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No, that's just a convenient excuse. The other side of "Be careful what you put in writing because lawyers, lol" that is always ignored is: "If you think we n

by ohazi 5y ago

No, that's just a convenient excuse. The other side of "Be careful what you put in writing because lawyers, lol" that is always ignored is: "If you think we need to dress up the way we talk about this one particular thing we're doing, then maybe we should reevaluate whether we should be doing this thing. If you think we need to dress up the way we talk about literally everything that this company does, then maybe it's time to step back and reevaluate the ethics of what this company stands for." A company is a machine that is going to do whatever it can to print money, including brainwashing its employees. You and your colleagues are the only entities capable of ethical reasoning. The company and its executive functionaries are not going to do this for you. In fact, they're more likely going to try and stop you. It's your responsibility to do it anyway.

shadowgovt 5y ago
Who is "we" and "you" in this context? At Google, the team responsible for deciding whether a given project is legal is the legal team. Googlers are encouraged to get a member of legal on board as soon as a project gels far enough to have a concrete description that could have legal consequences. At that point, a set of attorney client privileged communications could begin where any of the words listed here can be on the table (because that communication is not in discoverable media). But in general, Google doesn't encourage its software engineers to think they're experts in law any more that it encourages its lawyers to think their experts in BigTable performance tuning.
- CPLX 5y ago
  > the team responsible for deciding whether a given project is legal is the legal team Since legality in a corporate context is not typically a binary evaluation, it would be far more accurate to say that their job is to ascertain the relative financial and business costs of potentially illegal behavior so it can be effectively compared to that behavior’s potential profits
- ohazi 5y ago
  I'm not talking about what is legal, I'm talking about what is ethical. They are not the same. I'll grant you that not every corporate policy will agree with me, but I would argue that every human with a brain has a responsibility to think about whether what their boss asks them to do is ethical, and a responsibility to raise hell if they think it isn't. I don't believe it's ethical to abdicate this human responsibility to a corporate legal team. Part of what these corporate policies are deliberately designed to do is condition employees into believing that "deferring to the legal team" is where their responsibility ends. They want to convince you that this checks the box for both "legal" and "ethical" so that you feel like you've done your duty, and now you don't need to think about the ethics of your work anymore. This is what I meant by corporations "brainwashing" their employees. But you're always on the hook for the ethics of your work.
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    I agree with you. But one can raise hell by advocating to get the legal team on board as quickly as possible and making it clear that there's a significant issue that needs to be considered without using the words that will get the company half a million dollars of billed in-court attorney time whether or not there was actually any ethical issue. That's the key difference and the purpose for constraining what ends up in discoverable media. There is, perhaps, a meta-ethical question of whether companies should, in general, be factoring into their calculus ways to minimize the government's capacity to hinder their activities. It's a good question. I don't have an answer that's universally true. I suspect if we sit down and consider it, we find lots of circumstances where it's not in the best interests of anyone to just hand the government a company's throat to be slashed. After all, especially if we're talking about the United States, it's not like the government itself has proven a bastion of ethical reasoning either.

by ohazi 5y ago

shadowgovt 5y ago

Who is "we" and "you" in this context? At Google, the team responsible for deciding whether a given project is legal is the legal team. Googlers are encouraged to get a member of legal on board as soon as a project gels far enough to have a concrete description that could have legal consequences. At that point, a set of attorney client privileged communications could begin where any of the words listed here can be on the table (because that communication is not in discoverable media). But in general, Google doesn't encourage its software engineers to think they're experts in law any more that it encourages its lawyers to think their experts in BigTable performance tuning.

CPLX 5y ago
> the team responsible for deciding whether a given project is legal is the legal team Since legality in a corporate context is not typically a binary evaluation, it would be far more accurate to say that their job is to ascertain the relative financial and business costs of potentially illegal behavior so it can be effectively compared to that behavior’s potential profits
ohazi 5y ago
I'm not talking about what is legal, I'm talking about what is ethical. They are not the same. I'll grant you that not every corporate policy will agree with me, but I would argue that every human with a brain has a responsibility to think about whether what their boss asks them to do is ethical, and a responsibility to raise hell if they think it isn't. I don't believe it's ethical to abdicate this human responsibility to a corporate legal team. Part of what these corporate policies are deliberately designed to do is condition employees into believing that "deferring to the legal team" is where their responsibility ends. They want to convince you that this checks the box for both "legal" and "ethical" so that you feel like you've done your duty, and now you don't need to think about the ethics of your work anymore. This is what I meant by corporations "brainwashing" their employees. But you're always on the hook for the ethics of your work.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  I agree with you. But one can raise hell by advocating to get the legal team on board as quickly as possible and making it clear that there's a significant issue that needs to be considered without using the words that will get the company half a million dollars of billed in-court attorney time whether or not there was actually any ethical issue. That's the key difference and the purpose for constraining what ends up in discoverable media. There is, perhaps, a meta-ethical question of whether companies should, in general, be factoring into their calculus ways to minimize the government's capacity to hinder their activities. It's a good question. I don't have an answer that's universally true. I suspect if we sit down and consider it, we find lots of circumstances where it's not in the best interests of anyone to just hand the government a company's throat to be slashed. After all, especially if we're talking about the United States, it's not like the government itself has proven a bastion of ethical reasoning either.