Those annual trainings are there to show compliance. This prevents pro active investigations by authorities into business conduct. Without those corporations are free to engage in all kinda of shady business behaviour. And when something turns sideways, the offending employees passed the training, so the company is shielded, to an extend.
People downplay such training, but imagine the environment without it. Imagine if nobody officially talked about corrupt practices: it would create a very dark place for such things to occur, nobody would know what the rules are or what to do, and especially the silence would speak very loudly.
Edit: By training everyone, not just the people directly involved with such situations, anyone considering corrupt acts will know that everyone - from the tech support person who helps them send the corrupt message to the receptionist who takes the corrupt call to the finance underling who mails the check - everyone will recognize it. There is no talking the rube into helping them; there are eyes everywhere, all the time.
People know that what they hear in the training videos and how they must really act are two different things. If you find out that your boss's boss is corrupting goverment officials in Poland to get a $100m contract (a real case BTW, involving one of MS's big competitors), do you really think the company wants you to raise alarm and blow that contract? What good does it do to your boss's boss career, or the shareholders?
> People know that what they hear in the training videos and how they must really act are two different things
It also shifts culpability to the individuals; aka CYA for the org. Corporate counsel will say "We have training for this every year; they knew they were not supposed to do that,and we weren't aware they were doing that, so it's not our fault"
Very important to highlight this; since joining a different big tech company I have quickly realized how much the internal processes (everything from expenses to security posture) are structured to put the maximum responsibility on the person furthest down the totem pole.
In small European companies I've worked for this would be considered a big red flag and a sign of broken company culture, but for US companies it is seemingly the norm.
> In small European companies I've worked for this would be considered a big red flag and a sign of broken company culture, but for US companies it is seemingly the norm.
Try working for a big European company, it’s no different.
Do you mean large EU companies are more similar to large US companies, or more similar to small EU companies? I presume the former, which would be a shame but not entirely unexpected since I imagine (in the tech industry at least) there is a lot of emulation.
As soon as you do business interbationally, especially in the US, you have to follow the same anti corruption laws, business conduct and so on. I guess that's one of the reasons big corps are so similar with regards to those trainings.
It's not a perfect solution, but nothing is. The training shifts the equation significantly relative to no training (as described in the GP). Our alternative to perfect solutions, if that's what we require, is to do nothing.
> What good does it do ... the shareholders?
Note that we commonly talk as if people will naturally care about the interests of one group of humans they don't know, the shareholders, but not another group, the public. Various rules say you should care about both (and there are many more rules regarding the latter).
> Enron would have been better off if someone had blown the whistle early
Blown the whistle to who and about what. As I understand it, Enron's brilliance was breaking up the actions so each low ranking employee was looking at legal things and you had to be quite high up to see the issues
Not when you have a deadline and your stuff is behind, you don't :-)
Happily, it was better than that. Most of these courses were online, and you could just let the videos of actors working through scenarios run in the background and then answer some simple questions. The questions never varied and the correct answer was usually pretty obvious (e.g., don't pick any answer that includes hiding a body).
> The questions never varied and the correct answer was usually pretty obvious
Siemens ask different questions in reruns of end tests, vary the order the questions are in, and also ask questions you can’t answer from understanding the topic. Eg ‘what colour was the background of the graph demonstrating the effect?”
If I have a deadline and stuff is behind, it's my job to tell my boss. It's their job to get an exception so I take the training after the deadline. Also probably their job to get some of my tasks reassigned.
Watching company policy videos wears thin after about 2 minutes, but I wasn’t paid anything like $100/hr…
My method was to open another browser tab, then you can play several at the same time. The next company I was at prevented that somehow.
So I opened a few different web browsers. Then they broke that and also made each clip about 2 mins long and had loads of them, so you can’t even queue them up in one browser.
It's not about the videos. The main point it enforces is that you're supposed to hold hour tongue as your company engages in a kinds of intrinsically abusive and unethical practices (as long as you, personally, are not breaking the law). Still sound like $100/hr of fun?
It's effective in its real goal (preventing fines), just not in its stated goal (preventing bribery). Of course this means that it's at best a half-truth to call it training (a more accurate name would be e.g. "indemnity procedure").
My thoughts exactly. Every year, the Standards of Business Conduct training talks about not bribing foreign officials and devs are like “who the hell is ever in that position anyway?”.
If it helps, I had to sit through all that stuff at Amazon as well. I was in the bit that makes consumer electronics and never dealt with contracts in any way, yet still had to spend time learning not to make or take bribes from wholesalers or international businesses or governments. Every. Single. Year.
Initially the training software was badly written so you could just open up DevTools and type "v = document.querySelector('video'); v.currentTime = v.duration - 1000;" or similar and just bop through the sections. Later they seemed to track time on the server, so really the most I could do is turn off the window focus check and leave the tab open in a second monitor. So annoying.
Yea, those simple times have passed. Ours require clicks at various points ("Next" and testing questions at the end of sections), so i accumulate them until there are 4-5 of such mandatory crap due and do them simultaneously. I suppose in time they will catch onto that too, and you'd be able to run only one at a time.
