Comment by shapefrog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shapefrog | Hacker News Reader

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> use a word like "scam" in chat casually is 100% going to get auto-flagged and reviewed by compliance and/or your boss

"Congratulations" on typed chat, phone call to boss within 3 minutes, and required a written report to senior senior management. There was unironic suggestions of doctors notes when the reason for the congratulations was their wife had just had their first kid.

> places stopped giving out work devices but make you download all the work apps

Havent come across this before, work issued device only, all calls and messages were recorded and preserved for 7 years. Installing any chat apps on the phone; sackable offence. Giving your personal phone number in any business context; sackable offence. Making a work related call from anything other than your mobile phone / recorded office line; sackable offence.

> they operate almost entirely in the in-person verbal realm

Inevitable really - and if you wanted any actual response from management, stick your head in their office and ask. If it goes tits up, you are on your own though as inevitably they "dont recall" that conversation.

I can highly reccomend - The Lowball Tapes - The secret tapes the authorities, on both sides of the Atlantic, wouldn’t want you to hear, that could upend the official version of the biggest scandal since the financial crash. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0014x77

> Giving your personal phone number in any business context

In US it's become the norm to not issue work device hardware anymore sadly. Some people didn't like carrying 2 devices, and firms like saving $$ so win-win. Nonetheless, I got a few compliance pings when WFH and giving my phone # over work chat to someone to call me.

> Inevitable really - and if you wanted any actual response from management, stick your head in their office and ask. If it goes tits up, you are on your own though as inevitably they "dont recall" that conversation.

Precisely. I worked for a guy who had a particularly egregiously offensive boss. The big boss would claim to not have read emails, saying "you have to talk to me, you can't just send me an email, how do you know I've read it?" but then when they did things verbally, the guy would be like "I don't recall that conversation, you need to email me". Basically lol nothing matters. Dude got himself a C-suite gig at a competitor, but made sure to fire my boss on his way out because he was a small spiteful man.

> Dude got himself a C-suite gig at a competitor ... he was a small spiteful man.

Story old as time. Probably sold them on all those deals they made happen by being all over everything.

Just to balance it out - I have seen some people write some utterly stupid shit and get away with it (as well as contact list with plenty of people who have been fired for these sorts of things). "We need to keep compliance from finding out about this as it is against the rules" being top of my list of how did they keep their jobs.

> "Congratulations" on typed chat, phone call to boss within 3 minutes, and required a written report to senior senior management. There was unironic suggestions of doctors notes when the reason for the congratulations was their wife had just had their first kid.

I might be dense, what's the issue with congratulating someone? It can of course be for something untoward, but there are surely a lot more valid reasons for giving coworkers props ("congratulations on the promotion", "congratulations on your good work on project X", etc).

It is not necessary to engage in personal or small talk with brokers and counterparties at other banks in order to carry out a business conversation. In my case it was to a counterparty at another bank.

Champagne was a banned word as well. "I'll get the Champagne" in particular would see you sent to the Break Room for re-education. Shampoo and eventually derivatives of liquid with bubbles was also added to the list as creative traders mocked the system.

One phrase the Goldman software searched for: “How could this happen again?” https://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/15/you-wont-believe-what-gets-a... The general lists are pretty tame - mid 2010's were pretty wild as all this stuff was coming in.

Savvy Goldman types have long favoured the nifty acronym LDL – let’s discuss live – as a way of avoiding writing the wrong things down. https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/20...

This stuff in truth is very hard.

You have things like false alarms when acronyms start to overlap, like PA being "personal assistant" and "personal account".

And then stuff like Egol using "LDL" to take his conversations with his subordinate, Fabulous Fab off electronic form.

Fab ends up guilty of fraud, paying fines, and kicked out of industry to go work in academia.

Egol, who was his senior, and nearly a decade older so been through a few economic cycles.. stayed on with the firm 6 more years and then moved on up in the industry.

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