6 ms·

They sure like their email at Google. At most other organizations, sensitive email chains would be open to discovery but would just end by saying "call me" :)

by drewda 5y ago

mjevans 5y ago
Major corporations also often adopt a policy of automated record expunge after a given time. Sometimes that time is very short.
- dekhn 5y ago
  when I started at GOOG, email lived forever. Then at some point, supposedly document discovery was costing n*2 dollars for n accounts and this was some sort of justification for creating a 1-year and 5-year expunge (maybe I have the times off). I ended up losing a fair amount of my long-term correspondence (scientific stuff) because I didn't want to vault things indefinitely. What amazes me is that the leadership repeatedly puts these sorts of incriminating things in email after being repeatedly told not to.
  - droopyEyelids 5y ago
    I think of myself as someone who is relatively skeptical of authority, but even so it's hard to disabuse myself of the notion that company leadership is there due to meritocratic reasons. Just because they're VPs in the biggest company in the world doesn't mean they're actually smarter or more capable than a random person selected from the population at large. Some of them might be, but SOO many people are in their spots due to the accident of their birth and other random processes that happened afterwards.
    - dekhn 5y ago
      I wouldn't say any of the SVPs I met at Google during my era (probably 6-7 SVPs) that I thought any of them were dumb. And several were some of the smartest people I've met. But that's the problem with Google: INT 18, WIS 3.
      - yborg 5y ago
        >But that's the problem with Google: INT 18, WIS 3 This is the whole tech industry in a nutshell, not just Google.
      - omarfarooq 5y ago
        > INT 18, WIS 3. Pardon?
        niij 5y ago
        High intellect, low wisdom. The shorthand here is common in games where your character has certain capabilities/stats: intellect (int), strength (str), defence (def), etc.
        actually_a_dog 5y ago
        It's a D&D reference. Starting stats for (human) characters typically range from 3-18, corresponding to the range of 3 six sided dice. "INT 18" means "maximum normal human Intelligence." "WIS 3" means "lowest possible human Wisdom stat," where "Wisdom" roughly translates to "common sense."
    - ahiknsr 5y ago
      > Some of them might be, but SOO many people are in their spots due to the accident of their birth and other random processes that happened afterwards. Disagree. If you are not smart, you wouldn't last long in those positions.
      - spacemanmatt 5y ago
        PP did not imply favoritism got them into those positions and your comment doesn't address stochastic social processes. I declare a miscommunication.
  - TheKarateKid 5y ago
    > What amazes me is that the leadership repeatedly puts these sorts of incriminating things in email after being repeatedly told not to. It's probably intentional in many cases to cover themselves when things hit the fan.
    - seanhunter 5y ago
      It's probably not and it definitely doesn't. Operational security is hard and people have a lot on their plate and in their minds, so forget and slip up etc. My mental model is that you are never seeing the totality of communications, but instead imagine people are having communications on several channels (let's say in person, via a phone call, over Whatsapp/SMS/DMs and over email). A conversation in one channel will spill over into another channel. For instance in person or via a phone call will often lead to a "one more thing" moment or followup and the person will follow up over email or dm instead of in-person/voice.
  - bsimpson 5y ago
    It's so easy to forget that corp email is on a conveyor belt (esp when that belt is 18mos long). Then you go to find an email past-you wrote and remember "oh, the 18mo thing."
  - daniel-cussen 5y ago
    Maybe getting sued is not the end of the world. Like OK, you talk about it, you argue, and then the judge says this, the business says they'll appeal so that in the news it looks like the plaintiff is a bitch, but they never appeal because they know they'll get gutted clean as a fish appealing their stupid case. Well then they pay. So, I am a man and if a man becomes a husband, then in the wedding, when signing the marriage contract, that gives the wife the right to sue. Well both have the right to sue. But it doesn't matter, getting married means getting sued, having children means getting sued, hiring employees means getting sued, contracts means getting sued, using IP means getting sued, and you know what? Good, because otherwise men would leave their wives stranded, children would have nothing, promises would be all broken and IP would get stolen. Lawsuits are inescapable, a business I worked for would literally cheat every single employee, partner, and customer, without exception if they could, and the reason they can't is the lawsuit. That's it. You have to pay. Lawsuits equal