A VP at Goldman is, I think, the third lowest ranking front-office position. Not only is it not the sort of "officer" that Delaware law contemplates, but it's also not the sort of context Delaware law contemplates. Aleynikov wasn't accused of wrongdoing in his official capacity as an officer of the corporation. That might be something like a CEO being accused of funneling contracts to his brother's company. Aleynikov was accused of wrongdoing that was incidental to his employment.
So what? Let's just stick with the letter of the law, otherwise we're just choosing the letter or the spirit, whichever is more advantageous for the higher-status party. I have no doubt that, had he lost on a technicality rather than this bullshit, the inverse of your post would be the top comment instead (though I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have the same author, I hope).
the ruling gives Goldman an incentive to keep the ambiguous language in place so it can reserve the right to make “unpredictable post hoc determinations about which former employees should be advanced attorney’s fees and which shouldn’t,” Fuentes wrote.
Maybe there's some selection bias going, or I'm a contrarian, but somehow dissents usually make more sense than rulings.
In the software world, this is something like SWE II, SWE III, Senior SWE, Staff SWE, Senior Staff SWE. The titles in the software world don't make much sense either.
Edit: Oh sorry, I didn't know this was a serious topic, for serious discussion only. I'll just take my awesome title and go live it up, doing what the fuck I want. Have fun filling out your TPS reports.
Edit: Why did someone down vote me for asking a question? Don't be so goddam sensitive.
Read this instead: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Aleynikov
That being said, this just shows how much power Goldman wields with the establishment and it was kind of a scary insight into their recorded weirdness. Basically they just said to the FBI that he stole the source code and he could possibly use the code to manipulate markets. This is a guy that writes the code to manipulate markets, but then he was a criminal, because he might do it for himself. The whole thing is insane IMHO.
It's ILA: Internal Link Architecture. It was the hot thing several years back.
VPs don't need to manage a team, but they do often shoulder some responsibility for a project, or maybe, even run the project. Usually, it is the level of pay that bumps them into the VP bracket. Not much else.
It was kind of a shock when I put 2 and 2 together and realized who the author was, as I'd already been using the code for a while.
And it looks like he got his money's worth. There was no dispute that he took the code. His "open source" defense apparently fell through, and a jury convicted him. He only won on appeal because he convinced the Second Circuit that software wasn't a trade secret within the Electronic Espionage Act, something which Congress went and explicitly my added in response to the court case.
