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Comment by oblio | Hacker News Reader

The biggest thing is that FAANG learned to avoid Microsoft's mistakes, up to a point, and for example a bunch of them have policies where they destroy documents after a certain period plus they train employees to not put stuff in writing.

It will be much harder to prove something against them because proof will be gone.

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This is the type of comment I dislike on hackernews. This is said with such authority and uses preconceived notions of the “big tech boogie man” that people assume it’s true.

I work in big tech at one of the named companies. This is just flat out incorrect and actually the opposite of what happens. We’re trained TO write things down because, surprise surprise, it helps to be able to look up reasons for previous decisions.

The idea that leadership in a company with 100,000+ employees would hand down an edict that you shouldn’t write down decisions anywhere to avoid legal liability is laughable.

Agreed. Whenever I see comments like that it's almost a guarantee they're not someone who works in the places they're talking about.

It's pure FUD.

I've worked at Microsoft and other BigN companies and the training and culture around what gets written down is absolutely there at any big enough to have been sued.

This is why you're reminded to not discuss ongoing lawsuits over email. It's why you're reminded to never use aggressive language like "we will crush our competitor" or legally sensitive language like "I think this will harm our customers". It's why mail retention/litigation hold exists, and why most people who end up in retention will go out of their way to call or tall in person rather than over chat or email.

There are two kinds of people: those that think retention policies and these trainings are stupid, and those that have been proximate to a lawsuit and understand exactly why these rules exist.

I had plenty of managers and PMs at Microsoft who went out of their way to keep things off email; that instinct wasn't as strong at Google, but that'd because Google hasn't gone through a lawsuit of that magnitude.

There's a great internal copypasta by a lawyer at Microsoft titled "Apropos of Nothing" that goes into the specific legal details and dollar implications of this kind of language but it's not publicly available.

Well, you got different channels for communication.

- you have corporate email, where every message is being archived

- you have a corporate messenger and i am not sure that every discussion is being archived here.

You can guess that these distinctions do exist for a purpose.

Yeah, you work at one...

But you don't work in a serious capacity with serious leadership over serious projects, as your comment shows. The Department of Justice doesn't care about the comments in your code or your meticulous documentation of your company's APIs. They care about emails which allege or allude to illegal activity.

Let’s take this offline.

They lobby.

That’s the primary lesson learned.

Microsoft, in its hubris, did not.

Ah, forgot that! Yup, another big lesson.

That, and it taught them that they needed (a) a large law staff involved in all aspects of the busines, and (b) political connections in DC.

That 2nd aspect has led to them getting entangled in all kinds of partisan shenanigans.

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