8 ms·

I moved from an HFT firm to Google. The attitude difference with respect to document holds was hilarious. At the HFT firm, the attitude was, "we're constantly

I moved from an HFT firm to Google. The attitude difference with respect to document holds was hilarious. At the HFT firm, the attitude was, "we're constantly being sued (by the SEC and others), so we treat all of our records like they're under litigation holds, just in case the SEC claims they wanted them, even the off-topic slack channels." At Google, the attitude was, "we're constantly getting sued, so we treat all of our records as being as ephemeral as possible so we can avoid having a record of what we're doing."

ip26 4y ago
Finance is default not trusted. If documents are missing, fraud is presumed. Tech doesn’t seem to have reached that point just yet.
- 77pt77 4y ago
  As can be seen by the Madoff afair.
- JustSomeNobody 4y ago
  > Tech doesn’t seem to have reached that point just yet. It's on a high speed train heading in that direction now.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    Luckily for these companies, they are US based, and high speed rail doesn't really exist there.
    - kevviiinn 4y ago
      Ouch
  - hgsgm 4y ago
    US trains derail before arrival.
- SirAllCaps 4y ago
  At my company (not finance, and never gotten sued), documents are ephemeral primarily due to GDPR reasons. Many of them contain various personal data of clients and/or employees, legal makes us specify for how long each service needs to hold on to it, and purge as soon as possible to minimize chance of leaks.
  - rdtsc 4y ago
    It’s a funny intersection of hold requirements. Litigation and one set of compliance requires holding records for at least this much time, GDPR and other such things require keeping records no more than some particular time. I haven’t seen the case when the intersection is an empty interval. But I imagine then one would choose to justify breaking one of the least important ones.
    - wizzwizz4 4y ago
      GDPR Article 6, 1(c): > Processing shall be lawful […] if […] processing is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation to which the controller is subject;
      - rdtsc 4y ago
        Ah perfect. Thanks for the reference.
    - rodgerd 4y ago
      It's where being able to have strong guarantees about how customer data is being used becomes critical. I'm required to keep evidence about your KYC information and your financial transactions for compliance purposes for (e.g.) 7 years after you stop doing business with me. If I'm using them for that purpose I'd be in the clear GDPR-wise. However, the day I break off doing business with you I need to stop using them for marketing or sales leads - that would be a GDPR breach. Where I suspect it will get very messy for companies is the sexy new "hoover all the data into ML models" is going to come a GDPR cropper because I doubt most of the people doing it can show that they purged it when their relationship with the data owner ended, if they even had one in the first place. They're sure as fuck violating copyrights all over the place.
- steveBK123 4y ago
  Finance is generally well regulated, tech is well.. not.
  - RhodesianHunter 4y ago
    Which in some contexts makes sense. Losing all of your Facebook pictures is never going to be as devastating as losing your retirement.
    - steveBK123 4y ago
      I think its rather disingenuous or modest for tech to fall back on "whats the worst that can happen, maybe you lose some pictures from the cloud" as a defense for such a light touch. There's many areas in which tech competes directly with, or has attempted to build shadow parallel systems to other more regulated industries - payments, exchanges, various medical plays, media, etc.
      - dylan604 4y ago
        all of those "disruptors" just makes me cringe every time i hear it now. there have been so many bad actors. paypal still seizing accounts because some automated thing made a decision that can't be shared as to why. seems like Stripe as been in the news for similar topics. then you get the ones like Uber just flagrantly doing shady things to get that disruption. now, when i hear someone say disrupt, i immediately assume they are cutting corners on whatever regulation that is needed to gain a leg up over the incumbent companies following the regulations.
        steveBK123 4y ago
        Tech thinks it is "disruption" when they are breaking laws they don't like / they deem outdated / they deem "unfair" / that prevent them from making more money more quickly. Tech wanted people to think this was different from Wall St somehow, but I think the average American no longer sees the difference.
        4y ago
nightpool 4y ago
This probably isn't because of litigation holds, actually, this is because finance firms are under SEC record-keeping rules, which require the preservation of ALL internal written communications, regardless of whether they're currently being sued or not. It's a bit of a different beast. See https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-02-02/the-sec-wants-to-see-more-phones https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-02-02/the-se... which covers some ... interesting recent developments of this rule and its application
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  Yeah, as I understand it though, the SEC rules are to allow investigations (and "enforcement actions"/lawsuits) to happen quickly. I saw one of these "investigations" happening at one point and had no idea it was an investigation until I was casually informed that the strange people in the office were from the SEC and they had some questions about some trades, and that it happens all the time.
  - GalenErso 4y ago
    > the strange people in the office What made them strange, other than the fact you didn't know who they were?
    - pclmulqdq 4y ago
      In a 100-person company full of T-shirt wearers, ~4 random men walking around the trading floor in the middle of the day (a big no-no for any sort of guest) in suits is strange.
      - johannes1234321 4y ago
        When I was in a bank we were asked to dress up in times when BaFin (German SEC) was expected in the campus.
        justinclift 4y ago
steveBK123 4y ago
Yeah, FAANG gang has no idea the level of surveillance and record keeping that bank/fund/wall st tech is under. I worked at one shop that if you said "call my cell" in a slack to someone, you'd get a call from compliance within days ask to explain why you did this, what the conversation was about, why it wasn't on a work phone.. and to never, ever, ever do it again... because you know we are watching, so we will find you.
