RSS Feed

* The Business of Software

We were knee-deep in a discussion of the current spam-filter project and my coworker says "Oh yeah, and on a totally different matter: I need to talk to you about the bingo card problem".

I nearly had a heart attack.  (I'm sure you can guess how the thought process went: Have my bosses discovered that I'm running a side business?  Are they unhappy?  Do they think my level of focus at work has suffered?  Have they Googled my name recently? etc, etc)

It turns out that The Bingo Card Problem was making name bingo cards for the organization's annual dinner.  Five hundred of them, word list drawn of names in Japanese.  Its a tedious, painful job, so it got delegated around the place fifteen times over before it got kicked over to us programmers (someone guessed you could do it with a computer), and in the due course of Japanese office politics it comes to the two most junior members of the group, my coworker and I.

"Tell you what, why don't you let me handle that while you work on the test protocol for the mail filter", I say.

Fifteen minutes later he peeks his head in to see how things are going.  I'm browsing Slashdot and sitting next to a stack of 500 cards.  My coworker boggles.  "How the heck did you do it so fast?"

"Oh, I made a program."

Good thing he didn't ask to see it, because I uninstalled it after I was done.  My organization is strict about license count audits and I didn't want to have to explain in three months why there was no expense authorization form (signed by me) authorizing a payment (to me) for the license I used.  I think this means that, technically, I have just pirated my own software.

So you think that I was not aware of your Bingo card creator? Boy! I  knew it all along.

Wow, I don't even know where to start.

Did you just admit to them that you wrote your software on company time?

I hope that "Boss" is for real.  If so, the sinking feeling I was having for you is going away a little.

Hmm, that was not the take-away message I was trying for.  Lets try again: My day job has essentially nothing to do with my small business*.  They intersected, briefly, in a rather unlikely way this morning.  I thought it was amusing.

* And, it should go without saying, I run it on my own time.

>I thought it was amusing.

So did I.

I too thought it was amusing. However, if I did this in my corporate, the software would automatically belong to them by virtue of :

a) the statement "Oh, I made a program." - implicitly just now, in an attempt to solve the problem

b) the fact that they can take/have ownership of all software I write (unless they don't want it, or cannot exploit it commercially), particularly if it lands on one of their computers.

They may not have huge moral grounds for any of this, but it is vaguely stated in my contract and they have a lot of legal cash to sling around if I want to get shirty - so the software had better be making me a lot of money before I would dream of going there, apart from the sack and loss of salary I would be risking, etc...

Stinks, but there it is. Good luck, Patrick - you're a braver man than I.

anon -

He has enough history to demonstrate that his copyrights were valid well before he was assigned the project.  Many developers write utilities during their own time that they take with them to other companies in order to do their job. This could easily be seen as filling that role.

Its a sad thing that people here are so whipped that they make him feel scared to show off his acheivements. Solving this office problem quickly should get him brownie points.  Offering a free license to the Office Manager for future events would only help further. Having a side project should impress his coworkers (if he's obviously pulling his weight). But instead people here are so distrustful that its no wonder we always hear about dysfunctional offices. That attitude is what makes it dysfunctional.

Now the Boss decides that other people would like a Bingo card program and the company should develop one and sell it - they decide to bring in a team of IBM consultants to do it!

Funny story, thanks for sharing.

Very funny! I've had some sort of this heart-stopping interaction between my day job and my currently side job, but it wasn't that amusing!

As an outside consultant, you never have to worry about your day job taking things that you do on your own time.  That's another bonus that I hadn't though of for us contractors in the ever waging war of "FTE vs. Contractors: which is better?"

Patrick, good job.  This story lightened my morning (and I am up way to early to have a bad morning).

Hilarious.

...The only trouble is, once word gets around, they'll think you can write _anything_ in fifteen minutes.  :)

If they ask you to produce a certain .mpg file of Pamela Anderson, will you be just as prepared?  ;)

amusing story. Some people on this board are too serious for their own good.

I thought it was a great story too.

If anyone asks, I would go ahead and confess that you "donated" a copy of your program to the company for that one time use. I'm not familiar with Japanese culture, but it's probably the least painful way to get out of any problems here.

"Did you just admit to them that you wrote your software on company time?"

The words "Oh, I made a program." does not tell you when he made it. He has nothing to fear. Besides, there is quite a detailed trail about when, what, where, how and why it was made.

I can't believe how many people believe that companies have rights over what you do in your personal life outside of company time.

Very few people believe companies have those rights.  But a good many believe that companies will try to claim those rights regardless.  Call it paranoia, call it cynicism...

Don't speak another word to them.  Consult an attorney, and threaten legal action.  Then quit your job with that company and go make a mISV, where you'll rake in the cash and get the respect that those freedom-hating corporate types tried to steal from you.

