13 ms·

On Wall Street, a high-ranking few still avoid email

145 points by dodders 10y ago

addicted 10y ago
Probably the most productive lot.
chollida1 10y ago
> Dimon uses email but is known to keep his replies short and factual, favoring "yes," "no" and "thank you." I mean, come on. Everyone uses email. Having said that, everyone also knows there are things you put in email and things you only discuss face to face, or over the phone. And the dividing line doesn't necessarily have anything to do about breaking the law. Everyone on wall street has had an email they typed up get into the hands of someone who they wish it wouldn't. Whether its shitting all over an analyst for not being good at their job that got back to the analyst or doing something similar to a CEO, these things can harm your future relationship with these people who you may need to do business with again. You rant over the phone, you issue actionable orders via email for the same reason. One has no trace, the other has a record you can point to.
- tdb7893 10y ago
  Emails seem like a big risk, with so much data even if you are trying to do everything right you have to handle everything perfectly or it just gives other people more stuff against you. I feel like the recent leaks are good examples of that
  - reverend_gonzo 10y ago
    Furthermore, if you have an entire conversation, its much easier to cherry pick specific parts to make the person look however you want them to look. If you're a big enough target, having lots of conversations is much worse than having none, because you will make a mistake, or something will be misinterpreted, either accidentally or willfully.
    - tdb7893 10y ago
      Ya, I don't want to get into a political debate at all but a friend on Facebook said Clinton's emails have "pretty much proof that she murdered one of her staffers". Turns out that if you give people 60,000 emails and they will find proof for everything.
      - Bartweiss 10y ago
        On which note, I'm a bit amazed by people I see insist that "there's nothing objectionable in Hillary's emails". Specific content aside, it would downright miraculous for 60k emails to not include something embarrassing to someone, and setting an expectation for that just commits us to lying or condemning anyone who uses email.
- toddsiegel 10y ago
  > everyone also knows there are things you put in email and things you only discuss face to face, or over the phone Sadly, this is not true. I get many emails from people with URGENT in the subject that require an immediate reply, as if they expect I will see it in minutes. I have gotten emails about outages from clients, even after telling then "outages are always a phone call". Some people assume that everyone lives in email, like they do, and has push notifications setup on their phone, etc.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - mstade 10y ago
    This. I pretty much ignore anything with "URGENT" in the subject line at this point. When everything is urgent, nothing is.
- alistproducer2 10y ago
  >Having said that, everyone also knows there are things you put in email and things you only discuss face to face, or over the phone. A lot of people don't know this. One of my favorite classes in business school was "Business Communications." a lot of the stuff seemed really basic, but I'm amazed how much of it is disregarded in the wild.
  - ams6110 10y ago
    First job out of school (early 1990s), working at a "big" consulting company. All the new hires had it drilled into them that you do not talk about work outside of work. And you never discuss anything client-specific in public, on a plane or in a cab, in a restaurant, etc. Email wasn't a worry, nobody had it then. I think they had an internal system of some sort but the line staff consultants didn't have access.
  - danielhooper 10y ago
    I'm curious what kind of obvious examples you might have in mind for someone who never took any business classes.
- moftz 10y ago
  Also, emails can be subject to discovery during a lawsuit. If you want to discuss things you don't want some lawyer looking over a year from now, you keep all discussions face to face or via phone. Email is only for things that should have a papertrail.
  - brightsize 10y ago
    Personal anecdote - I can confirm this as one recently deposed in a corporate lawsuit that I'm not even a party to. Email systems are awash with information that most people would never have expected to become public. You see all kinds of stuff in emails by employees: office gossip, embarrassing comments, foul language, snark about fellow employees and competitors and the company, non-work-related comms .... all of it subject to being twisted by opposition lawyers to try to bolster their case and which can end up verbatim in front of the eyes of a jury.
    - greedo 10y ago
      And chat logs if your chat is company hosted...
      - redbeard0x0a 10y ago
        Even Slack has the capability to hold on to your messages (as required by some certifications) and be retrieved during discovery. If it is a service that is paid for by the company, then it is most likely a trove of data that is discoverable...
- ComteDeLaFere 10y ago
  -> I mean, come on. Everyone uses email. Not actually. I've been a consultant for a few years now, and have worked with executives who have their assistants print out their email for them in order to review. It isn't limited to Wall Street. Though it's probably something we'll see less and less of as the years go by.
  - colejohnson66 10y ago
    Isn't that how Donald Knuth handles email? I heard his wife prints out emails and types his replies for him.
    - secure 10y ago
      More accurately, his secretary (as per https://cs.stanford.edu/~uno/email.html https://cs.stanford.edu/~uno/email.html). As per https://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-be-Knuths-secretary https://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-be-Knuths-secretary, the secretary role has changed a couple of times in the last couple of years.
