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Comment by mil22 | Hacker News Reader

At Google in 2006, the SVP of Engineering was presenting to the entire engineering org during an all hands meeting. A question came up as regards retaining emails related to a pending lawsuit. He told everybody:

"Do NOT delete any emails. <chuckles>. Let me say that again to make sure everyone has understood me correctly: do NOT delete any emails!"

The way it was said, the chuckle, and the way it was repeated with the extra emphasis on NOT, sent a clear message: delete all such emails.

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Where are you getting this from? Is this from the complaint? Or a personal anecdote?

I worked there in 2006. The SVP of Eng was Alan Eustace. He's a jolly guy, he chuckles a lot. I don't remember this specific exchange but I can hear his chuckle in my head. Knowing him, the chuckle would almost certainly be laughing at what an obviously terrible idea it would be to delete the emails. Alan Eustace certainly would not have instructed people, explicitly nor implicitly, to delete messages subject to legal hold.

Yeah that would be a ridiculous take. He is clearly laughing at the enormous pain that attempts to delete emails would cause.

Sure, Jan.

Personal anecdote, personal interpretation (though shared by colleagues I discussed this with at the time who also heard the tone and phrasing of the words first hand). The SVP would never tell anyone to delete emails, and he did not do so! Did I make that clear? He did NOT do so. He definitely DID NOT want us to DELETE ANY EMAILS! No SVP would have publicly instructed anyone to do so.

Unrelatedly, I would not have believed you at the time if you told me that the then CEO had entered into an illegal mutual non-solicit agreement with Apple (and Intel, Adobe, and others), suppressing employee pay by agreeing not to recruit or hire each other's workers. History and a successful class action lawsuit revealed a different story.

I can see how an awkwardly-delivered statement could by misconstrued, regardless of the speaker's true intent. However, doesn't this play out pretty poorly for the rank-and-file anyhow? Anyone caught deleting emails would get thrown under the bus by management citing the explicit instruction.

It's neat to see a "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest" combined with a drastic misunderstanding (oh whose end, I have no idea).

The way you described it, I cannot imagine any way to interpret that as "delete all such emails". Perhaps I lack imagination, or perhaps you grossly misunderstood him.

Can't they just make it impossible to delete them or make backups?

At that time, all corporate email was already being hosted on an internal version of Gmail, so yes, both were technically possible, and external Gmail accounts were in fact backed up. To do so would have rendered any instructions not to delete any emails moot and unnecessary. Evidently they decided not to do so, and instead, tell everyone to NOT delete any sensitive emails. One can only speculate why that might have been.

This seems like an ineffective way to either comply or not comply, since the actual result is clearly the fault of the legal hold team for not handling it themselves.

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