Former Amazonian here. When i was there, they made us take this antitrust training course that had things like "don't use terms like 'market share' in internal communications", but all along there were people doing this? I mean...
it is because humans use terms colloquially rather than with the utmost precision, and then it gets held up as if the person meant the exact precise legal concept. This is true always, which is why the advice this person got is also commonly given in lots of forms. For example, doctors are often trained in being careful in what they write down for the same reason.
The audit trail is always there no matter what, and this wouldn't change that
> This is true always, which is why the advice this person got is also commonly given in lots of forms. For example, doctors are often trained in being careful in what they write down for the same reason.
Alternative take: it is indeed for the same reason - to avoid incriminating yourself. You carry assumption that the behavior is not incriminating.
Doctors do commit in malpractice. Companies do engage in monopolistic behavior.
If such training were strictly to avoid illegal behavior, wouldn't it be better to train people in what the precise legal concept is, so that they can comply with the law? Or is behaving within the law a secondary concern.
In this case Amazon quite literally got caught by the AG of Washington state for breaking the exact laws their training tells them they shouldn't talk about. Why are you defending this?
Not to defend corporations, but they do. It’s repeatedly drilled down in you to reach out to the legal dept. That said companies care a lot about the legality of things and not necessarily the morality. And they hire people who would “get things done”. Consequently converting the legal training to “how to avoid to getting caught” training.
>That said companies care a lot about the legality of things and not necessarily the morality.
I worked for a fortune 100 company. We are humans, and our customers are humans. We absolutely have morals - at an individual level, and those morals influence how we work
Morals don’t matter when the shareholders sue board members for failing to uphold fiduciary responsibility. Just saying, the law influences how we work
This argument makes no sense to me. Yes some people and companies break the law. That is completely and totally orthogonal to whether the training exists for a given reason or not.
They also train people to not commit insider trading. It still happens. Does that mean the training exists simply to help them figure out how to not get caught insider trading, or to avoid an evidence trail?
You aren’t going to successfully train people en masse in something like antitrust law in the course of a few hours. That’s why law school isn’t a single day.
I’m not defending any illegal behavior here, I’m defending the training that says "please be careful with what you say" does not exist mainly to try to hide some useful evidence trail, which was the claim.
The level of cynicism in all this is impressively high, and the level of knowledge about antitrust is very low
The insider trading training is an excellent example: it does not benefit the company, and is done at an individual level, so the training reflects what the law says and what is not allowed. Individuals may break that.
Say that you are part of the executive team of Amazon, and want to take some illegal behavior like price fixing. Things that actually happened. You know it is illegal and want to avoid getting caught, so your communications only happen in person, and there's not really a paper trail.
Okay, great, you've set that up now. Now it's the day to day business at your company, and all different departments need to do their basic jobs to support that. You're still doing something illegal, and now it's spread across hundreds of people to support your illegal activity. The last thing you want to do is to have them writing e-mails about price fixing and kickbacks etc. How do you avoid this? Train your people not to mention certain words.
And guess what, that's exactly what they do.
Amazon literally committed a crime requiring many people to conspire. How is it cynicism to say that Amazon can conspire to commit crimes?
Your optimism is impressively high.
> Amazon: commits crimes
> OP: lol when I was at Amazon they told us not to talk about crimes
> You: These are completley unrelated! Let's stop this trope!
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to HN? You've done it a lot, unfortunately. We ban accounts that do that, because we're trying for a different quality of discussion here. I don't want to ban you, so if you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
This is standard procedure among any large company in a market. Ideally, antitrust should be proven by actions and not by “see! Your employees say you dominate the market! Take that!”
This. I’m not qualified to prosecute antitrust law; I’m not even a lawyer. How is it that I can throw the company under the bus just by misusing terms of art that I vaguely understand?
> How is it that I can throw the company under the bus just by misusing terms of art that I vaguely understand?
You cannot. As you've seen the frequency of antitrust judgements is very low, you're really unlikely to harm your company by saying anything. Don't worry about companies being “thrown under the bus”, their are fine, thank you.
The only reason it appears to be low is because newsworthy antitrust filings against big tech are few and far between. You can still be a target of the DOJ even if you're not working FAANG.
It sounds like pretty ordinary corporate training. The idea is that you don’t want ordinary workers saying things that sound bad in discoverable messages, which is very likely if there is the ordinary amount of speculation about things they don’t really know about.
Whether any particular thing actually is an antitrust violation is for the lawyers to decide. I guess they decided wrong?
It reads to me like the sexual harassment trainings.
Those specifically tell you what not to do to limit the legal liability of the company.
Nowhere in any sexual harassment training video have I ever seen anything saying that if you have the urge to sexually harass people to seek a support group or find another, less socially harmful outlet for your energies, not anything.
It's strictly about treating the symptoms and not the disease.