- notacoward 10y ago
  > everyone also knows there are things you put in email and things you only discuss face to face, or over the phone. Sadly, no. I often have to remind co-workers not to discuss things like patents or license issues in email, IRC, etc. These are seasoned developers who absolutely should know better - we do take training in this every year - but it still keeps happening.
- notacoward 10y ago
  > everyone also knows there are things you put in email and things you only discuss face to face, or over the phone. Sadly, no. I often have to remind co-workers not to discuss things like patents or license issues in email, IRC, etc. These are seasoned developers who absolutely should know better - we do take training in this every year - but it still keeps happening.
thefastlane 10y ago
> Dimon volunteered: "Don't send emails after you've had a drink." good advice for everyone, not just bankers and politicians.
- nashashmi 10y ago
  Don't send emails when you are angry either. Just wait a while before sending.
  - movedx 10y ago
    Best advice I ever had early on in my career.
  - colejohnson66 10y ago
    Actually, just the act of writing out your anger or pain without actually sending it can reduce the anger or pain
    - robotresearcher 10y ago
      Just fill in the address field at the top of the email last, if ever.
- frandroid 10y ago
  I wish social media sites had Gmail's anti-drunk posting safeguard. :)
- 6stringmerc 10y ago
  "Wall St. got drunk" - G W Bush, re: 2008 financial meltdown, paraphrased.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- natuac 10y ago
  This is what George Clooney said about Twitter: "There's a real danger when you're really famous. I can have a drink or two at night; I don't need to have an apparatus that, in a drunken joke, even, I could say something, go to sleep, and wake up in the morning and my career be over." http://fusion.net/video/136579/george-clooney-doesnt-understand-why-famous-people-are-on-twitter/ http://fusion.net/video/136579/george-clooney-doesnt-underst...
shade23 10y ago
Wouldn't you prefer encrypted email more than a conversation. You do get a lot of self destructing emails too. And custom protocols included. And they use phone calls too I presume. Those would also come under the same scrutiny right?
- moftz 10y ago
  In some cases, they need to preserve email in case the company is sued and emails are subject to discovery. If these guys want to talk in private, they talk face to face. Email is only for things that should have a papertrail.
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    You can have a data retention policy and delete email after a certain period of time, you don't have to keep them just because they are created. Of course the nature of email makes it difficult to make sure the policy has been enforced.
    - closeparen 10y ago
      Public and other regulated companies are subject to minimums on the retention policy. They do have to keep them just because they were created. The standard enforcement protocol is to block all non-company webmail (and other messaging systems) and SMTP so everything runs through corporate Exchange or IM configured with the appropriate retention policy. I expect that as creating and dealing with wiretap recordings gets easier, we'll see email retention policies extended to voice communications. Currently that only exists for certain highly sensitive positions that interact with the public, AFAIK.
    - Bartweiss 10y ago
      For personal use or many companies, you can get by with a common sense data retention policy and systematically delete aged-out emails. That's not true for banks; they have specific reporting laws to comply with for anything that gets emailed.
drzaiusapelord 10y ago
Its incredible how there's all this email related stuff in the press and not one word about email encryption. Pretty much everything supports S/MIME, yet almost no one uses it. The DNC hack could have been avoided if those emails were encrypted, for example. Hackers would then also have to get private keys on top of data. That's another layer to get through. I suspect baby boomer led management think memorizing passphrases and using encryption is "too hard" and are calling the shots right now and we're all paying the price for it. We should be teaching each other and the younger generation that email encryption should be seen the same way we look at https now. Not too long ago https was regarded as for just 'credit card stuff only' because it 'cost time and resources.' Its sad that something as critical as email doesn't have end to end encryption.
- renaudg 10y ago
  memorizing passphrases and using encryption is "too hard" It's not just baby boomers, it's most people outside HN unfortunately.
  - drzaiusapelord 10y ago
    The worst part of this is that memorizing passphrases is far easier than passwords. Compare: mydog'snameisAliceandsheiscute to P@ssw0rd The latter is harder to memorize (what letters did I substitute with symbols again?) and far easier to crack. I suspect until regulators make people use encrypted email we'll keep using plain-text.
    - lukewrites 10y ago
      I'm a big fan of passphrases for important sites. For most sites I use a randomly generated pw that's stored in a password manager. I use separate pw managers for home (1password) and work (lastpass). Since a pw manager can be cracked, for important sites (financial , email, etc), I make up a sentence that describes my feelings about the site. These I keep memorized. As a bonus, as my feelings about the site change, it's a great prompt to update my password. I'd like to throw a layer of physical security into the mix (eg one of those usb keys), but it seems like there still aren't universally accepted options. Anyone have suggestions for this?
pbourke 10y ago
