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Comment by Nullabillity | Hacker News Reader

> And it's not just about anti-trust; you also never want to talk in any kind of discoverable medium how an engineering short-cut in the development of your product (say, like a 737) is going to cause people to get killed.

You don't see the fucking problem with this policy?

Ultimately, I guess the solution here is that this "training" ought to be considered as damning as the kind of speech that it tries to forbid.

This is like trying to get out of a drunk driving ticket by smoking weed and wearing a blindfold.

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No, it's not like that at all. What you don't want is a bunch of nerds with no idea what they are talking about writing an email that says "I don't think this follows standard safety practices" because then that will be admitted into court even if the author has no knowledge whatsoever about industry standard practices.

The training is more about getting nerds to shut the hell up, and less about some great conspiracy against humanity.

I get that damping down language on "dominating the market" isn't going to hurt anyone.

But on engineering matters, it does seem problematic to put legal before technical. Instead of people using the medium they would otherwise use to communicate something they are concerned about, they are supposed to stop, think about the company's image, and instead remember to bring it up in person tomorrow? Don't dare email a guy you know on the other production line to see if he's noticed the same pattern? This does seem like a nudge toward sweeping problems under the rug.

I don't believe that delay is part of the training. As I recall, the training advises people with such concerns to raise the matter with their product counsel immediately.

ETA by the way, the training does not discourage people from making statements of fact in discoverable docs, it discourages people from drawing conclusions of law. If you emailed Bob down on the production line to mention that you had 42 failed gFrobs on Tuesday, and asked Bob how many he had, that's not discouraged. If you were to instead mail Bob and said "Those Panamanian safety regulators are gonna be pissed, LOL!" that is discouraged.

"Hey Cheryl, let's meet tomorrow and confirm we've considered all possible concerns on the privacy constraints around data storage for X" is preferable to putting in an email "Cheryl, we need to meet tomorrow. If we launch X as is, there's a huge privacy hole and we're going to get sued."

In essence, that's all the training says regarding this topic.

It still seems that every time you push people from vividly describing what the problem is, as they see it, to cloaking it in something bureaucratic like "considered all possible concerns", you get lower bandwidth.

And, both your setups imagine the main course being a verbal meeting tomorrow, no notes, only memories. Sometimes this is a great way to hash out problems. Sometimes it's not. Maybe the underling is scared that his words will be twisted by Cheryl on the way to big boss Bob, and would prefer to write it down to cover his ass... and if he can't, maybe he convinces himself it's not a big deal, and doesn't tell Cheryl at all.

If the underling has a reason to be scared, they should commit it to writing. But that's a different scenario than the one the training is talking about. The training is talking about how to avoid accidentally shooting oneself in the foot by misunderstanding what can happen in legal discovery.

Give them a call. Walk over to their desk. There's no need to wait, but there's also no need to present things out of context.

There are two kinds of companies: Companies that advise their employees to watch their language on all discoverable mediums, and those that have never been sued before. Most large companies are in the latter group.

In tech, it's much more obvious - unless you're working on hardware, the odds of your code directly posing a threat to life is rather low. The odds that some passionate employees may start a discussion on a large email group discussing ongoing legal action against your company that's been in the news, and that they will say something misinformed that will get quoted out of context, is incredibly high.

Never say anything in an email that you wouldn't want presented out of context in a courtroom. And unless you want all of your emails to be legally mandated to be retained for a few years, I'd avoid talking about anything relevant to ongoing or potential lawsuits over discoverable mediums.

> watch their language on all discoverable mediums, and those that have never been sued

Yes I see how this has come about. I'm trying to say that it's not a very healthy place for our society to have ended up.

And I'm explicitly not talking about discussing ongoing legal action, or speculating about politics. I'm talking about technical matters, and communication bandwidth between people close to the coalface who may notice some pattern, and people higher up from whom this might be hidden, if the incentives are wrong.

Sometimes talking to people in person is the best from all perspectives, sure. But illiterate societies never built jet airliners.

Or.. you could document what safety practices you do follow, and refer to those when people get curious. Or take their concerns seriously if it's not covered already.

You do care, right?

> The training is more about getting nerds to shut the hell up, and less about some great conspiracy against humanity.

