."

I have to imagine the reply isn't going to be "oh, great idea, keep me posted", but rather something more like "uhhhhhhh.... can we not?" Like, it just doesn't seem like a good financial decision to me. Let's say this is a solid case (which it isn't; or at least, nobody can point to the patent that's being infringed, or the literal source text that was illegally copied, or the NDA that Radon signed). The best case is you get a few hundred thousand dollars in damages. But the intern doesn't have that kind of money, so best case, it gets paid back in installments over many, many years. You are trading the opportunity to use that money right now to grow your company and make your investors rich, at the cost of not teaching some intern a lesson. It's unclear what sort of positive effect that could possibly have on the future of your company or an intern. OK, interns won't clone your product. That was pretty unlikely already, and reimplementing an idea is a lot easier than running a business.

I guess I just don't see the point. All I can say is that Amjad was mad and personally hurt, and people do dumb things in that position. A CEO should see past that and say "you know what, I'm going to save this as a draft tonight and see how I feel in the morning". He didn't, and the company is probably over at this point. A lesson for us all -- sometimes you're mad, and can't do anything about it. Focus that energy into making your product better, or going for a run or something :)

Finally, I guess to sum this up, it makes me sick to my stomach. Threatening someone a year out of college with financial ruin. Who does that!?! I feel terrible just standing by watching this.