"His staff filters important messages, prints them out and puts them on his chair for review" A desire to filter out noise and apply their attention in a selective manner is probably the biggest motivation to avoid email. At this level, I imagine people would like to receive a concise written or spoken summary, think about the content, discuss it with the relevant people and then make a decision. Since they control their own time, and have staff to respond to "tactical emergencies," they're free to organize their schedule and staff in order to optimize the decision-making process.
- johan_larson 10y ago
  I remember hearing talk about Bill Gates having four assistants who did nothing except filter and redirect email sent to him. I can easily believe that major figures with a public email address receive far more mail than they can deal with in person.
nerdo 10y ago
Sounds like things are going as planned for Wikileaks[1]: > RS: One of the unintended consequences is the opposite effect, which is what we've seen with the Department of Defense, and even the State Department, here in the U.S., of trying to make secrets more impenetrable rather than less and trying to take precautions against what has happened from happening again in the future. How do you regard that? > JA: Well, I think that's very positive. Since 2006, we have been working along this philosophy that organizations which are abusive and need to be [in] the public eye. If their behavior is revealed to the public, they have one of two choices: one is to reform in such a way that they can be proud of their endeavors, and proud to display them to the public. Or the other is to lock down internally and to balkanize, and as a result, of course, cease to be as efficient as they were. To me, that is a very good outcome, because organizations can either be efficient, open and honest, or they can be closed, conspiratorial and inefficient. 1: http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2034040,00.html http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2034040,00...
- smallnamespace 10y ago
  Time for Wikileaks to make all their internal communications public. After all, don't they believe in full transparency?
  - cloudjacker 10y ago
    Sure when they start accepting public money or get absorbed into the Government Accountability Office
    - vkou 10y ago
      Not all of the people whose correspondence they leak accept public money, or are part of governments. They don't have much of a moral hill to stand on - unless they subscribe to the morality of "The ends justify the means." (Which most people do.)
      - saint_fiasco 10y ago
steveplace 10y ago
Janet Napolitano never used email as the head of DHS
- nashashmi 10y ago
  Donald Trump is also said not to use email. I think he said "I'm smart. I don't use email.".
  - gearhart 10y ago
    In case anyone else, like me, assumed this was comedy, there's no Politifact on it, but Bloomberg claims it's true: http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-06-20/trump-strategy-meeting http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-06-20/trump-... (last paragraph)
    - qznc 10y ago
      He probably does use his phone to tweet http://varianceexplained.org/r/trump-tweets/ http://varianceexplained.org/r/trump-tweets/
- busterarm 10y ago
  I worked at a financial company where Larry Summers went to work, briefly, around 10 years ago. The guy wouldn't use the company computers or phones.
- trhway 10y ago
  >Janet Napolitano never used email as the head of DHS i know at least one candidate for President of US who right now is very very sorry for not following such best practice while at her last gov job, and who has basically become the showcase of "Trying to dodge discovery the Wrong Way".
dtnewman 10y ago
My first job was at an investment bank. I was taught very early on that I needed to watch what I said in my emails. I'm not sure if it was true or not, but someone told me that every month, someone from compliance looked over a random selection of my emails and my manager would have been informed if they found something wrong. What everyone on Wall Street appreciates is that your emails are a permanent record and should be treated accordingly. When there's a real risk that your emails will later turn up in court, you are gonna be a lot more careful about what you say. Even things that seem innocuous when you write them may not look good if they come under the spotlight later (something like "Hey John, the code in that repo looks messy..." may come back to bite you if it turns up in court). So I was taught to always keep to facts in emails rather than opinions ("this data set has 246 invalid phone numbers and 20 fake email addresses" is a fact... "this data looks messy" is an opinion subject to all sorts of interpretation later). You might think that there's nothing that you have to hide. If that's true, then by all means, say what you want in your _personal_ email. But when you are using your company email, remember that you don't have many rights to privacy there and so treat it accordingly.
- jlarocco 10y ago
  That's actually true in most large corporations. I once dated a lady who did data recovery and "e-discovery" for the legal department of a large corporation. A large part of her job involved grabbing disk images of people's hard drives, and then digging through them and people's email, looking for any information relevant to lawsuits, internal investigations, subpeonas, etc.. As far as I know it was never at random, though.
  - devopsproject 10y ago
    Compliance vs Discovery. Typically, you would check for compliance periodically while discovery happens after the fact.
fatdog 10y ago
People only use email to create a paper trail. It's not a discussion, as a medium it's a set of assertions and challenges. If you don't have a personal relationship with someone, questions aren't even honest questions, they are signals of liability transfer. The cc: line is a kind of blackmail where assholes list the people they are performing for, or threatening to scandalize you to. Everything about e-mail is abnormal. It's a performance. The only way to win is not to play. Hence executives eschew it.