Although, now that I've thought about it, I guess this is more like, "use these methods to prevent yourself from observing sexual harassment so that you can't legally report it" so... yeah.
What are you talking about? A huge chunk of sexual harassment training is about stuff that is perfectly acceptable in non-work environments (asking someone on a date, flirting, etc).
If sexual harassment training was just obvious stuff that needs counseling to fix (e.g. harassing people after having advances declined), then corporations likely wouldn’t need sexual harassment training at all.
It’s mandatory precisely because it’s a bunch of behavior that is completely normal outside of work. Suggesting people get counseling if they feel the urge to ask someone at work out on a date is ridiculous.
Anti harassment training is mandatory because its a requirement for the Farragher-Ellerth defense. (Absolves corporations from paying damages to victims of harassment.)
> If sexual harassment training was just obvious stuff that needs counseling to fix (e.g. harassing people after having advances declined), then corporations likely wouldn’t need sexual harassment training at all.
[Citation Needed]
I'm pretty sure don't take the team out to a strip club as a work outing is always on the training because people keep taking the team out to a strip club.
Which is the point the person you’re replying to is making: Taking people to a strip club is a normal (personal preferences & judgements aside) and legal thing to do… outside of a professional setting.
The training is “please don’t do these things at work so we can limit our liability to claims” and not “these are completely unacceptable behaviours so please stop doing them”.
Sure, there is a general assumption that you, the person taking the training, aren’t actually a bad person who has urges to do illegal things. Would you like to take training assuming you are capable of these things?
Maybe there are bad people in the class but you can’t assume that.
But I have been in training where they give basic dating advice, like if someone makes an excuse that’s as good as a “no.” If they are interested they’ll find a way to reschedule.
I don’t think there’s anything “ordinary” about antitrust training. I think if’s a safe bet to say that you wouldn’t see that type of training in 99.99% of companies.
This isn't new to Amazon. Leaving written paper trails is often times attempted to be avoided by simple messages like "let's chat about this over the phone" or "let's chat about this over a cup of coffee".
This is also why you viciously respond with a follow up message saying "You would like to "discuss <controversial topic here> in a non-recorded/discoverable medium?"
Yes. I've seen that tactic before, and it is very easy to counter with the pre-message and a post-summary message with CC and BCC. The fun part is dropping in statutory and case law citations. Nobody expects actual well formed legal research, and it makes it more difficult for legal to try to wiggle out of or deflect the awkward questions if litigation ever eventually comes up. This baking in of accountability is a valuable tool to ensure people stay on their best behavior.
When your job is making sure the company operates in a squeaky clean manner, above reproach from all comers, you divest yourself of giving a hoot what your bosses think. This is a crucial part of being a professional. As a free agent in the workforce, you must take ultimate responsibility for what you enable. Your boss delegates and trusts you to handle operational concerns in their stead because no one can be everywhere.
>If you don't want to keep your job, you can just quit, you know?
Nope. I want to work in an ethical marketplace where the biggest scumbags don't set the rules for everyone else. I can also only be in one place at a time; so as a manager and delegator of work, I'm doing my part to be as shining an example to my employees of the level of professionalism I expect them to aspire to in the doing of the work I delegate to them, as I can expect no more from them than I live up to myself. The important part is holding the bar high. If my boss doesn't like the way I do things, that's cool. I regularly loop them in on roadmap, and let them know what I'm up to so they can leverage their right to modify, halt, or start a discussion on an exit; but they have no right to be left unburdened with the eventual consequences and legal compliance risks of their own decision making as allocators of capital. Heavy is the head, as it were, and when it isn't is when things start going to hell real quick.
This is called managing/delegating up, and maintaining your own integrity. Part of this is also being open and plain with superiors about what you're going to do up front, and following through with it to the letter.
It's not even restricted to tech. This kind of thing it is base level legal advice for anyone in any field that faces lots of lawsuits (for example, medicine)
Corporate training is partially about training you.
It's also partially about being able to show that you had the opportunity to learn. So if you act contrarily to the training, you can be fired and/or claimed a rogue actor.
The most interesting part of their training is that they only talk about actions that employees should be taking or not. It never considers the end result: being a monopoly. In other words, being monopolist is just fine, as long as people don't do any action that can be used as evidence against the company.
What you're saying doesn't disprove my point. Obviously they care about external perceptions, but this doesn't mean they think being a monopoly is a problem. In fact they want to achieve this result without the public realizing it.
This isn't about prevention. It's training to avoid recording damning evidence. The bad behavior can continue as long as it isn't written down. Preferably implemented in pieces that lend plausible deniability.
Even companies who are innocent, and don't have any damning evidence because they did nothing wrong, need policies like this. You can be innocent and someone can still sue you, find the suspicious-sounding messages, and use them against you. Proving your innocence may cost money and reputation, not to mention that since the justice system is imperfect, there's always a chance that you can still lose the lawsuit.