paychecks. Complaining, getting a mediator, writing a polite but firm note to the employer, none of that adds up to dogshit. Well when I sued the business, in my conversations with my lawyer, she kept clearing up for me that there's no criminal consequences for suing, it's not a crime. Over and over, it's not a crime to sue, it's not wrong to sue. Funny, a relative I knew who knew the laws perfectly was like "can't we get so-and-so to talk things out, without doing something as violent as going to the Worker's Comp board?" Well you know what suing replaced right? Something violent, in fact. Before lawyers who talked there were champions who fought, and before champions who fought people would just challenge each other and duke it out, to the death sometimes. So collecting on someone meant threatening to beat him up. So it was violent, but so what? Stealing is violent. Everything you have can be stolen, and then you have to (in those days) agree to become a slave (check the thesaurus for what variation on slave you'll be called) all because your possessions were stolen. And get beaten all the time, live on terrible food and hunger, really cold, not just the coercion of slavery but the overlooked poverty of slavery. Or serfdom, in thrall, et cetera. Or going hungry until your reptile brain coerces you into stealing something yourself, and you get caught and sent to jail, coercion and violence. Stealing is violent. Creating the expectation of payment, in particular by A/B testing what makes people think they'll get paid but which your lawyer can argue you can sneak out of, that is violent. At one point, these guys, the CEO and CFO were talking about a debt the CEO had to the CFO, like how bad could it be you never talk about it, and the CFO said "Well I don't complain about it every day! There are people in this company with rent to pay and people to feed!" Later he had arguments with banks, all kinds of people, the minute the call ended he said "how did I get into this shit!?" And the guys were in 20% interest debt, they were "young and dumb" for accepting it and "getting raped" like the CFO said. Then they refinanced, and they got the Banco Security "prize" (it's actually called a prize) which meant that bank took on 80% of the risk of the loan (that's what jacks up the interest, the risk), a loan with that bank, the prize is a loan, so they paid I don't know, 6%. Over inflation. And for a business like that that meant the CEO had to use his assets as collateral. The CFO said they needed a miracle. They would have been in great shape, actually, I created something for them that was worth, conservatively, a million dollars. It was to find optimal pricing to escape competition, so sometimes you would undercut your competitors, the obvious thing to do, but other times, mark up into a price segment where the good could be alone. And do it conforming to theorems, like really bulletproof. I talked to a Stanford professor, and he said that algo would be worth huge sums of money. And I have tons more stuff, most of it much better. Actually nowadays I've had to run extensive experiments because the algos are disgusting, way off the charts but it kept making no sense they could be that good, kept looking for the gotcha and kept thinking I found it and the gotchas were like a mirage, receding as I approached. All I wanted was $1000. But he actually had to pay. Even if I sold it for $1 million now, which I can't be bothered with because of the my backlog of algos, of which my portfolio online is a small fraction, the only thing I would want would be to pay 99.9% of it to send that $1000 back in time.
- Spooky23 5y ago
  Depends on whether you are sued or are a sue-er. I used to be in the email biz, and spoke to attorneys whose retention preferences were 7 days and others who would like to keep email until the heat death of the universe.
  - dekhn 5y ago
    I decided it made more sense to move my scientific correspondence to personal gmail (I've not deleted any emails since I signed up in ~2005 or so) and decided not to give a fuck about my google email. if the company lost something useful because it aged it my email, that's google's problem, not mine.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- hirundo 5y ago
  Slack deletes posts older than a few weeks on their free account, and flogs longer term access as the principle feature of their paid account. But I assume some customers feel that Slack is asking them to pay for extended legal liability.
  - histriosum 5y ago
    Just FYI, I don't believe Slack deletes them. They just hide them. If I go from a free tier to paid, I believe my message history becomes available again.
Havoc 5y ago
>sensitive email chains would be open to discovery but would just end by saying "call me" :) Probably less common in tech than finance, but recording of 100% of calls for key people is quite common. In regularly in training sessions about random stuff that end up being A/V recorded since one random dude in the training has above requirement legally.