- gohrt 10y ago
  Everything you said applies to other forms of communication as well as email.
- closeparen 10y ago
  Please name the organizations that led you to believe this so we can never work for them. I don't doubt that this toxic environment exists, but I'm fortunate not to have worked in one yet and I'd like to keep it that way.
  - fatdog 10y ago
    The entire public sector, and most organizations over 1000 people. Bureaucracy is what happens when your dunbar-number sized network overflows and starts to metastasize. When people say they work for a company that is collaborative and non-hierarchical, I've found it either means they are a manipulative and delusional tyrant or they are the sucker at the table.
    - closeparen 10y ago
      My large organization manages this pretty successfully by having small teams that don't interact much. It's absolutely hierarchical from a macro level, but engineers live in pretty collaborative 5-10 person leaf nodes and we don't need to interact across the tree very often. What you describe might exist for senior management, but they generally take cross-team dependencies to be a bug in the way the tree was partitioned, and fix it at the next re-org.
ihaveahadron 10y ago
Why avoid email. It's just quick/instantaneous physical letter writing.
laxatives 10y ago
This doesn't seem so crazy. Google deletes emails after a few months for rank/file and 6 months for executives for the sake of avoiding lawsuits as well.
- johan_larson 10y ago
  > ... after a few months for rank/file and 6 months for executives What's your source for this? I can easily believe they delete emails. But I would expect them to be subject to various laws about email retention, and those laws typically require companies to hold on to emails for years.
exelius 10y ago
I have worked with C-level executives at several very large companies. Due to the nature of regulation at companies of this size, many of these individuals are under subpoena almost continuously. As a result of the record keeping requirements of a person under subpoena, their life is much simpler if they conduct all business in person and keep no files. They use e-mail exclusively for interactions that are intended to be public. Any business communication to them is usually scheduled through a secretary and done in in-person meetings with projected slides. It's not that they have anything to hide -- but at the same time, corporate espionage is a real thing and you have to protect trade secrets and you know the government receives a copy of every e-mail and document that you do.
- gohrt 10y ago
  So, they have something to hide.
  - exelius 10y ago
    Well, there are a lot of things that look bad but aren't criminal.
    - dtnewman 10y ago
      To add to this, there are also lots of things that can be misinterpreted or taken out of context. I imagine that most people would treat email differently if they knew that all of their emails would become public information. Smart executives at large companies simply assume this and send emails accordingly.
  - stale2002 10y ago
    They have trade secrets and IP to hide, yes.
  - refurb 10y ago
    Not necessarily. They just don't want the risk of their emails being used against them due to misinterpretation. A great story I heard from a former employer was a lawsuit around a new sleeping pill. One person taking the drug ended up killing his wife while on it (in combination with a ton of alcohol and other drugs). The drug manufacturer was sued and decided to vigorously defend the safety of the drug. Well, some low-level lawyer in the company decided to spout about the science of drug development (have no actual education around it) and said in an email "maybe the dose is too high?". Slam dunk. That statement looked incriminating. The company quickly settled after that email was found. Just not worth the time or money to fight it. A settlement was the cheapest way out.
noer 10y ago
The thing I always think when I read articles like this (and this one from the NY Times about Senators & Email [1]) is that they don't use email because they don't have to. They have jobs that come with many assistants & aides who can communicate electornically on their behalf. They started working in these positions before email became the norm for business/professional communication and happen to have had careers that span both eras. I wonder if these people are the last (or some of the last) people that don't use email to communicate. 1: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/12/us/politics/storing-emails-from-these-senators-will-be-easy-if-they-ever-send-one.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/12/us/politics/storing-emails...
darrenmc 10y ago
I wonder how many tech executives don't use email? I've got a feeling Tim Cook doesn't use a computer, maybe just an iPad with a carefully curated list of messages and financial reports for him to browse.
werdna123 10y ago
"Data is not oil. It needs to be transformed into a product before it's valuable." As does... oil...
Gustomaximus 10y ago
Not covered in this article, some people simply never transitioned to new technology because they are older, unfamiliar/inclined with tech and didn't have to. A colleague who was at a fairly known investment company told me of a senior exec whose PA left printed emails and left them on his desk. He would then write replies on the paper version and the PA would type and send them. Nothing to do with secrecy. He was just older and never adapted to computers. I feel this logic fits occam's razor nicely rather than being over conspiratorial. It's not like you can't use email for efficiency, and do the 'lets take this offline' response when going somewhere sensitive/secretive.