- grepfru_it 4y ago
  Every bank I’ve worked at issued a company cell phone. To be pedantic if you say call my personal cell, then compliance will be on you like flies on poop
  - steveBK123 4y ago
    I said something like "call my cell at __" and put my personal cell number, but didn't say "personal". Which gives you an idea of the level of monitoring they are doing to tie that together probably automatically given how quickly I was called. And this was almost 10 years ago. I'm also old enough to recall the little background hum & beep the bank landlines used to make when you were on a recorded line.
    - hgsgm 4y ago
      "Almost 10 years ago" was before Slack launched :-) We're you on AOL IM?
      - steveBK123 4y ago
        Whatever crap MSFT had before teams
        mjcl 4y ago
        Good 'ol OCS/Lync/S4B
  - 4y ago
1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
"The attitude difference with respect to document holds was hilarious." megcampbell@google.com: "it needs to be history off" https://ia802501.us.archive.org/21/items/gov.uscourts.dcd.223205/gov.uscourts.dcd.223205.574.12.pdf https://ia802501.us.archive.org/21/items/gov.uscourts.dcd.22... schramm@google.com: "should we have history off for this?" https://ia802501.us.archive.org/21/items/gov.uscourts.dcd.223205/gov.uscourts.dcd.223205.574.13.pdf https://ia802501.us.archive.org/21/items/gov.uscourts.dcd.22... margaretlam@google.com: "Hi Tim, if OK, can I ask you to turn history off :)" https://ia802501.us.archive.org/21/items/gov.uscourts.dcd.223205/gov.uscourts.dcd.223205.574.14.pdf https://ia802501.us.archive.org/21/items/gov.uscourts.dcd.22... margaretlam@google.com: [interesting exchange with another employee who is trying to follow the rules] https://ia802501.us.archive.org/21/items/gov.uscourts.dcd.223205/gov.uscourts.dcd.223205.574.3.pdf https://ia802501.us.archive.org/21/items/gov.uscourts.dcd.22... Paraphrasing: "What policy? I'm on multiple legal holds as well. I ignore them every day [smileyface] But if you want to follow the rules, I'll respect your decision. I'll just communicate with the others off the record. I only included you for optics reasons." Some would say that company culture starts at the top. Here's the 50-year-old CEO: https://ia802501.us.archive.org/21/items/gov.uscourts.dcd.223205/gov.uscourts.dcd.223205.574.5.pdf https://ia802501.us.archive.org/21/items/gov.uscourts.dcd.22...
- hgsgm 4y ago
  It's funnier when you realize that this is happening because no one knows how to talk on the phone anymore.
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    Wow it has been maybe 15 years since I called someone at work, about work using a phone.
- refurb 4y ago
  Wow, that's not just "hey let's be careful", it's "hey, screw all that legal hold stuff, lol!" What kind of legal guidance were these people getting? When I worked at a big corp, we had regular meetings with legal that were reminders of how to treat sensitive subjects and it was taken very seriously.
ocdtrekkie 4y ago
Google operates exactly like a criminal organization would. It's that simple, and we should talk about it in that way, because that is what it is. A huge portion of their business is effectively racketeering, and we should be putting Larry, Sergey, and Sundar in prison. RICO provides some tools to effectively bring in the heads of the organization based on the actions of people under their employ. "Nice website you got there. It'd sure be a shame if your competitors all were listed above it in search even when looking for it by exact name."
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  "Wow, that would suck for me. Guess I'll be telling my customers to find me on Bing. Not to mention supporting the trade and industry organizations that will be putting the message out, via ad campaigns, that Bing is the better option."
- DesiLurker 4y ago
  if you think thats criminal, you should look up what they do with android anti fragmentation agreement.
  - ocdtrekkie 4y ago
    Heh, well aware. The MADA and AFA are insane reads, especially when you realize they apply to over half the mobile phones on the planet. It's one of those things they keep confidential not because they have any real trade secrets, but because they're flagrantly illegal and they want to keep government officials from seeing them.
    - hgsgm 4y ago
      Yeah, imagine if Apple banned their manufacturing and sales partners from selling devices with forks of the iOS open source project too. Or if Microsoft banned Windows forks.
      - DesiLurker 4y ago
s1artibartfast 4y ago
This is the same story in the medical space. Chat history is deleted after 7 days. Emails are deleted after 18 months. Cloud store documents are deleted after 3 years. Is all about legal downside. Of course, quality approved necessary documents are retained for the, entire duration of the company
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  IIRC "quality approved necessary documents" are also exempt from discovery in malpractice cases, so there's no risk to holding onto them.
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    I dont think that is accurate at all. Lawsuits often turn on quality docs specifically. A simple example would be be something like a memo that states a defective product can still be released to market that goes on to kill someone. Another example would be a quality approved design document that shows infringement on competitor IP. Most quality docs must be retained by law for the life of the company, even if they discontinue a product. So it isn't really judgement call from the legal department.
ChuckMcM 4y ago
This was my experience as well. (Well I didn't come from an HFT company but on arriving at Google and then seeing some "dubious" things get diverted to ephemeral media, because possibile suits, was a thing.) What I found interesting was the rationalization that "people would just cherry pick data and use it against us." Which belied the idea that if you saved all of it, you would be able to reconstruct it. Also the storing of live traffic not to "look at" but to have a model of live traffic to test changes against. I once asked "why not create a statistical model of the traffic and use that?" and was responded "#1, people wouldn't believe you if you said this was 'just like actual traffic', and #2 we get live traffic for free with no engineering effort so its a win to use it instead." They weren't wrong but they didn't really prioritize privacy or safety either.
WWLink 4y ago
Google sounds like an utterly repulsive company.

