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Years ago, I worked at a place that attempted this. They were so giddy about it. There wasn’t even a known leak, or, arguably, anything particularly worth leaki

Years ago, I worked at a place that attempted this. They were so giddy about it. There wasn’t even a known leak, or, arguably, anything particularly worth leaking. They were just tickled by the idea that they could gotcha anyone who tried to leak something. Then, as now, it strikes me as little more than sad and paranoid Tom Clancy cosplay. I’d like to say I’ve moved on to a place with a culture of trust and faithfulness, but it doesn’t seem like anyone really trusts anyone anywhere anymore, and recent general infatuation with petty lords of chaos doesn’t seem to be helping. So here we are, everyone fantasizing about espionage.

registeredcorn 4y ago
>it doesn’t seem like anyone really trusts anyone anywhere anymore No offense intended, but have you considered that maybe you're just surrounded by bad people? I have a reasonable amount of trust and faith in the other people that I work with. If I needed someone to pick me up in the middle of the night from the hospital, I'd trust my coworkers as much as I would trust my wife or friends. My company is hardly some "golden child", but it generally does right by its staff, and the staff, more or less, does right by the company. Things aren't perfect, but I would say the amount of inter-office trust is about as close as anyone would reasonably expect. Problems pop up, but with a healthy amount of addressing things head on, those problems don't rot and fester. Need someone to be honest with you about the deadline of an upcoming project? Done. Need to get a hold of someone off-hours on a three day weekend? Alright, as long as it's something important and time sensitive. Need realistic feedback about a presentation you're working on. Sure. It all revolves around mutual respect, camaraderie, and clearly defined roles. When I see an upcoming issue with an area I have nothing to do with, I don't feel the need to fix it "because no one else will", but, I also don't leave it to blow up in someone else's face either. I let the right people know, or tell my boss if I'm not sure who should be involved. If I had to take a guess, maybe you work for one of those larger corporate type companies with lots of middle managers, office politics, etc.? I'd encourage you to look at getting away from that if it's weighing heavily on your ability to trust others. It's something that I dealt with for a length of time, and once I moved onto a smaller shop, the ability to trust and genuinely rely on others improved quite a bit.
- jmbwell 4y ago
  Fair comments. I’m not at a huge org, but I am in an industry not known for its optimism. I myself am not particularly optimistic lately. Maybe I should be!
  - registeredcorn 4y ago
    Dang, sorry to hear that. I do hope things improve for you! :)
- LeifCarrotson 4y ago
  I started out work in a shop with a terrible, toxic work environment. Micromanaging, power-hungry, abusive management begat gossiping, uncaring, deceptive, and selfish labor... you learned to just keep your head down and let the shit slide off your shoulders like water off a duck's back. Keep your wits about you when something went behind schedule, though, because the blame game was about to get serious. I took to taking long walks on my lunch break - 28 minutes out, plan for 28 minutes back for some breathing room, because you were entitled to a 1-hour lunch break and would get shouted at for punching in and out with a 61-minute lunch hour - just to clear my head. Now I'm at a shop that's miles better than the first. Management probably cares too much, treating labor better than a lot of parents treat their own children. Honesty and transparency are the defaults, a problem doesn't result in blame being passed around, the 5 whys are extended to 6 whys if they seem to point to "this trusted human made a human mistake." We're our vendors' favorite customer - we just got a valued salesman/apps engineer back who'd had his territory switched, he covers most of the region starting 30 minutes south of us but also negotiated a key account exception to keep us on his account. We're also one of our customers' favorite suppliers, they'll happily pay extra because they know we'll build them the Cadillac of machine tools with integrity and quality at each step of the build, and not nickel-and-dime them for support after the fact or ignore them when the machine is out of warranty. The scary part about this, though, is that the accumulation of loyalty, trust, and social capital that's been very slowly built up over decades could be quite effectively and profitably plundered in an acquisition or by a change in the board or management. They could probably turn the screws and push profit into the stratosphere for 4-8 quarters before our abnormally low turnover turned into abnormally high turnover and customers realized that our culture had changed.
robomartin 4y ago