145 points by dodders 10y ago

Probably the most productive lot.

> Dimon uses email but is known to keep his replies short and factual, favoring "yes," "no" and "thank you." I mean, come on. Everyone uses email. Having said that, everyone also knows there are things you put in email and things you only discuss face to face, or over the phone. And the dividing line doesn't necessarily have anything to do about breaking the law. Everyone on wall street has had an email they typed up get into the hands of someone who they wish it wouldn't. Whether its shitting all over an analyst for not being good at their job that got back to the analyst or doing something similar to a CEO, these things can harm your future relationship with these people who you may need to do business with again. You rant over the phone, you issue actionable orders via email for the same reason. One has no trace, the other has a record you can point to.

tdb7893 10y ago
Emails seem like a big risk, with so much data even if you are trying to do everything right you have to handle everything perfectly or it just gives other people more stuff against you. I feel like the recent leaks are good examples of that
- reverend_gonzo 10y ago
  Furthermore, if you have an entire conversation, its much easier to cherry pick specific parts to make the person look however you want them to look. If you're a big enough target, having lots of conversations is much worse than having none, because you will make a mistake, or something will be misinterpreted, either accidentally or willfully.
  - tdb7893 10y ago
    Ya, I don't want to get into a political debate at all but a friend on Facebook said Clinton's emails have "pretty much proof that she murdered one of her staffers". Turns out that if you give people 60,000 emails and they will find proof for everything.
    - Bartweiss 10y ago
      On which note, I'm a bit amazed by people I see insist that "there's nothing objectionable in Hillary's emails". Specific content aside, it would downright miraculous for 60k emails to not include something embarrassing to someone, and setting an expectation for that just commits us to lying or condemning anyone who uses email.
toddsiegel 10y ago
> everyone also knows there are things you put in email and things you only discuss face to face, or over the phone Sadly, this is not true. I get many emails from people with URGENT in the subject that require an immediate reply, as if they expect I will see it in minutes. I have gotten emails about outages from clients, even after telling then "outages are always a phone call". Some people assume that everyone lives in email, like they do, and has push notifications setup on their phone, etc.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- mstade 10y ago
  This. I pretty much ignore anything with "URGENT" in the subject line at this point. When everything is urgent, nothing is.
alistproducer2 10y ago
>Having said that, everyone also knows there are things you put in email and things you only discuss face to face, or over the phone. A lot of people don't know this. One of my favorite classes in business school was "Business Communications." a lot of the stuff seemed really basic, but I'm amazed how much of it is disregarded in the wild.
- ams6110 10y ago
  First job out of school (early 1990s), working at a "big" consulting company. All the new hires had it drilled into them that you do not talk about work outside of work. And you never discuss anything client-specific in public, on a plane or in a cab, in a restaurant, etc. Email wasn't a worry, nobody had it then. I think they had an internal system of some sort but the line staff consultants didn't have access.
- danielhooper 10y ago
  I'm curious what kind of obvious examples you might have in mind for someone who never took any business classes.
moftz 10y ago
Also, emails can be subject to discovery during a lawsuit. If you want to discuss things you don't want some lawyer looking over a year from now, you keep all discussions face to face or via phone. Email is only for things that should have a papertrail.
- brightsize 10y ago
  Personal anecdote - I can confirm this as one recently deposed in a corporate lawsuit that I'm not even a party to. Email systems are awash with information that most people would never have expected to become public. You see all kinds of stuff in emails by employees: office gossip, embarrassing comments, foul language, snark about fellow employees and competitors and the company, non-work-related comms .... all of it subject to being twisted by opposition lawyers to try to bolster their case and which can end up verbatim in front of the eyes of a jury.
  - greedo 10y ago
    And chat logs if your chat is company hosted...
    - redbeard0x0a 10y ago
      Even Slack has the capability to hold on to your messages (as required by some certifications) and be retrieved during discovery. If it is a service that is paid for by the company, then it is most likely a trove of data that is discoverable...
ComteDeLaFere 10y ago
-> I mean, come on. Everyone uses email. Not actually. I've been a consultant for a few years now, and have worked with executives who have their assistants print out their email for them in order to review. It isn't limited to Wall Street. Though it's probably something we'll see less and less of as the years go by.
- colejohnson66 10y ago
  Isn't that how Donald Knuth handles email? I heard his wife prints out emails and types his replies for him.
  - secure 10y ago
    More accurately, his secretary (as per https://cs.stanford.edu/~uno/email.html https://cs.stanford.edu/~uno/email.html). As per https://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-be-Knuths-secretary https://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-be-Knuths-secretary, the secretary role has changed a couple of times in the last couple of years.
notacoward 10y ago
> everyone also knows there are things you put in email and things you only discuss face to face, or over the phone. Sadly, no. I often have to remind co-workers not to discuss things like patents or license issues in email, IRC, etc. These are seasoned developers who absolutely should know better - we do take training in this every year - but it still keeps happening.
notacoward 10y ago
> everyone also knows there are things you put in email and things you only discuss face to face, or over the phone. Sadly, no. I often have to remind co-workers not to discuss things like patents or license issues in email, IRC, etc. These are seasoned developers who absolutely should know better - we do take training in this every year - but it still keeps happening.

