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Comment by pbiggar | Hacker News Reader

It's relevant because Microsoft, like all big companies, have Human Rights Pricinples and such that are part of the company. It's basically impossible to get big institutional investment without it.

The issue is that they were caught not following their practices, and then lying about it. So the shareholders are asking that they produce a report about whether they are following their own human rights principles.

And Satya is resisting it, because it is very clear that they are not following them, as workers [1] have been calling out for years now. Many leaked documents have shown that Microsoft actually embeds employees directly with the IDF and makes millions in service contracts with them. [2]

[1] https://noazureforapartheid.com/ [2] https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/microsoft-azure-israel-top-cu...

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For anyone that is still green on company politics, all company principles are check boxes that form part of an HR circus of yearly compliance trainings, and marketing for young employees that are naive enough to think they mean anything.

Perhaps this reflects your experience, in your part of the world. In some parts of the world, principles and ethics do count, and don’t change on a dime (as they do in the US).

Several European countries.

Regardless of the part of the world, corruption happens when the right price gets negotiated.

It can be money, a favour, need to help someone in need, needing to meet specific sales KPIs,...

Shhhh, you’ll scare away the new hires that have to pay the interest on the loans they were told would get them there.

In my experience working at several US health IT companies, company principles for following HIPAA rules (especially patient privacy) were taken seriously at all levels and considered more than just compliance check boxes. Regardless of the ethical issues, if you get a reputation for being sloppy and the trade press writes negative articles then that can kill your sales pipeline.

HIPAA has nothing to do with the usual company values I was talking about.

HIPAA is a certification process for industry deployments.

Nope. There is no certification process in HIPAA for that. Have you read the law?

A way of speaking, it has nothing to do with stuff like "Do no evil", "Respect, Achievement, Renewal, and Challenge", "Excellence, Innovation, and Responsibility" and similar word games with a yearly HR training, just to check a box.

>Many leaked documents have shown that Microsoft actually embeds employees directly with the IDF.

Are you sure it's not the other way around?

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