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Comment by saalweachter | Hacker News Reader

Eh, as a software engineer, every piece of text I produce -- from chat to email to memes -- is sitting around, archived and backed up, for years if not longer, waiting to be combed through and potentially taken out of context. A great deal of that is social, idle chat, or complaining about my employer, or outright gossip.

First they came for, etc, but they came for me a long time ago.

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The equivalent of what you described is archiving your outputs. In flight, that would be a pilot's flight control inputs. That seems entirely uninvasive.

The equivalent of an always-on cockpit voice recorder would be... screen recording all of your digital devices during working hours? And, turn a mic on just to be safe?

It's not just my work output, though.

I'm a programmer on a team with other programmers, many of us remote.

We're not standing around a water-cooler talking. We're on team chats. We're reply-all'ing to email-chains. We're sharing memes. Half the time we talk across chat when we're sitting in the same room.

These aren't formal design docs or code output [the analogy to flight controls], this is our water-cooler talk, and it can all be subpoenaed in a variety of situations, to be read into court record and taken out of context for the rest of time.

That sounds like a fair point.

But are all zoom calls required to be archived, specifically in the medical device industry?

Certainly you have the option to make a phone call to a teammate, or walk over to someone if not remote, and say something without any record. Don't you?

Which, if a company has a policy of recording all work communications, sounds a bit like you're bypassing the monitoring systems in place.

Mind you, that is how people mostly work anyway. Even if I generally trust an employer to not be intrusively monitoring my communications, for anything sensitive I'm ideally going to talk in person or failing that, at least go with a personal cell call.

I mean, a pilot subject to constant audio recording could learn ASL, or scribble notes on a piece of paper, or whisper in someone's ear.

But we aren't talking about how to circumvent monitoring. We're talking about working when your idle socializing (while working) is monitored and logged.

Logged for 25 hours anyway. Stuck in a box in the airplane, that can only reasonably be opened by a technical crew.

I could deal with it if my laptop did that.

I think this thread started with a suggestion to permanently log and archive it though, the 25 hour part is less controversial

The proposal was that it would be automatically uploaded and searchable by corporate.

Yes, and talks between air traffic control and pilots are recorded.

Would you be okay with a recorder being beside your desk at all times? Catching every conversation, even personal ones?

Currently it's your choice to participate in sending memes over email. You also have the choice to walk over and have a private conversation.

Would this be any different from walking out of the cockpit to have a private conversation?

Pilot's shouldn't be encouraged to walk out of the cockpit mid flight, also after 9/11 all cockpit doors are locked during flight

But they're not archiving your chit-chat with your coworkers over the water cooler. For pilots, they are (in the cockpit). So I can halfway see the pilots' point.

[Edit: I mean, voice chit-chat. Just talking to each other. That gets recorded for pilots, and not for software engineers, no matter how long they keep our (text) chats for. Stuff gets said in person, by voice, that would never get typed out in a chat.]

I would be shocked if most companies are not maintaining long duration archives of employee emails, Slack, Teams, whatever medium.

Chat logs are tiny.

I’d be shocked if most companies are retaining these logs longer than the legally mandated minimum. This kind of information is radioactive from a legal perspective. Slack and Teams even advertise automated deletion as a feature.

Long-duration archives can be used against the company in a lawsuit - whoever's suing you would love to get decades of material to look through to help make their case.

As such, it's a large liability, and most companies retain those sorts of records for the minimum amount of time acceptable by law/regulation/customary expectations.

> Eh, as a software engineer, every piece of text I produce -- from chat to email to memes -- is sitting around, archived and backed up, for years if not longer, waiting to be combed through and potentially taken out of context.

If this is true your legal team is committing malpractice.

You have no way of knowing this is the case unless you know where they work, the industry they operate in, the country they live in, the country their employer is domiciled in, and what agreements they've signed prior to and during employment.

True I made an assumption and skipped the qualifiers. That’s how I keep my comment word count below 450,000.

If you know the qualifiers will put your word count above 450k, maybe it’s not a very applicable comment?

Ok I’ll keep it down to 449,999.

Will you too?

How about instead of that nonsense we just have a reasonable conversation and assume best intentions?

It's hard to have a reasonable discussion when someone flippantly says an entire legal team is committing malpractice when talking about something they have no way of knowing anything about.

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