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Comment by chollida1 | Hacker News Reader

> Dimon uses email but is known to keep his replies short and factual, favoring "yes," "no" and "thank you."

I mean, come on. Everyone uses email. Having said that, everyone also knows there are things you put in email and things you only discuss face to face, or over the phone.

And the dividing line doesn't necessarily have anything to do about breaking the law.

Everyone on wall street has had an email they typed up get into the hands of someone who they wish it wouldn't.

Whether its shitting all over an analyst for not being good at their job that got back to the analyst or doing something similar to a CEO, these things can harm your future relationship with these people who you may need to do business with again.

You rant over the phone, you issue actionable orders via email for the same reason. One has no trace, the other has a record you can point to.

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>Having said that, everyone also knows there are things you put in email and things you only discuss face to face, or over the phone.

A lot of people don't know this. One of my favorite classes in business school was "Business Communications." a lot of the stuff seemed really basic, but I'm amazed how much of it is disregarded in the wild.

First job out of school (early 1990s), working at a "big" consulting company. All the new hires had it drilled into them that you do not talk about work outside of work. And you never discuss anything client-specific in public, on a plane or in a cab, in a restaurant, etc.

Email wasn't a worry, nobody had it then. I think they had an internal system of some sort but the line staff consultants didn't have access.

I'm curious what kind of obvious examples you might have in mind for someone who never took any business classes.

> everyone also knows there are things you put in email and things you only discuss face to face, or over the phone

Sadly, this is not true.

I get many emails from people with URGENT in the subject that require an immediate reply, as if they expect I will see it in minutes.

I have gotten emails about outages from clients, even after telling then "outages are always a phone call".

Some people assume that everyone lives in email, like they do, and has push notifications setup on their phone, etc.

This. I pretty much ignore anything with "URGENT" in the subject line at this point. When everything is urgent, nothing is.

Also, emails can be subject to discovery during a lawsuit. If you want to discuss things you don't want some lawyer looking over a year from now, you keep all discussions face to face or via phone. Email is only for things that should have a papertrail.

Personal anecdote - I can confirm this as one recently deposed in a corporate lawsuit that I'm not even a party to. Email systems are awash with information that most people would never have expected to become public. You see all kinds of stuff in emails by employees: office gossip, embarrassing comments, foul language, snark about fellow employees and competitors and the company, non-work-related comms .... all of it subject to being twisted by opposition lawyers to try to bolster their case and which can end up verbatim in front of the eyes of a jury.

And chat logs if your chat is company hosted...

Even Slack has the capability to hold on to your messages (as required by some certifications) and be retrieved during discovery.

If it is a service that is paid for by the company, then it is most likely a trove of data that is discoverable...

-> I mean, come on. Everyone uses email.

Not actually. I've been a consultant for a few years now, and have worked with executives who have their assistants print out their email for them in order to review. It isn't limited to Wall Street.

Though it's probably something we'll see less and less of as the years go by.

Isn't that how Donald Knuth handles email? I heard his wife prints out emails and types his replies for him.

More accurately, his secretary (as per https://cs.stanford.edu/~uno/email.html).

As per https://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-be-Knuths-secretary, the secretary role has changed a couple of times in the last couple of years.

Emails seem like a big risk, with so much data even if you are trying to do everything right you have to handle everything perfectly or it just gives other people more stuff against you. I feel like the recent leaks are good examples of that

Furthermore, if you have an entire conversation, its much easier to cherry pick specific parts to make the person look however you want them to look.

If you're a big enough target, having lots of conversations is much worse than having none, because you will make a mistake, or something will be misinterpreted, either accidentally or willfully.

Ya, I don't want to get into a political debate at all but a friend on Facebook said Clinton's emails have "pretty much proof that she murdered one of her staffers". Turns out that if you give people 60,000 emails and they will find proof for everything.

On which note, I'm a bit amazed by people I see insist that "there's nothing objectionable in Hillary's emails".

Specific content aside, it would downright miraculous for 60k emails to not include something embarrassing to someone, and setting an expectation for that just commits us to lying or condemning anyone who uses email.

> everyone also knows there are things you put in email and things you only discuss face to face, or over the phone.

Sadly, no. I often have to remind co-workers not to discuss things like patents or license issues in email, IRC, etc. These are seasoned developers who absolutely should know better - we do take training in this every year - but it still keeps happening.

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