ip26 4y ago

Finance is default not trusted. If documents are missing, fraud is presumed. Tech doesn’t seem to have reached that point just yet.

77pt77 4y ago
As can be seen by the Madoff afair.
JustSomeNobody 4y ago
> Tech doesn’t seem to have reached that point just yet. It's on a high speed train heading in that direction now.
- dylan604 4y ago
  Luckily for these companies, they are US based, and high speed rail doesn't really exist there.
  - kevviiinn 4y ago
    Ouch
- hgsgm 4y ago
  US trains derail before arrival.
SirAllCaps 4y ago
At my company (not finance, and never gotten sued), documents are ephemeral primarily due to GDPR reasons. Many of them contain various personal data of clients and/or employees, legal makes us specify for how long each service needs to hold on to it, and purge as soon as possible to minimize chance of leaks.
- rdtsc 4y ago
  It’s a funny intersection of hold requirements. Litigation and one set of compliance requires holding records for at least this much time, GDPR and other such things require keeping records no more than some particular time. I haven’t seen the case when the intersection is an empty interval. But I imagine then one would choose to justify breaking one of the least important ones.
  - wizzwizz4 4y ago
    GDPR Article 6, 1(c): > Processing shall be lawful […] if […] processing is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation to which the controller is subject;
    - rdtsc 4y ago
      Ah perfect. Thanks for the reference.
  - rodgerd 4y ago
    It's where being able to have strong guarantees about how customer data is being used becomes critical. I'm required to keep evidence about your KYC information and your financial transactions for compliance purposes for (e.g.) 7 years after you stop doing business with me. If I'm using them for that purpose I'd be in the clear GDPR-wise. However, the day I break off doing business with you I need to stop using them for marketing or sales leads - that would be a GDPR breach. Where I suspect it will get very messy for companies is the sexy new "hoover all the data into ML models" is going to come a GDPR cropper because I doubt most of the people doing it can show that they purged it when their relationship with the data owner ended, if they even had one in the first place. They're sure as fuck violating copyrights all over the place.
steveBK123 4y ago
Finance is generally well regulated, tech is well.. not.
- RhodesianHunter 4y ago
  Which in some contexts makes sense. Losing all of your Facebook pictures is never going to be as devastating as losing your retirement.
  - steveBK123 4y ago
    I think its rather disingenuous or modest for tech to fall back on "whats the worst that can happen, maybe you lose some pictures from the cloud" as a defense for such a light touch. There's many areas in which tech competes directly with, or has attempted to build shadow parallel systems to other more regulated industries - payments, exchanges, various medical plays, media, etc.
    - dylan604 4y ago
      all of those "disruptors" just makes me cringe every time i hear it now. there have been so many bad actors. paypal still seizing accounts because some automated thing made a decision that can't be shared as to why. seems like Stripe as been in the news for similar topics. then you get the ones like Uber just flagrantly doing shady things to get that disruption. now, when i hear someone say disrupt, i immediately assume they are cutting corners on whatever regulation that is needed to gain a leg up over the incumbent companies following the regulations.
      - steveBK123 4y ago
        Tech thinks it is "disruption" when they are breaking laws they don't like / they deem outdated / they deem "unfair" / that prevent them from making more money more quickly. Tech wanted people to think this was different from Wall St somehow, but I think the average American no longer sees the difference.
      - 4y ago