thefastlane 10y ago

> Dimon volunteered: "Don't send emails after you've had a drink." good advice for everyone, not just bankers and politicians.

nashashmi 10y ago
Don't send emails when you are angry either. Just wait a while before sending.
- movedx 10y ago
  Best advice I ever had early on in my career.
- colejohnson66 10y ago
  Actually, just the act of writing out your anger or pain without actually sending it can reduce the anger or pain
  - robotresearcher 10y ago
    Just fill in the address field at the top of the email last, if ever.
frandroid 10y ago
I wish social media sites had Gmail's anti-drunk posting safeguard. :)
6stringmerc 10y ago
"Wall St. got drunk" - G W Bush, re: 2008 financial meltdown, paraphrased.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
natuac 10y ago
This is what George Clooney said about Twitter: "There's a real danger when you're really famous. I can have a drink or two at night; I don't need to have an apparatus that, in a drunken joke, even, I could say something, go to sleep, and wake up in the morning and my career be over." http://fusion.net/video/136579/george-clooney-doesnt-understand-why-famous-people-are-on-twitter/ http://fusion.net/video/136579/george-clooney-doesnt-underst...

shade23 10y ago

Wouldn't you prefer encrypted email more than a conversation. You do get a lot of self destructing emails too. And custom protocols included. And they use phone calls too I presume. Those would also come under the same scrutiny right?

moftz 10y ago
In some cases, they need to preserve email in case the company is sued and emails are subject to discovery. If these guys want to talk in private, they talk face to face. Email is only for things that should have a papertrail.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  You can have a data retention policy and delete email after a certain period of time, you don't have to keep them just because they are created. Of course the nature of email makes it difficult to make sure the policy has been enforced.
  - closeparen 10y ago
    Public and other regulated companies are subject to minimums on the retention policy. They do have to keep them just because they were created. The standard enforcement protocol is to block all non-company webmail (and other messaging systems) and SMTP so everything runs through corporate Exchange or IM configured with the appropriate retention policy. I expect that as creating and dealing with wiretap recordings gets easier, we'll see email retention policies extended to voice communications. Currently that only exists for certain highly sensitive positions that interact with the public, AFAIK.
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    For personal use or many companies, you can get by with a common sense data retention policy and systematically delete aged-out emails. That's not true for banks; they have specific reporting laws to comply with for anything that gets emailed.

drzaiusapelord 10y ago

Its incredible how there's all this email related stuff in the press and not one word about email encryption. Pretty much everything supports S/MIME, yet almost no one uses it. The DNC hack could have been avoided if those emails were encrypted, for example. Hackers would then also have to get private keys on top of data. That's another layer to get through. I suspect baby boomer led management think memorizing passphrases and using encryption is "too hard" and are calling the shots right now and we're all paying the price for it. We should be teaching each other and the younger generation that email encryption should be seen the same way we look at https now. Not too long ago https was regarded as for just 'credit card stuff only' because it 'cost time and resources.' Its sad that something as critical as email doesn't have end to end encryption.

renaudg 10y ago
memorizing passphrases and using encryption is "too hard" It's not just baby boomers, it's most people outside HN unfortunately.
- drzaiusapelord 10y ago
  The worst part of this is that memorizing passphrases is far easier than passwords. Compare: mydog'snameisAliceandsheiscute to P@ssw0rd The latter is harder to memorize (what letters did I substitute with symbols again?) and far easier to crack. I suspect until regulators make people use encrypted email we'll keep using plain-text.
  - lukewrites 10y ago
    I'm a big fan of passphrases for important sites. For most sites I use a randomly generated pw that's stored in a password manager. I use separate pw managers for home (1password) and work (lastpass). Since a pw manager can be cracked, for important sites (financial , email, etc), I make up a sentence that describes my feelings about the site. These I keep memorized. As a bonus, as my feelings about the site change, it's a great prompt to update my password. I'd like to throw a layer of physical security into the mix (eg one of those usb keys), but it seems like there still aren't universally accepted options. Anyone have suggestions for this?