> So here we are, everyone fantasizing about espionage. Espionage isn't a fantasy, it's very much real. People go to jail for it all the time. The only question is to what degree might a company be affected or targeted. Taking steps to add a reasonable layer of security to attempt to protect costly IP isn't being paranoid at all. Not to mention that in some environments there are legal requirements, a prime example being aerospace. We have had the experience of having an employee provide confidential technical information to a multi-billion dollar international competitor. The same competitor that, for as long as a year, bribed top resellers not to feature our products at industry trade shows. Business can be absolutely brutal and, yes, it can be war.
- bradjohnson 4y ago
  Your particular example wouldn't be deterred from the tactics that Elon says that he used, though. If it's not leaked to the public it wouldn't be seen by those that encoded an identifier into it.
  - nickff 4y ago
    But it would be discoverable and traceable in the case of legal proceedings.
    - bradjohnson 4y ago
      If they kept the original correspondence then it would anyway. Plus this wouldn't be legally binding in a court room when Elon runs in and is like "I think the spaces match the one that I sent to this employee." That is not enough evidence to say that the employee did it when it is trivial for the ploy to be subverted by another employee just inserting a space in a random place.
  - aksss 4y ago
    defense in layers. no single mechanism wins the trophy.
    - 4y ago
diebeforei485 4y ago
> They were so giddy about it. This makes no sense. Why would they tell everyone what their measures were?
- jmbwell 4y ago
  Well, they didn't tell everyone. I was simply, as they say, familiar with the plan.
nonethewiser 4y ago
Yet I can't really fault a company for trying to hold people accountable for breaking their terms of employment.
- cwkoss 4y ago
  I can. It's a waste of time and easily defeated if anyone realizes. Once secret is known, its easy to frame innocent coworkers by twiddling spaces.
- cowmoo728 4y ago
  Employees should be responsible and have a duty to their employer. But it's important to decide if enforcement is appropriate and helpful. It hurts employee morale to be distrusted like this. If the secrets being guarded are life or death for the company, then some extra measures may be appropriate. But if they're normal corporate "secrets" the harms of enforcement will be worse than a leak.
mattferderer 4y ago
Curious if anyone realized this early & either: * tried to sabotage other employees at random by modifying their letter & leaking it * tried to sabotage a specific employee by getting their unique copy & leaking it The risk/reward for a company here seems very poor. I would imagine this blows up in the face of the company often.
- Mr_Modulo 4y ago
  If you can get a copy from another employee then they are in trouble for not securing private communications.
timbo1642 4y ago
oxfordmale 4y ago
Stick the email into Google Translate, translate to Spanish and back, correcting any major mis-translations and Juan is your uncle .
- benburleson 4y ago
  Or put your own space noise in the message to frame a coworker.
  - Grimburger 4y ago
    Chaotic Evil at its finest.
  - spfzero 4y ago
    Wouldn't you have to have access to your coworker's email in-box to do that?
    - michaelcampbell 4y ago
      No, you might get lucky and your space noise "maps" to some other coworker without having seen their copy. _WHICH_ coworker is unknown.
    - Weryj 4y ago
      Just an email they sent.
  - datavirtue 4y ago
    Don't have to...thier lame circumstantial evidence will do it for me. Boil your emails before leaking...got it.
lake_vincent 4y ago
Indeed. For example, Musk fancies himself a champion of "hard work" but what he fails to realize is that humans have not actually merged with robots yet, and we still have human needs. If innovation and brilliant thinking are part of your brand, you actually get higher quality work, sustained over a longer period of time, if you actually back off on the whip-cracking and just give people what they need to produce great work. You get slightly slower growth, but more area under the curve in the long run.
- jjtheblunt 4y ago
  Maybe he realizes that, and is just a jackass.
  - whatwherewhy 4y ago
    Where are the nice bosses of top tech companies? Maybe that's how you build a big tech company.
    - Goronmon 4y ago
      I think there is a middle area between being a "nice boss" and being a boss who calls out internal engineering implementation concerns (rightly or not) on Twitter. And then fire people who disagree in a response.
      - whatwherewhy 4y ago
        Well, Gates is an asshole, Jobs was an asshole - where's the middleground? Maybe niceness leads to [business] mediocrity.
        lake_vincent 4y ago
        Just because the Great Pyramids were built with slavery doesn't mean that slavery is okay, or that there is not a better way to build a pyramid.