nightpool 4y ago

This probably isn't because of litigation holds, actually, this is because finance firms are under SEC record-keeping rules, which require the preservation of ALL internal written communications, regardless of whether they're currently being sued or not. It's a bit of a different beast. See https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-02-02/the-sec-wants-to-see-more-phones https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-02-02/the-se... which covers some ... interesting recent developments of this rule and its application

pclmulqdq 4y ago
Yeah, as I understand it though, the SEC rules are to allow investigations (and "enforcement actions"/lawsuits) to happen quickly. I saw one of these "investigations" happening at one point and had no idea it was an investigation until I was casually informed that the strange people in the office were from the SEC and they had some questions about some trades, and that it happens all the time.
- GalenErso 4y ago
  > the strange people in the office What made them strange, other than the fact you didn't know who they were?
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago
    In a 100-person company full of T-shirt wearers, ~4 random men walking around the trading floor in the middle of the day (a big no-no for any sort of guest) in suits is strange.
    - johannes1234321 4y ago
      When I was in a bank we were asked to dress up in times when BaFin (German SEC) was expected in the campus.
      - justinclift 4y ago

steveBK123 4y ago

Yeah, FAANG gang has no idea the level of surveillance and record keeping that bank/fund/wall st tech is under. I worked at one shop that if you said "call my cell" in a slack to someone, you'd get a call from compliance within days ask to explain why you did this, what the conversation was about, why it wasn't on a work phone.. and to never, ever, ever do it again... because you know we are watching, so we will find you.

grepfru_it 4y ago
Every bank I’ve worked at issued a company cell phone. To be pedantic if you say call my personal cell, then compliance will be on you like flies on poop
- steveBK123 4y ago
  I said something like "call my cell at __" and put my personal cell number, but didn't say "personal". Which gives you an idea of the level of monitoring they are doing to tie that together probably automatically given how quickly I was called. And this was almost 10 years ago. I'm also old enough to recall the little background hum & beep the bank landlines used to make when you were on a recorded line.
  - hgsgm 4y ago
    "Almost 10 years ago" was before Slack launched :-) We're you on AOL IM?
    - steveBK123 4y ago
      Whatever crap MSFT had before teams
      - mjcl 4y ago
        Good 'ol OCS/Lync/S4B
- 4y ago

