400 dollars for an hour of trade secrets. Screening questions included.
For a couple of days now, Hamza Faisal, and Rayan Ahmad, both members of the market research firm IDR, have been offering me 400 US dollars almost daily to talk about head-up displays for an hour. One small flaw: I work in automotive cybersecurity and regulation. My connection to head-up displays is that I occasionally look through a windshield.
The emails arrive in my private inbox. What they want is 60 minutes, remote, on technology evolution, emerging optical solutions, current development challenges, and innovation trends through 2035. One look at my profile would have shown that I am the wrong person, an effort of roughly eleven seconds. But if you fish with a trawl net, you don’t sort the catch beforehand.
My favorite part is the assurance that “no proprietary or commercially sensitive information would be requested.” Of course not. Everyone is famously happy to pay 400 dollars an hour for what is already in the press release. What they ask about is “current development challenges,” which is precisely what an engineer only knows because their employer pays them to know it.
Who ends up buying the resulting “research report” is something the interviewee never learns. Quite possibly the buyer sits two motorway exits down the road, developing the very same component.
For everyone currently doing the maths on their fee: there is a confidentiality obligation in your employment contract, and there is the German Trade Secrets Act (GeschGehG), Section 23, which is a criminal provision. Anyone who sells their employer’s development know-how to strangers for pocket money has not earned a formal warning but dismissal without notice. 400 dollars is a remarkably low price for a career.
I did briefly consider saying yes anyway. 60 minutes of PowerPoint karaoke: “The holographic quantum HUD with blockchain-based field-of-view synchronization, production-ready in 2031.” I am certain it would show up unchanged two weeks later in a report priced at 4,900 dollars. You cannot expect quality control from people who ask a cybersecurity lawyer about optics.
A handful of hangers-on who develop nothing themselves cling to an industry like barnacles, tap its know-how by legally questionable means, and hawk it on. Although the comparison is unfair. Barnacles at least do not sell the ship.
