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Former Amazonian here. When i was there, they made us take this antitrust training course that had things like "don't use terms like 'market share' in internal
by valar_m 5y ago
Former Amazonian here. When i was there, they made us take this antitrust training course that had things like "don't use terms like 'market share' in internal communications", but all along there were people doing this? I mean...
- colinmhayes 5y agoWhy would they waste employee time on antitrust training if they were innocent?
- robbedpeter 5y agoCorporate ass-covering.
- seanmcdirmid 5y agoAll big corps require you to take this kind of training.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Supermancho 5y ago> All big corps require you to take this kind of training. I've worked at a couple "big corps" as an internal developer. JPMC, BestBuy, Experian, etc. Never encountered it. I suspect it's only for those companies in danger (or with a history of being charged with) breeching anti-trust.
- jamesfinlayson 5y agoMaybe it depends on the industry? I've worked in big companies with big interests in goverment-regulated industries and every single person has had to do this sort of training, regardless of role (there'll be a course every month, and big responsibilities like anti-money laundering and corruption get rehashed yearly).
- mtnygard 5y agoSuch training programs are often part of a settlement or judgement against a company that transgressed. The guilty individuals are long gone, but everyone after them has to take a mandatory ethics/antitrust/anticorruption/sensitivity class each year.
- tyingq 5y agoI have had the training in companies not in danger of anti-trust, but only when in a leadership position, not as a developer. And not a single-purpose anti-trust class, but as part of a business ethics class or similar.
- forgotmyoldacc 5y agoI've worked at one of the companies you've listed, definitely had to do anti-trust training.
- ptero 5y agos/all/many/ But the point of the argument is still valid -- it is present often enough and not only for nefarious purposes.
- tasha0663 5y agoIt's not unusual for required training for employees to be mandated in the aftermath of, say, a class action lawsuit. So maybe it wasn't the case when you were there, but became that way later.
- wenc 5y agoI worked at two Fortune 250s (both publicly listed) in completely different industries. Both had antitrust training for all corporate employees not just leadership. I believe —but have no data—that this is common among publicly listed companies.
- Supermancho 5y agoThe discussion hasn't been circling back to "all big corps have this kind of training" in a more general sense, but in a more specific one. There's antitrust training and there's ANY training that says "never use these words", which are wildly different.
- seanmcdirmid 5y agoIs there any big corp that doesn’t do “never use these words” training? “We are going to crush the competition” has been taboo in emails since the mid 1990s. Not to mention a lot of words that should be avoided for sensitivity reasons.
- Supermancho 5y ago> Is there any big corp that doesn’t do “never use these words” training? As I stated I've never seen it, in the context of anti-trust. If your company has to have that in literature, they are already skirting and it's just a matter of time.
- seanmcdirmid 5y agoAll the companies are buying pretty much the same training units from the same set of providers. If you haven't experienced personally at the American office in the big corp you claim to work out, I'm not sure what to tell you.
- Supermancho 5y ago> If you haven't experienced personally at the American office in the big corp you claim to work out, I'm not sure what to tell you. It's disingenuous to continue to move the goalpost out to a more general scenario than what birthed the thread. Re-read the specific issue at hand. You can go to the companies mentioned and there is no anti-trust training, for developers (of any level) that covers what phrases or words you can say. Whatever "generalized training" you are handwaving about does not contradict that fact. GL with whatever.
- xmcqdpt2 5y agoJPMC didn't have antitrust in the onboarding stuff? I find that difficult to believe. The bank I work for tells employees to never discuss products or prices with competitors without going through compliance. It's not really emphasized (it's one bullet point amongst many) but it's there. I just checked and it's in the JPMC code of conduct on page 4, https://www.jpmorganchase.com/content/dam/jpmc/jpmorgan-chase-and-co/documents/code-of-conduct.pdf https://www.jpmorganchase.com/content/dam/jpmc/jpmorgan-chas...
- nickff 5y agoBecause they were trying to correct or prevent it? If they hadn't done the training, you'd be saying that they never even tried to avoid it.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y agoThis isn't about prevention. It's training to avoid recording damning evidence. The bad behavior can continue as long as it isn't written down. Preferably implemented in pieces that lend plausible deniability.
- nickff 5y agoI thought it was generally accepted that changing verbiage/language has a huge impact on the way people think. Do you disagree with that notion?
- kevin_thibedeau 5y agoData retention training is always about limiting liability. These are the sort of companies that delete emails after 18 months no matter how much that kneecaps the employees. No amount of training will change the behavior of the sociopaths calling the shots. They need their underlings to not ruin everything for them with careless mistakes. Any other story is just a cover because they can't state their true intentions.
- Jiro 5y agoCompanies tell employees to delete emails after 18 months because there are two alternatives: 1) delete emails after 18 months (or some similar time period), or 2) never delete emails, ever. If your policy is "delete emails based on personal preference", someone can sue you in court and claim that the selective deletions of email is evidence of wrongdoing even if you just happened to have a full hard drive that day. And you don't actually need to be a wrongdoer for someone to claim this.
- Jiro 5y ago
- rat9988 5y agoSo you don't do it by ignorance as it becomes their responsability?
- bluGill 5y agoOne of my companies competitors (I'm not told which) was caught red handed bribing a government official someplace. Because of a very close look at all their practices - including the anti bribe training - the courts concluded this was a rouge employee doing something the company didn't want him to do (even though it would have greatly benefited the company) and so the company is still around. Training is a part of a robust process to ensure that your company only does legal things at all levels. It is a given in any large company that somebody will do something immoral/illegal. The real question is it one person and so the company can fire the bad person and be done, or is it the whole company and firing one person is just making a scapegoat.