pbourke 10y ago

"His staff filters important messages, prints them out and puts them on his chair for review" A desire to filter out noise and apply their attention in a selective manner is probably the biggest motivation to avoid email. At this level, I imagine people would like to receive a concise written or spoken summary, think about the content, discuss it with the relevant people and then make a decision. Since they control their own time, and have staff to respond to "tactical emergencies," they're free to organize their schedule and staff in order to optimize the decision-making process.

johan_larson 10y ago
I remember hearing talk about Bill Gates having four assistants who did nothing except filter and redirect email sent to him. I can easily believe that major figures with a public email address receive far more mail than they can deal with in person.

nerdo 10y ago

Sounds like things are going as planned for Wikileaks[1]: > RS: One of the unintended consequences is the opposite effect, which is what we've seen with the Department of Defense, and even the State Department, here in the U.S., of trying to make secrets more impenetrable rather than less and trying to take precautions against what has happened from happening again in the future. How do you regard that? > JA: Well, I think that's very positive. Since 2006, we have been working along this philosophy that organizations which are abusive and need to be [in] the public eye. If their behavior is revealed to the public, they have one of two choices: one is to reform in such a way that they can be proud of their endeavors, and proud to display them to the public. Or the other is to lock down internally and to balkanize, and as a result, of course, cease to be as efficient as they were. To me, that is a very good outcome, because organizations can either be efficient, open and honest, or they can be closed, conspiratorial and inefficient. 1: http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2034040,00.html http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2034040,00...

smallnamespace 10y ago
Time for Wikileaks to make all their internal communications public. After all, don't they believe in full transparency?
- cloudjacker 10y ago
  Sure when they start accepting public money or get absorbed into the Government Accountability Office
  - vkou 10y ago
    Not all of the people whose correspondence they leak accept public money, or are part of governments. They don't have much of a moral hill to stand on - unless they subscribe to the morality of "The ends justify the means." (Which most people do.)
    - saint_fiasco 10y ago

steveplace 10y ago

Janet Napolitano never used email as the head of DHS

nashashmi 10y ago
Donald Trump is also said not to use email. I think he said "I'm smart. I don't use email.".
- gearhart 10y ago
  In case anyone else, like me, assumed this was comedy, there's no Politifact on it, but Bloomberg claims it's true: http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-06-20/trump-strategy-meeting http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-06-20/trump-... (last paragraph)
  - qznc 10y ago
    He probably does use his phone to tweet http://varianceexplained.org/r/trump-tweets/ http://varianceexplained.org/r/trump-tweets/
busterarm 10y ago
I worked at a financial company where Larry Summers went to work, briefly, around 10 years ago. The guy wouldn't use the company computers or phones.
trhway 10y ago
>Janet Napolitano never used email as the head of DHS i know at least one candidate for President of US who right now is very very sorry for not following such best practice while at her last gov job, and who has basically become the showcase of "Trying to dodge discovery the Wrong Way".

dtnewman 10y ago

My first job was at an investment bank. I was taught very early on that I needed to watch what I said in my emails. I'm not sure if it was true or not, but someone told me that every month, someone from compliance looked over a random selection of my emails and my manager would have been informed if they found something wrong. What everyone on Wall Street appreciates is that your emails are a permanent record and should be treated accordingly. When there's a real risk that your emails will later turn up in court, you are gonna be a lot more careful about what you say. Even things that seem innocuous when you write them may not look good if they come under the spotlight later (something like "Hey John, the code in that repo looks messy..." may come back to bite you if it turns up in court). So I was taught to always keep to facts in emails rather than opinions ("this data set has 246 invalid phone numbers and 20 fake email addresses" is a fact... "this data looks messy" is an opinion subject to all sorts of interpretation later). You might think that there's nothing that you have to hide. If that's true, then by all means, say what you want in your _personal_ email. But when you are using your company email, remember that you don't have many rights to privacy there and so treat it accordingly.

jlarocco 10y ago
That's actually true in most large corporations. I once dated a lady who did data recovery and "e-discovery" for the legal department of a large corporation. A large part of her job involved grabbing disk images of people's hard drives, and then digging through them and people's email, looking for any information relevant to lawsuits, internal investigations, subpeonas, etc.. As far as I know it was never at random, though.
- devopsproject 10y ago
  Compliance vs Discovery. Typically, you would check for compliance periodically while discovery happens after the fact.