So uh, don't talk about potential engineering problems that might kill you, and after the first response pushing back, you characterize the people highlighting these issues as a "bunch of nerds."

Honestly, no clue why people could possibly have a problem with corporate America, seems pretty healthy and non-toxic to me.

Are you here to question whether this industry as a whole lacks social skills, or do you have some other, as-yet-unmentioned objection?

Some people reading your post [1] believe you're saying either that aircraft designers are less qualified than lawyers to determine whether an aircraft is airworthy - or that aircraft designers should prioritise protecting their employer's money over protecting their passengers' lives.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24782526

There are ways to raise issues related to product safety that don't potentially leave you in the very uncomfortable position of being a witness in a court proceeding. (Trust me, this is not going to be a pleasant experience, so if you don't care about your fiduciary duty to your employer, you might want to learn how to raise these issues so you can meet your engineering ethical demands and at the same time, not risk landing you and your company in a super-uncomfortable position, whether it's in a lawsuit, or at a congressional hearing. "No Senator, that's not exactly what I meant....")

> so if you don't care about your fiduciary duty to your employer

Your duties are to:

1. Society at large

2. Your users

3. Yourself

4. Your company

In that order.

> you might want to learn how to raise these issues so you can meet your engineering ethical demands and at the same time, not risk landing you and your company in a super-uncomfortable position, whether it's in a lawsuit, or at a congressional hearing.

Or the company could, y'know, keep its shit together and steer clear of stuff that people raise congressional hearings about, rather than just trying to sweep it under the rug.

>the company could keep its shit together and steer clear of stuff that people raise congressional hearings about

I'm sorry but is this not exactly what is being said? To steer clear of instructing other employees to perform anti-competitive behavior? I think you may be misinterpreting the parent post.

No, the discussion is about acknowledging that behaviour is anti-competitive.

I don't see how. Acknowledging what behavior is anti-competitive is generally done by a court, not by us random posters on HN. (If you're a federal prosecutor with some authoritative insight here then please disclose :)

That's the point of the training. Determination of whether a behavior is anti-competitive is specifically not something a software engineer is trained in. They aren't lawyers. The law on this topic is huge, nuanced, and deeply technical.

Google isn't comfortable with individual untrained software engineers speculating on law for the same reason it isn't comfortable with the lawyers getting it and modifying the privacy coding---people are trained in disciplines that they are highly skilled in, and it's important to let them do their jobs.

In this particular case, I think Google is far more worried about new legislation passing that would redefine what "anti-competitive" means, such that it's definitely applicable to Google - and that its own employees pointing out instances of monopoly abuse would contribute to the probability of such a law, and its severity.

But in this context, from the perspective of society as a whole trying to decide what the law should be, the personal opinion of Google employees does matter, regardless of what's presently legal.

> That's the point of the training. Determination of whether a behavior is anti-competitive is specifically not something a software engineer is trained in. They aren't lawyers. The law on this topic is huge, nuanced, and deeply technical.

This is ultimately an ethical question, not a legal one.

But I guess if you come in with the mindset of "might makes right" then you won't see the distinction.

> Google isn't comfortable with individual untrained software engineers speculating on law for the same reason it isn't comfortable with the lawyers getting it and modifying the privacy coding---

Surely the equivalent would be lawyers weighing in on the spec of what the "privacy coding" should do. Which is very much something that they ought to do?

> people are trained in disciplines that they are highly skilled in, and it's important to let them do their jobs.

This whole discussion is a perfect example of why this silo mentality is fucking toxic. You don't need to be a chef to point out that the food is rancid.

> Surely the equivalent...

No, and that's exactly the kind of categorical error that software engineers make and Google seeks to avoid. Merely speculating on the topic in writing can be used against Google in a court of law.

Google encourages the software engineers to point out the food is rancid. Via the proper channels, so they don't accidentally put something somewhere that leads to a New York Times headline that says "FAMOUS FOOD TASTER SAYS FOOD IS RANCID---SHOULD RESTAURANT BE SHUT DOWN?" The training is about how to have the desired effect without the undesired effect.

How do you imagine the company "keeps its shit together" if employees are going around like a disorganized bag of cats making legally discoverable documents about topics they don't understand?

The training this story is about is how the company keeps its shit together. They remind employees that doing things correctly, safely, and within the law is a shared responsibility.

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