This is just the corporate equivalent of "if you're not guilty, you have nothing to hide". You damn well do have something to hide even if you're not guilty, and that's why companies train their employees this way.
You are confused. The "damning evidence" is usually only damning in the court of politics and opinion. That's where it gets used too. You can't prove an antitrust case on the basis of some random set your of 500k employees saying "market share" in an email (unless they are like c level exec). Think how stupid a basis for liability that would be - "we are breaking up your company because a fresh college graduate you hired a month ago said market share in an email". The end result would be to ban email.
This is why these emails get highlighted in press releases mainly. In court, it would have to be email from someone who matters. Look at the level of exec in the emails in the Microsoft case.
Those kinds of execs are often getting regular advice from legal counsel, so usually the lawyers think whatever they are doing is okay. That's also why you also end up with emails from them later. If you have been advised you aren't doing anything wrong, there is no reason to act like you are doing something wrong. They will happily email as a result.
...Unless you are aware fundamentally that the nature of litigation is not set ahead of time, and highly dependent on the receptiveness of a judge/jury at the time of litigation.
The Judiciary is completely free to "interpret statute however it wants in the presence of a reasonable and convincing explanation of why previous case law doesn't fit the bill". This is why even a lawyer's take should be taken with a grain of salt.
Sure, but when you are trying to prove a company did something as a company, particularly as a company, you are usually going to need evidence that someone with sufficient authority to bind the company acted. For something serious like antitrust, arguing the apparent authority of low level employees (vs actual authority of high level ones) has never been a winning strategy.
Data retention training is always about limiting liability. These are the sort of companies that delete emails after 18 months no matter how much that kneecaps the employees. No amount of training will change the behavior of the sociopaths calling the shots. They need their underlings to not ruin everything for them with careless mistakes. Any other story is just a cover because they can't state their true intentions.
Companies tell employees to delete emails after 18 months because there are two alternatives: 1) delete emails after 18 months (or some similar time period), or 2) never delete emails, ever. If your policy is "delete emails based on personal preference", someone can sue you in court and claim that the selective deletions of email is evidence of wrongdoing even if you just happened to have a full hard drive that day. And you don't actually need to be a wrongdoer for someone to claim this.
I worked at two Fortune 250s (both publicly listed) in completely different industries.
Both had antitrust training for all corporate employees not just leadership. I believe —but have no data—that this is common among publicly listed companies.
Is there any big corp that doesn’t do “never use these words” training? “We are going to crush the competition” has been taboo in emails since the mid 1990s. Not to mention a lot of words that should be avoided for sensitivity reasons.
> Is there any big corp that doesn’t do “never use these words” training?
As I stated I've never seen it, in the context of anti-trust. If your company has to have that in literature, they are already skirting and it's just a matter of time.
All the companies are buying pretty much the same training units from the same set of providers. If you haven't experienced personally at the American office in the big corp you claim to work out, I'm not sure what to tell you.
> If you haven't experienced personally at the American office in the big corp you claim to work out, I'm not sure what to tell you.
It's disingenuous to continue to move the goalpost out to a more general scenario than what birthed the thread. Re-read the specific issue at hand. You can go to the companies mentioned and there is no anti-trust training, for developers (of any level) that covers what phrases or words you can say. Whatever "generalized training" you are handwaving about does not contradict that fact. GL with whatever.
I have had the training in companies not in danger of anti-trust, but only when in a leadership position, not as a developer. And not a single-purpose anti-trust class, but as part of a business ethics class or similar.
Maybe it depends on the industry? I've worked in big companies with big interests in goverment-regulated industries and every single person has had to do this sort of training, regardless of role (there'll be a course every month, and big responsibilities like anti-money laundering and corruption get rehashed yearly).
JPMC didn't have antitrust in the onboarding stuff? I find that difficult to believe. The bank I work for tells employees to never discuss products or prices with competitors without going through compliance. It's not really emphasized (it's one bullet point amongst many) but it's there.
I just checked and it's in the JPMC code of conduct on page 4,
It's not unusual for required training for employees to be mandated in the aftermath of, say, a class action lawsuit. So maybe it wasn't the case when you were there, but became that way later.
One of my companies competitors (I'm not told which) was caught red handed bribing a government official someplace. Because of a very close look at all their practices - including the anti bribe training - the courts concluded this was a rouge employee doing something the company didn't want him to do (even though it would have greatly benefited the company) and so the company is still around.
Training is a part of a robust process to ensure that your company only does legal things at all levels. It is a given in any large company that somebody will do something immoral/illegal. The real question is it one person and so the company can fire the bad person and be done, or is it the whole company and firing one person is just making a scapegoat.
