4 ms·

Eh, as a software engineer, every piece of text I produce -- from chat to email to memes -- is sitting around, archived and backed up, for years if not longer,

Eh, as a software engineer, every piece of text I produce -- from chat to email to memes -- is sitting around, archived and backed up, for years if not longer, waiting to be combed through and potentially taken out of context. A great deal of that is social, idle chat, or complaining about my employer, or outright gossip. First they came for, etc, but they came for me a long time ago.

AnimalMuppet 3y ago
But they're not archiving your chit-chat with your coworkers over the water cooler. For pilots, they are (in the cockpit). So I can halfway see the pilots' point. [Edit: I mean, voice chit-chat. Just talking to each other. That gets recorded for pilots, and not for software engineers, no matter how long they keep our (text) chats for. Stuff gets said in person, by voice, that would never get typed out in a chat.]
- 0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
  I would be shocked if most companies are not maintaining long duration archives of employee emails, Slack, Teams, whatever medium. Chat logs are tiny.
  - mulmen 3y ago
    I’d be shocked if most companies are retaining these logs longer than the legally mandated minimum. This kind of information is radioactive from a legal perspective. Slack and Teams even advertise automated deletion as a feature.
  - volkl48 3y ago
    Long-duration archives can be used against the company in a lawsuit - whoever's suing you would love to get decades of material to look through to help make their case. As such, it's a large liability, and most companies retain those sorts of records for the minimum amount of time acceptable by law/regulation/customary expectations.
consumer451 3y ago
The equivalent of what you described is archiving your outputs. In flight, that would be a pilot's flight control inputs. That seems entirely uninvasive. The equivalent of an always-on cockpit voice recorder would be... screen recording all of your digital devices during working hours? And, turn a mic on just to be safe?
- saalweachter 3y ago
  It's not just my work output, though. I'm a programmer on a team with other programmers, many of us remote. We're not standing around a water-cooler talking. We're on team chats. We're reply-all'ing to email-chains. We're sharing memes. Half the time we talk across chat when we're sitting in the same room. These aren't formal design docs or code output [the analogy to flight controls], this is our water-cooler talk, and it can all be subpoenaed in a variety of situations, to be read into court record and taken out of context for the rest of time.
  - consumer451 3y ago
    That sounds like a fair point. But are all zoom calls required to be archived, specifically in the medical device industry? Certainly you have the option to make a phone call to a teammate, or walk over to someone if not remote, and say something without any record. Don't you?
    - ghaff 3y ago
      Which, if a company has a policy of recording all work communications, sounds a bit like you're bypassing the monitoring systems in place. Mind you, that is how people mostly work anyway. Even if I generally trust an employer to not be intrusively monitoring my communications, for anything sensitive I'm ideally going to talk in person or failing that, at least go with a personal cell call.
      - saalweachter 3y ago
        I mean, a pilot subject to constant audio recording could learn ASL, or scribble notes on a piece of paper, or whisper in someone's ear. But we aren't talking about how to circumvent monitoring. We're talking about working when your idle socializing (while working) is monitored and logged.
mulmen 3y ago
> Eh, as a software engineer, every piece of text I produce -- from chat to email to memes -- is sitting around, archived and backed up, for years if not longer, waiting to be combed through and potentially taken out of context. If this is true your legal team is committing malpractice.
- pc86 3y ago
  You have no way of knowing this is the case unless you know where they work, the industry they operate in, the country they live in, the country their employer is domiciled in, and what agreements they've signed prior to and during employment.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - mulmen 3y ago
    True I made an assumption and skipped the qualifiers. That’s how I keep my comment word count below 450,000.
    - Aeolun 3y ago
      If you know the qualifiers will put your word count above 450k, maybe it’s not a very applicable comment?
      - mulmen 3y ago
        Ok I’ll keep it down to 449,999. Will you too? How about instead of that nonsense we just have a reasonable conversation and assume best intentions?
        pc86 3y ago
        It's hard to have a reasonable discussion when someone flippantly says an entire legal team is committing malpractice when talking about something they have no way of knowing anything about.

AnimalMuppet 3y ago

But they're not archiving your chit-chat with your coworkers over the water cooler. For pilots, they are (in the cockpit). So I can halfway see the pilots' point. [Edit: I mean, voice chit-chat. Just talking to each other. That gets recorded for pilots, and not for software engineers, no matter how long they keep our (text) chats for. Stuff gets said in person, by voice, that would never get typed out in a chat.]

0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
I would be shocked if most companies are not maintaining long duration archives of employee emails, Slack, Teams, whatever medium. Chat logs are tiny.
- mulmen 3y ago
  I’d be shocked if most companies are retaining these logs longer than the legally mandated minimum. This kind of information is radioactive from a legal perspective. Slack and Teams even advertise automated deletion as a feature.
- volkl48 3y ago
  Long-duration archives can be used against the company in a lawsuit - whoever's suing you would love to get decades of material to look through to help make their case. As such, it's a large liability, and most companies retain those sorts of records for the minimum amount of time acceptable by law/regulation/customary expectations.

consumer451 3y ago

The equivalent of what you described is archiving your outputs. In flight, that would be a pilot's flight control inputs. That seems entirely uninvasive. The equivalent of an always-on cockpit voice recorder would be... screen recording all of your digital devices during working hours? And, turn a mic on just to be safe?

saalweachter 3y ago
It's not just my work output, though. I'm a programmer on a team with other programmers, many of us remote. We're not standing around a water-cooler talking. We're on team chats. We're reply-all'ing to email-chains. We're sharing memes. Half the time we talk across chat when we're sitting in the same room. These aren't formal design docs or code output [the analogy to flight controls], this is our water-cooler talk, and it can all be subpoenaed in a variety of situations, to be read into court record and taken out of context for the rest of time.
- consumer451 3y ago
  That sounds like a fair point. But are all zoom calls required to be archived, specifically in the medical device industry? Certainly you have the option to make a phone call to a teammate, or walk over to someone if not remote, and say something without any record. Don't you?
  - ghaff 3y ago
    Which, if a company has a policy of recording all work communications, sounds a bit like you're bypassing the monitoring systems in place. Mind you, that is how people mostly work anyway. Even if I generally trust an employer to not be intrusively monitoring my communications, for anything sensitive I'm ideally going to talk in person or failing that, at least go with a personal cell call.
    - saalweachter 3y ago
      I mean, a pilot subject to constant audio recording could learn ASL, or scribble notes on a piece of paper, or whisper in someone's ear. But we aren't talking about how to circumvent monitoring. We're talking about working when your idle socializing (while working) is monitored and logged.

mulmen 3y ago

> Eh, as a software engineer, every piece of text I produce -- from chat to email to memes -- is sitting around, archived and backed up, for years if not longer, waiting to be combed through and potentially taken out of context. If this is true your legal team is committing malpractice.

pc86 3y ago
You have no way of knowing this is the case unless you know where they work, the industry they operate in, the country they live in, the country their employer is domiciled in, and what agreements they've signed prior to and during employment.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- mulmen 3y ago
  True I made an assumption and skipped the qualifiers. That’s how I keep my comment word count below 450,000.
  - Aeolun 3y ago
    If you know the qualifiers will put your word count above 450k, maybe it’s not a very applicable comment?
    - mulmen 3y ago
      Ok I’ll keep it down to 449,999. Will you too? How about instead of that nonsense we just have a reasonable conversation and assume best intentions?
      - pc86 3y ago
        It's hard to have a reasonable discussion when someone flippantly says an entire legal team is committing malpractice when talking about something they have no way of knowing anything about.