registeredcorn 4y ago

>it doesn’t seem like anyone really trusts anyone anywhere anymore No offense intended, but have you considered that maybe you're just surrounded by bad people? I have a reasonable amount of trust and faith in the other people that I work with. If I needed someone to pick me up in the middle of the night from the hospital, I'd trust my coworkers as much as I would trust my wife or friends. My company is hardly some "golden child", but it generally does right by its staff, and the staff, more or less, does right by the company. Things aren't perfect, but I would say the amount of inter-office trust is about as close as anyone would reasonably expect. Problems pop up, but with a healthy amount of addressing things head on, those problems don't rot and fester. Need someone to be honest with you about the deadline of an upcoming project? Done. Need to get a hold of someone off-hours on a three day weekend? Alright, as long as it's something important and time sensitive. Need realistic feedback about a presentation you're working on. Sure. It all revolves around mutual respect, camaraderie, and clearly defined roles. When I see an upcoming issue with an area I have nothing to do with, I don't feel the need to fix it "because no one else will", but, I also don't leave it to blow up in someone else's face either. I let the right people know, or tell my boss if I'm not sure who should be involved. If I had to take a guess, maybe you work for one of those larger corporate type companies with lots of middle managers, office politics, etc.? I'd encourage you to look at getting away from that if it's weighing heavily on your ability to trust others. It's something that I dealt with for a length of time, and once I moved onto a smaller shop, the ability to trust and genuinely rely on others improved quite a bit.

jmbwell 4y ago
Fair comments. I’m not at a huge org, but I am in an industry not known for its optimism. I myself am not particularly optimistic lately. Maybe I should be!
- registeredcorn 4y ago
  Dang, sorry to hear that. I do hope things improve for you! :)
LeifCarrotson 4y ago
I started out work in a shop with a terrible, toxic work environment. Micromanaging, power-hungry, abusive management begat gossiping, uncaring, deceptive, and selfish labor... you learned to just keep your head down and let the shit slide off your shoulders like water off a duck's back. Keep your wits about you when something went behind schedule, though, because the blame game was about to get serious. I took to taking long walks on my lunch break - 28 minutes out, plan for 28 minutes back for some breathing room, because you were entitled to a 1-hour lunch break and would get shouted at for punching in and out with a 61-minute lunch hour - just to clear my head. Now I'm at a shop that's miles better than the first. Management probably cares too much, treating labor better than a lot of parents treat their own children. Honesty and transparency are the defaults, a problem doesn't result in blame being passed around, the 5 whys are extended to 6 whys if they seem to point to "this trusted human made a human mistake." We're our vendors' favorite customer - we just got a valued salesman/apps engineer back who'd had his territory switched, he covers most of the region starting 30 minutes south of us but also negotiated a key account exception to keep us on his account. We're also one of our customers' favorite suppliers, they'll happily pay extra because they know we'll build them the Cadillac of machine tools with integrity and quality at each step of the build, and not nickel-and-dime them for support after the fact or ignore them when the machine is out of warranty. The scary part about this, though, is that the accumulation of loyalty, trust, and social capital that's been very slowly built up over decades could be quite effectively and profitably plundered in an acquisition or by a change in the board or management. They could probably turn the screws and push profit into the stratosphere for 4-8 quarters before our abnormally low turnover turned into abnormally high turnover and customers realized that our culture had changed.

robomartin 4y ago

> So here we are, everyone fantasizing about espionage. Espionage isn't a fantasy, it's very much real. People go to jail for it all the time. The only question is to what degree might a company be affected or targeted. Taking steps to add a reasonable layer of security to attempt to protect costly IP isn't being paranoid at all. Not to mention that in some environments there are legal requirements, a prime example being aerospace. We have had the experience of having an employee provide confidential technical information to a multi-billion dollar international competitor. The same competitor that, for as long as a year, bribed top resellers not to feature our products at industry trade shows. Business can be absolutely brutal and, yes, it can be war.