They sure like their email at Google. At most other organizations, sensitive email chains would be open to discovery but would just end by saying "call me" :)

by drewda 5y ago

They sure like their email at Google. At most other organizations, sensitive email chains would be open to discovery but would just end by saying "call me" :)

mjevans 5y ago

Major corporations also often adopt a policy of automated record expunge after a given time. Sometimes that time is very short.

dekhn 5y ago
when I started at GOOG, email lived forever. Then at some point, supposedly document discovery was costing n*2 dollars for n accounts and this was some sort of justification for creating a 1-year and 5-year expunge (maybe I have the times off). I ended up losing a fair amount of my long-term correspondence (scientific stuff) because I didn't want to vault things indefinitely. What amazes me is that the leadership repeatedly puts these sorts of incriminating things in email after being repeatedly told not to.
- droopyEyelids 5y ago
  I think of myself as someone who is relatively skeptical of authority, but even so it's hard to disabuse myself of the notion that company leadership is there due to meritocratic reasons. Just because they're VPs in the biggest company in the world doesn't mean they're actually smarter or more capable than a random person selected from the population at large. Some of them might be, but SOO many people are in their spots due to the accident of their birth and other random processes that happened afterwards.
  - dekhn 5y ago
    I wouldn't say any of the SVPs I met at Google during my era (probably 6-7 SVPs) that I thought any of them were dumb. And several were some of the smartest people I've met. But that's the problem with Google: INT 18, WIS 3.
    - yborg 5y ago
      >But that's the problem with Google: INT 18, WIS 3 This is the whole tech industry in a nutshell, not just Google.
    - omarfarooq 5y ago
      > INT 18, WIS 3. Pardon?
      - niij 5y ago
        High intellect, low wisdom. The shorthand here is common in games where your character has certain capabilities/stats: intellect (int), strength (str), defence (def), etc.
      - actually_a_dog 5y ago
        It's a D&D reference. Starting stats for (human) characters typically range from 3-18, corresponding to the range of 3 six sided dice. "INT 18" means "maximum normal human Intelligence." "WIS 3" means "lowest possible human Wisdom stat," where "Wisdom" roughly translates to "common sense."
  - ahiknsr 5y ago
    > Some of them might be, but SOO many people are in their spots due to the accident of their birth and other random processes that happened afterwards. Disagree. If you are not smart, you wouldn't last long in those positions.
    - spacemanmatt 5y ago
      PP did not imply favoritism got them into those positions and your comment doesn't address stochastic social processes. I declare a miscommunication.
- TheKarateKid 5y ago
  > What amazes me is that the leadership repeatedly puts these sorts of incriminating things in email after being repeatedly told not to. It's probably intentional in many cases to cover themselves when things hit the fan.
  - seanhunter 5y ago
    It's probably not and it definitely doesn't. Operational security is hard and people have a lot on their plate and in their minds, so forget and slip up etc. My mental model is that you are never seeing the totality of communications, but instead imagine people are having communications on several channels (let's say in person, via a phone call, over Whatsapp/SMS/DMs and over email). A conversation in one channel will spill over into another channel. For instance in person or via a phone call will often lead to a "one more thing" moment or followup and the person will follow up over email or dm instead of in-person/voice.
- bsimpson 5y ago
  It's so easy to forget that corp email is on a conveyor belt (esp when that belt is 18mos long). Then you go to find an email past-you wrote and remember "oh, the 18mo thing."
- daniel-cussen 5y ago
  Maybe getting sued is not the end of the world. Like OK, you talk about it, you argue, and then the judge says this, the business says they'll appeal so that in the news it looks like the plaintiff is a bitch, but they never appeal because they know they'll get gutted clean as a fish appealing their stupid case. Well then they pay. So, I am a man and if a man becomes a husband, then in the wedding, when signing the marriage contract, that gives the wife the right to sue. Well both have the right to sue. But it doesn't matter, getting married means getting sued, having children means getting sued, hiring employees means getting sued, contracts means getting sued, using IP means getting sued, and you know what? Good, because otherwise men would leave their wives stranded, children would have nothing, promises would be all broken and IP would get stolen. Lawsuits are inescapable, a business I worked for would literally cheat every single employee, partner, and customer, without exception if they could, and the reason they can't is