There, that will save about 20 people the time of typing up their responses to the OP.

On a serious note, that's a funny story.  Glad to hear that your bingo card software came in handy in an unexpected way :P

Funny story, but what the hell are you doing wasting your time on Slashdot?

You need to download a domain blocker: http://www.verysimple.com/blog/?p=55

> I can't believe how many people believe that companies
> have rights over what you do in your personal life outside
> of company time.

http://unixguru.com/background.html

"Bingo" is Japanese for "code complete".
Its why everyone gets excited.

Could not help laughing at this! :-))

> I have just pirated my own software

ROFL! Can you report your employer to the BSA and get compensation?

> I can't believe how many people believe that companies
> have rights over what you do in your personal life outside
> of company time.

You would believe too if you had to sign such agreement on your first day at the company.

That was the main reason why I decided I should quit my day job if I wanted to get serious about my mISV.

Many companies have employment agreements that include clauses that explicitly state that any intellectual property created by the employee in its own time (whether it is related to his job or not) is company's IP.

I really wanted the job, and at the time had no concrete plans of having a mISV, so I just signed it.

You are supposed to go back to HR and ask to ammend the contract to include new items. Unless its a conflict of interest, they'll be happy to comply. People complain because they fear the worst and are too lazy to resolve it properly and legally.

Patrick, when I first read your site, I didn't know what Bingo was. I searched the net, used wikipedia, and gained zero understanding about this thing called Bingo.

Now I hear that your company plays (or uses?) Bingo, too.

It seems that in the US and Japan, it's Bingo, Bingo everywhere!

This looks like you can also find Bingo in shops, car dealerships, supermarkets, plains, trains and buses.

What is this misterious game, so strange that students and also employees play it?

Perhaps I will never find out.

> "Perhaps I will never find out."

In my part of Australia, they are called Flash Cards. Bingo is an entirely different game than Patrick's product.

>>
Patrick, when I first read your site, I didn't know what Bingo was. I searched the net, used wikipedia, and gained zero understanding about this thing called Bingo.
>>

Bingo game typically played by many players at once.  Each player is, generally speaking, in competition with every other player.  Each player is given a card which is typically 5 cells by 5 cells square.  In a gambling setting, the cells will be filled with numbers.  In an instructional setting, its typically something else (vocab words, for example). 

The caller or teacher will randomly choose one number/word from the set of words used to create the cards and call it out.  Everyone in the audience who has that word on a cell fills the cell in, using a chip, a dauber (it makes ink blots), or just a plain old #2 pencil. 

There are a variety of victory conditions, the most common being getting five cells filled in on a row, column, or one of the two diagonals.  A person having achieved a victory condition shouts "BINGO!"  If, on inspection of their card against the list of words called, their BINGO was accurate they win.  The winner typically collects a prize.

There may be multiple winners simultaneously, and the game may continue after some winners have won.  There are also numerous variants, probably the most common being "You must fill in every cell to win".

Thats the gist of the game in 30 seconds or less.

On the "Why the heck would anybody play this in school" front: Bingo involves a mix of luck (getting things on your card called) and skill (identifying that things which are on your card have been called -- for example, you need to be able to read and/or remember twenty-five words to mark the correct vocab word before the next vocab word is called).  It has some nice features for classroom instruction: you can make it fit into not a lot of time, the same game rules can be applied to many subjects (so you spend less time teaching kids to play and more time teaching them to read/add/etc), it has excellent crowd control properties, it doesn't feature direct competition between students (some teachers don't really like that -- bingo never means the smart, fast, or strong kid stomps in the other guy's face), etc. 

Why would you play this at work: Low materials cost, adapts to almost any environment (if you have a seat and can hear a speaker you can play bingo), and most especially it scales trivially to almost any number of players.

Anyhow, the game is almost universally known in the US, extraordinarily widely known in Japan, and to the best of my knowledge well-understood in the UK and Australia although the rules or name might be slightly different there.

My apologies to Patrick. I was not aware of the game aspect to your software.

Around here, Bingo is played by little old ladies in large halls, using this type of card:
http://www.ildado.com/uk-bingo-card.jpg
All the numbers must be marked off before shouting "Bingo". There are usually large cash prizes.

"Flash cards" OTOH, are used for learning - the teacher/parent holds up the card and the student/child tries to read it. Sometimes for young kids there is a picture on the flip side which serves as the answer.

Sorry if you know all this already, if not perhaps "Flash cards" would be a good adword for this country?

"Around here" -> I should note that I'm in Melbourne Australia, the UK card I linked to above was the only example I could find with a quick google.