- urthor 5y agoThat's actually surprisingly cunning. Run a very in depth training program on how "not" to do antitrust. Secretly, it's just a training course in antitrust. Gotta respect the level of commitment to evil.
- skybrian 5y agoIt sounds like pretty ordinary corporate training. The idea is that you don’t want ordinary workers saying things that sound bad in discoverable messages, which is very likely if there is the ordinary amount of speculation about things they don’t really know about. Whether any particular thing actually is an antitrust violation is for the lawyers to decide. I guess they decided wrong?
- BizarroLand 5y agoIt reads to me like the sexual harassment trainings. Those specifically tell you what not to do to limit the legal liability of the company. Nowhere in any sexual harassment training video have I ever seen anything saying that if you have the urge to sexually harass people to seek a support group or find another, less socially harmful outlet for your energies, not anything. It's strictly about treating the symptoms and not the disease. Although, now that I've thought about it, I guess this is more like, "use these methods to prevent yourself from observing sexual harassment so that you can't legally report it" so... yeah.
- skybrian 5y agoSure, there is a general assumption that you, the person taking the training, aren’t actually a bad person who has urges to do illegal things. Would you like to take training assuming you are capable of these things? Maybe there are bad people in the class but you can’t assume that. But I have been in training where they give basic dating advice, like if someone makes an excuse that’s as good as a “no.” If they are interested they’ll find a way to reschedule.
- kortilla 5y agoWhat are you talking about? A huge chunk of sexual harassment training is about stuff that is perfectly acceptable in non-work environments (asking someone on a date, flirting, etc). If sexual harassment training was just obvious stuff that needs counseling to fix (e.g. harassing people after having advances declined), then corporations likely wouldn’t need sexual harassment training at all. It’s mandatory precisely because it’s a bunch of behavior that is completely normal outside of work. Suggesting people get counseling if they feel the urge to ask someone at work out on a date is ridiculous.
- organsnyder 5y ago> "don't use terms like 'market share' in internal communications" Sounds like the training was teaching you how to avoid leaving an audit trail rather than how to prevent illegal activity.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- luckydata 5y agoduh, what do you think training is for?
- zarmin 5y ago
- kylebyproxy 5y agoHuh. I always thought it was for the conductors. This changes everything.
- dang 5y agoCould you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to HN? You've done it a lot, unfortunately. We ban accounts that do that, because we're trying for a different quality of discussion here. I don't want to ban you, so if you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
- DannyBee 5y agoCan we please kill this trope? it is because humans use terms colloquially rather than with the utmost precision, and then it gets held up as if the person meant the exact precise legal concept. This is true always, which is why the advice this person got is also commonly given in lots of forms. For example, doctors are often trained in being careful in what they write down for the same reason. The audit trail is always there no matter what, and this wouldn't change that
- klyrs 5y agoBe good > Don't be evil > Don't talk about being evil.
- dylan604 5y agoThe first rule of being a monopoly is don't talk about being a monopoly.
- throwaway889900 5y agoPeople pay attention in corporate training? I sure as hell don't.
- eru 5y agoCorporate training is partially about training you. It's also partially about being able to show that you had the opportunity to learn. So if you act contrarily to the training, you can be fired and/or claimed a rogue actor.
- judge2020 5y agoThis is standard procedure among any large company in a market. Ideally, antitrust should be proven by actions and not by “see! Your employees say you dominate the market! Take that!”
- erik_seaberg 5y agoThis. I’m not qualified to prosecute antitrust law; I’m not even a lawyer. How is it that I can throw the company under the bus just by misusing terms of art that I vaguely understand?
- littlestymaar 5y ago> How is it that I can throw the company under the bus just by misusing terms of art that I vaguely understand? You cannot. As you've seen the frequency of antitrust judgements is very low, you're really unlikely to harm your company by saying anything. Don't worry about companies being “thrown under the bus”, their are fine, thank you.
- judge2020 5y ago> the frequency of antitrust judgements is very low, No it's not. https://www.justice.gov/atr/antitrust-case-filings https://www.justice.gov/atr/antitrust-case-filings The only reason it appears to be low is because newsworthy antitrust filings against big tech are few and far between. You can still be a target of the DOJ even if you're not working FAANG.
- csours 5y agoCorpo training like that is a CYA for the company [0]. If an employee screws up it's much easier to fire them because you can show they knew better. 0. In addition to also being legit training sometimes.
- vmception 5y agoI mean you have to. Things like antitrust aren’t exactly clear laws you can avoid breaking at a certain size. So it becomes a word game. Source: have played word games to maintain standing in society
- bradly 5y agoAt Intuit we were told by legal not to use email in legal matters.
- coliveira 5y agoThe most interesting part of their training is that they only talk about actions that employees should be taking or not. It never considers the end result: being a monopoly. In other words, being monopolist is just fine, as long as people don't do any action that can be used as evidence against the company.
- eru 5y agoCompanies care whether a court of law could find them to be a monopoly (in jurisdictions where that is a problem). Somewhat generalized, they also care about the court of public opinion. Both kinds of courts rely heavily on interpretation and on words. They don't ascertain objective truths. Things revealed in proceedings in a court of law can often be used against you in the court of public opinion, too.