the lawsuit. That's it. You have to pay. Lawsuits equal paychecks. Complaining, getting a mediator, writing a polite but firm note to the employer, none of that adds up to dogshit. Well when I sued the business, in my conversations with my lawyer, she kept clearing up for me that there's no criminal consequences for suing, it's not a crime. Over and over, it's not a crime to sue, it's not wrong to sue. Funny, a relative I knew who knew the laws perfectly was like "can't we get so-and-so to talk things out, without doing something as violent as going to the Worker's Comp board?" Well you know what suing replaced right? Something violent, in fact. Before lawyers who talked there were champions who fought, and before champions who fought people would just challenge each other and duke it out, to the death sometimes. So collecting on someone meant threatening to beat him up. So it was violent, but so what? Stealing is violent. Everything you have can be stolen, and then you have to (in those days) agree to become a slave (check the thesaurus for what variation on slave you'll be called) all because your possessions were stolen. And get beaten all the time, live on terrible food and hunger, really cold, not just the coercion of slavery but the overlooked poverty of slavery. Or serfdom, in thrall, et cetera. Or going hungry until your reptile brain coerces you into stealing something yourself, and you get caught and sent to jail, coercion and violence. Stealing is violent. Creating the expectation of payment, in particular by A/B testing what makes people think they'll get paid but which your lawyer can argue you can sneak out of, that is violent. At one point, these guys, the CEO and CFO were talking about a debt the CEO had to the CFO, like how bad could it be you never talk about it, and the CFO said "Well I don't complain about it every day! There are people in this company with rent to pay and people to feed!" Later he had arguments with banks, all kinds of people, the minute the call ended he said "how did I get into this shit!?" And the guys were in 20% interest debt, they were "young and dumb" for accepting it and "getting raped" like the CFO said. Then they refinanced, and they got the Banco Security "prize" (it's actually called a prize) which meant that bank took on 80% of the risk of the loan (that's what jacks up the interest, the risk), a loan with that bank, the prize is a loan, so they paid I don't know, 6%. Over inflation. And for a business like that that meant the CEO had to use his assets as collateral. The CFO said they needed a miracle. They would have been in great shape, actually, I created something for them that was worth, conservatively, a million dollars. It was to find optimal pricing to escape competition, so sometimes you would undercut your competitors, the obvious thing to do, but other times, mark up into a price segment where the good could be alone. And do it conforming to theorems, like really bulletproof. I talked to a Stanford professor, and he said that algo would be worth huge sums of money. And I have tons more stuff, most of it much better. Actually nowadays I've had to run extensive experiments because the algos are disgusting, way off the charts but it kept making no sense they could be that good, kept looking for the gotcha and kept thinking I found it and the gotchas were like a mirage, receding as I approached. All I wanted was $1000. But he actually had to pay. Even if I sold it for $1 million now, which I can't be bothered with because of the my backlog of algos, of which my portfolio online is a small fraction, the only thing I would want would be to pay 99.9% of it to send that $1000 back in time.
Spooky23 5y ago
Depends on whether you are sued or are a sue-er. I used to be in the email biz, and spoke to attorneys whose retention preferences were 7 days and others who would like to keep email until the heat death of the universe.
- dekhn 5y ago
  I decided it made more sense to move my scientific correspondence to personal gmail (I've not deleted any emails since I signed up in ~2005 or so) and decided not to give a fuck about my google email. if the company lost something useful because it aged it my email, that's google's problem, not mine.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
hirundo 5y ago
Slack deletes posts older than a few weeks on their free account, and flogs longer term access as the principle feature of their paid account. But I assume some customers feel that Slack is asking them to pay for extended legal liability.
- histriosum 5y ago
  Just FYI, I don't believe Slack deletes them. They just hide them. If I go from a free tier to paid, I believe my message history becomes available again.

Havoc 5y ago

>sensitive email chains would be open to discovery but would just end by saying "call me" :) Probably less common in tech than finance, but recording of 100% of calls for key people is quite common. In regularly in training sessions about random stuff that end up being A/V recorded since one random dude in the training has above requirement legally.