fatdog 10y ago

People only use email to create a paper trail. It's not a discussion, as a medium it's a set of assertions and challenges. If you don't have a personal relationship with someone, questions aren't even honest questions, they are signals of liability transfer. The cc: line is a kind of blackmail where assholes list the people they are performing for, or threatening to scandalize you to. Everything about e-mail is abnormal. It's a performance. The only way to win is not to play. Hence executives eschew it.

gohrt 10y ago
Everything you said applies to other forms of communication as well as email.
closeparen 10y ago
Please name the organizations that led you to believe this so we can never work for them. I don't doubt that this toxic environment exists, but I'm fortunate not to have worked in one yet and I'd like to keep it that way.
- fatdog 10y ago
  The entire public sector, and most organizations over 1000 people. Bureaucracy is what happens when your dunbar-number sized network overflows and starts to metastasize. When people say they work for a company that is collaborative and non-hierarchical, I've found it either means they are a manipulative and delusional tyrant or they are the sucker at the table.
  - closeparen 10y ago
    My large organization manages this pretty successfully by having small teams that don't interact much. It's absolutely hierarchical from a macro level, but engineers live in pretty collaborative 5-10 person leaf nodes and we don't need to interact across the tree very often. What you describe might exist for senior management, but they generally take cross-team dependencies to be a bug in the way the tree was partitioned, and fix it at the next re-org.

ihaveahadron 10y ago

Why avoid email. It's just quick/instantaneous physical letter writing.

laxatives 10y ago

This doesn't seem so crazy. Google deletes emails after a few months for rank/file and 6 months for executives for the sake of avoiding lawsuits as well.

johan_larson 10y ago
> ... after a few months for rank/file and 6 months for executives What's your source for this? I can easily believe they delete emails. But I would expect them to be subject to various laws about email retention, and those laws typically require companies to hold on to emails for years.

exelius 10y ago

I have worked with C-level executives at several very large companies. Due to the nature of regulation at companies of this size, many of these individuals are under subpoena almost continuously. As a result of the record keeping requirements of a person under subpoena, their life is much simpler if they conduct all business in person and keep no files. They use e-mail exclusively for interactions that are intended to be public. Any business communication to them is usually scheduled through a secretary and done in in-person meetings with projected slides. It's not that they have anything to hide -- but at the same time, corporate espionage is a real thing and you have to protect trade secrets and you know the government receives a copy of every e-mail and document that you do.

gohrt 10y ago
So, they have something to hide.
- exelius 10y ago
  Well, there are a lot of things that look bad but aren't criminal.
  - dtnewman 10y ago
    To add to this, there are also lots of things that can be misinterpreted or taken out of context. I imagine that most people would treat email differently if they knew that all of their emails would become public information. Smart executives at large companies simply assume this and send emails accordingly.
- stale2002 10y ago
  They have trade secrets and IP to hide, yes.
- refurb 10y ago
  Not necessarily. They just don't want the risk of their emails being used against them due to misinterpretation. A great story I heard from a former employer was a lawsuit around a new sleeping pill. One person taking the drug ended up killing his wife while on it (in combination with a ton of alcohol and other drugs). The drug manufacturer was sued and decided to vigorously defend the safety of the drug. Well, some low-level lawyer in the company decided to spout about the science of drug development (have no actual education around it) and said in an email "maybe the dose is too high?". Slam dunk. That statement looked incriminating. The company quickly settled after that email was found. Just not worth the time or money to fight it. A settlement was the cheapest way out.

noer 10y ago

The thing I always think when I read articles like this (and this one from the NY Times about Senators & Email [1]) is that they don't use email because they don't have to. They have jobs that come with many assistants & aides who can communicate electornically on their behalf. They started working in these positions before email became the norm for business/professional communication and happen to have had careers that span both eras. I wonder if these people are the last (or some of the last) people that don't use email to communicate. 1: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/12/us/politics/storing-emails-from-these-senators-will-be-easy-if-they-ever-send-one.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/12/us/politics/storing-emails...

darrenmc 10y ago

I wonder how many tech executives don't use email? I've got a feeling Tim Cook doesn't use a computer, maybe just an iPad with a carefully curated list of messages and financial reports for him to browse.

werdna123 10y ago

"Data is not oil. It needs to be transformed into a product before it's valuable." As does... oil...

Gustomaximus 10y ago

Not covered in this article, some people simply never transitioned to new technology because they are older, unfamiliar/inclined with tech and didn't have to. A colleague who was at a fairly known investment company told me of a senior exec whose PA left printed emails and left them on his desk. He would then write replies on the paper version and the PA would type and send them. Nothing to do with secrecy. He was just older and never adapted to computers. I feel this logic fits occam's razor nicely rather than being over conspiratorial. It's not like you can't use email for efficiency, and do the 'lets take this offline' response when going somewhere sensitive/secretive.