bradjohnson 4y ago
Your particular example wouldn't be deterred from the tactics that Elon says that he used, though. If it's not leaked to the public it wouldn't be seen by those that encoded an identifier into it.
- nickff 4y ago
  But it would be discoverable and traceable in the case of legal proceedings.
  - bradjohnson 4y ago
    If they kept the original correspondence then it would anyway. Plus this wouldn't be legally binding in a court room when Elon runs in and is like "I think the spaces match the one that I sent to this employee." That is not enough evidence to say that the employee did it when it is trivial for the ploy to be subverted by another employee just inserting a space in a random place.
- aksss 4y ago
  defense in layers. no single mechanism wins the trophy.
  - 4y ago

diebeforei485 4y ago

> They were so giddy about it. This makes no sense. Why would they tell everyone what their measures were?

jmbwell 4y ago
Well, they didn't tell everyone. I was simply, as they say, familiar with the plan.

nonethewiser 4y ago

Yet I can't really fault a company for trying to hold people accountable for breaking their terms of employment.

cwkoss 4y ago
I can. It's a waste of time and easily defeated if anyone realizes. Once secret is known, its easy to frame innocent coworkers by twiddling spaces.
cowmoo728 4y ago
Employees should be responsible and have a duty to their employer. But it's important to decide if enforcement is appropriate and helpful. It hurts employee morale to be distrusted like this. If the secrets being guarded are life or death for the company, then some extra measures may be appropriate. But if they're normal corporate "secrets" the harms of enforcement will be worse than a leak.

mattferderer 4y ago

Curious if anyone realized this early & either: * tried to sabotage other employees at random by modifying their letter & leaking it * tried to sabotage a specific employee by getting their unique copy & leaking it The risk/reward for a company here seems very poor. I would imagine this blows up in the face of the company often.

Mr_Modulo 4y ago
If you can get a copy from another employee then they are in trouble for not securing private communications.

timbo1642 4y ago

oxfordmale 4y ago

Stick the email into Google Translate, translate to Spanish and back, correcting any major mis-translations and Juan is your uncle .

benburleson 4y ago
Or put your own space noise in the message to frame a coworker.
- Grimburger 4y ago
  Chaotic Evil at its finest.
- spfzero 4y ago
  Wouldn't you have to have access to your coworker's email in-box to do that?
  - michaelcampbell 4y ago
    No, you might get lucky and your space noise "maps" to some other coworker without having seen their copy. _WHICH_ coworker is unknown.
  - Weryj 4y ago
    Just an email they sent.
- datavirtue 4y ago
  Don't have to...thier lame circumstantial evidence will do it for me. Boil your emails before leaking...got it.

lake_vincent 4y ago

Indeed. For example, Musk fancies himself a champion of "hard work" but what he fails to realize is that humans have not actually merged with robots yet, and we still have human needs. If innovation and brilliant thinking are part of your brand, you actually get higher quality work, sustained over a longer period of time, if you actually back off on the whip-cracking and just give people what they need to produce great work. You get slightly slower growth, but more area under the curve in the long run.

jjtheblunt 4y ago
Maybe he realizes that, and is just a jackass.
- whatwherewhy 4y ago
  Where are the nice bosses of top tech companies? Maybe that's how you build a big tech company.
  - Goronmon 4y ago
    I think there is a middle area between being a "nice boss" and being a boss who calls out internal engineering implementation concerns (rightly or not) on Twitter. And then fire people who disagree in a response.
    - whatwherewhy 4y ago
      Well, Gates is an asshole, Jobs was an asshole - where's the middleground? Maybe niceness leads to [business] mediocrity.
      - lake_vincent 4y ago
        Just because the Great Pyramids were built with slavery doesn't mean that slavery is okay, or that there is not a better way to build a pyramid.