1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago

"The attitude difference with respect to document holds was hilarious." megcampbell@google.com: "it needs to be history off" https://ia802501.us.archive.org/21/items/gov.uscourts.dcd.223205/gov.uscourts.dcd.223205.574.12.pdf https://ia802501.us.archive.org/21/items/gov.uscourts.dcd.22... schramm@google.com: "should we have history off for this?" https://ia802501.us.archive.org/21/items/gov.uscourts.dcd.223205/gov.uscourts.dcd.223205.574.13.pdf https://ia802501.us.archive.org/21/items/gov.uscourts.dcd.22... margaretlam@google.com: "Hi Tim, if OK, can I ask you to turn history off :)" https://ia802501.us.archive.org/21/items/gov.uscourts.dcd.223205/gov.uscourts.dcd.223205.574.14.pdf https://ia802501.us.archive.org/21/items/gov.uscourts.dcd.22... margaretlam@google.com: [interesting exchange with another employee who is trying to follow the rules] https://ia802501.us.archive.org/21/items/gov.uscourts.dcd.223205/gov.uscourts.dcd.223205.574.3.pdf https://ia802501.us.archive.org/21/items/gov.uscourts.dcd.22... Paraphrasing: "What policy? I'm on multiple legal holds as well. I ignore them every day [smileyface] But if you want to follow the rules, I'll respect your decision. I'll just communicate with the others off the record. I only included you for optics reasons." Some would say that company culture starts at the top. Here's the 50-year-old CEO: https://ia802501.us.archive.org/21/items/gov.uscourts.dcd.223205/gov.uscourts.dcd.223205.574.5.pdf https://ia802501.us.archive.org/21/items/gov.uscourts.dcd.22...

hgsgm 4y ago
It's funnier when you realize that this is happening because no one knows how to talk on the phone anymore.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  Wow it has been maybe 15 years since I called someone at work, about work using a phone.
refurb 4y ago
Wow, that's not just "hey let's be careful", it's "hey, screw all that legal hold stuff, lol!" What kind of legal guidance were these people getting? When I worked at a big corp, we had regular meetings with legal that were reminders of how to treat sensitive subjects and it was taken very seriously.

ocdtrekkie 4y ago

Google operates exactly like a criminal organization would. It's that simple, and we should talk about it in that way, because that is what it is. A huge portion of their business is effectively racketeering, and we should be putting Larry, Sergey, and Sundar in prison. RICO provides some tools to effectively bring in the heads of the organization based on the actions of people under their employ. "Nice website you got there. It'd sure be a shame if your competitors all were listed above it in search even when looking for it by exact name."

shadowgovt 4y ago
"Wow, that would suck for me. Guess I'll be telling my customers to find me on Bing. Not to mention supporting the trade and industry organizations that will be putting the message out, via ad campaigns, that Bing is the better option."
DesiLurker 4y ago
if you think thats criminal, you should look up what they do with android anti fragmentation agreement.
- ocdtrekkie 4y ago
  Heh, well aware. The MADA and AFA are insane reads, especially when you realize they apply to over half the mobile phones on the planet. It's one of those things they keep confidential not because they have any real trade secrets, but because they're flagrantly illegal and they want to keep government officials from seeing them.
  - hgsgm 4y ago
    Yeah, imagine if Apple banned their manufacturing and sales partners from selling devices with forks of the iOS open source project too. Or if Microsoft banned Windows forks.
    - DesiLurker 4y ago

s1artibartfast 4y ago

This is the same story in the medical space. Chat history is deleted after 7 days. Emails are deleted after 18 months. Cloud store documents are deleted after 3 years. Is all about legal downside. Of course, quality approved necessary documents are retained for the, entire duration of the company

pclmulqdq 4y ago
IIRC "quality approved necessary documents" are also exempt from discovery in malpractice cases, so there's no risk to holding onto them.
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  I dont think that is accurate at all. Lawsuits often turn on quality docs specifically. A simple example would be be something like a memo that states a defective product can still be released to market that goes on to kill someone. Another example would be a quality approved design document that shows infringement on competitor IP. Most quality docs must be retained by law for the life of the company, even if they discontinue a product. So it isn't really judgement call from the legal department.

ChuckMcM 4y ago

This was my experience as well. (Well I didn't come from an HFT company but on arriving at Google and then seeing some "dubious" things get diverted to ephemeral media, because possibile suits, was a thing.) What I found interesting was the rationalization that "people would just cherry pick data and use it against us." Which belied the idea that if you saved all of it, you would be able to reconstruct it. Also the storing of live traffic not to "look at" but to have a model of live traffic to test changes against. I once asked "why not create a statistical model of the traffic and use that?" and was responded "#1, people wouldn't believe you if you said this was 'just like actual traffic', and #2 we get live traffic for free with no engineering effort so its a win to use it instead." They weren't wrong but they didn't really prioritize privacy or safety either.

WWLink 4y ago

Google sounds like an utterly repulsive company.