Yeah I just mute the tabs and set video speed to as fast as it’ll let me. Ours has little quiz sections but you pretty much always get infinite tries and it doesn’t take a genius to guess the answers.
I worked somewhere that had a fire safety online test each year.
One staff member would be nominated to do all the tests and would sit down with everyone’s logins and spent the whole day sitting the test again and again. The other staff provided food and drink.
Me desperately trying to get a decent repro case for a bizarre networking bug in Halo: "Oh man, gotta remember, better not bribe any foreign officials while I sort this out."
On the other hand, if network errors could be debugged by bribing foreign officials, I'm assuming there would be a lot of rather rich foreign officials.
How many MSFT devs do you think travel to foreign countries to close deals? I do not think one has to have worked there to come up with, "mmm, probably not very many", and thus devs are like, "WTF do I have to watch this?"
Many years ago, another division of my employer got caught bribing Nigeria. As a result, a bunch of people who were never in a position to do so had to sit through hours of ethics training. Some of it came with oddly specific examples. Halfway through one such lecture, in which we were being admonished to never accept a car from a customer, some engineer in the back did some quick mental arithmetic on his own salary versus costs of cars and asked "Which customers were giving out cars?"
Being that Instructor is 100% bullshit job. I.e. you're doing something entirely pointless, day in-day out, just so your company can later say to some lawyers that it was done. I feel bad for people who work those jobs.
I read a story yesterday[1] how the policy inside Google is to cc their legal department on any emails that you think could make the company look bad in any future legal proceedings. As I understand it, this shields the email from discovery.
As one there before, during, after that little DoJ/IE kurfluffle, I recall the guidelines to be simple: there are things you don't talk about in email[0]. Which is why this Google thing mystifies me: why are you talking about it in email at all? And then to rely on what sounds like some crackpot legal theory? (I mean, maybe it's not, and IANAL, but it reeks of "sovereign citizens don't have to pay taxes".)
[0] Yes, that is a vast oversimplification (though accurate) to make a point.
> Plaintiffs respectfully request the Court to sanction Google LLC (Google) for its extensive and intentional efforts to misuse the attorney-client privilege to hide business documents relevant to this case. Google has explicitly and repeatedly instructed its employees to shield important business communications from discovery by using false requests for legal advice. These efforts directly harmed Plaintiffs, undermined their discovery efforts, and subverted the judicial process. The Court should sanction Google and order the full production of withheld and redacted emails where in-house counsel was included in a communication between non-attorneys and did not respond. Alternatively, the Court should hold these silent-attorney emails are not privileged and immediately order their production.
That's what the DoJ is alleging; it's not clear what "theory Google was operating under". The DoJ may be right or wrong, and separately, they may be on a wild goose chase.
one thing that they teach you in this sort of training (never a Googler but been at at other big names) is that it is not a blank check to shield all emails from discovery by just cc-ing legal.
At my employer, where where everyone has to undergo multiple types of ethics training every year, I think they would view this as "willful ignorance," which they say is not a defense for anything. Plus, they tell us to contact legal only when we think something has been done to violate the ethics guidelines, not to prevent it from happening in the first place.
In almost every country with a dictator and human right abuses, you will find a constitution guarantying civil rights and liberties of the individual...
[1] - "The Constitution of the Russian Federation"
Article 17
1. In the Russian Federation recognition and guarantees shall be provided for the rights and freedoms of man and citizen according to the universally recognized principles and norms of international law and according to the present Constitution.
2. Fundamental human rights and freedoms are inalienable and shall be enjoyed by everyone since the day of birth.
3. The exercise of the rights and freedoms of man and citizen shall not violate the rights and freedoms of other people.
Article 18
The rights and freedoms of man and citizen shall be directly operative. They determine the essence, meaning and implementation of laws, the activities of the legislative and executive authorities, local self-government and shall be ensured by the administration of justice.
Article 19
1. All people shall be equal before the law and court.
2. The State shall guarantee the equality of rights and freedoms of man and citizen, regardless of sex, race, nationality, language, origin, property and official status, place of residence, religion, convictions, membership of public associations, and also of other circumstances. All forms of limitations of human rights on social, racial, national, linguistic or religious grounds shall be banned.
3. Man and woman shall enjoy equal rights and freedoms and have equal possibilities to exercise them.
A gridlocked political system is not guaranteed to create "good legislation" as Scalia puts it, take US as a prime example of that, almost every legislation is packed with pork and other things unrelated to the legalisation itself.
To Scalia defence he might have meant "not awful legislation", like avoid harming a minority, because of the bicameral legislature. But good legislation? No.
It is true that in Europe it is common to mix the legislative and the executive with the same election and thus chamber. However in Sweden the executive power is divided in half, with the elected prime minister with his cabinet (regeringen) on the one hand and the independent government agencies (myndigheter) on the other. This is a separation of powers that US doesn't have.
And it is in the executive that has the highest risk of political corrupt behaviour, because it deals with all the practical details of running a country, therefore separating the executive into two separate branches, the elected and the civil servants, creates better protection against political corruption.
Scalia main argument is that US can't become the Soviet union because of the bicameral gridlock built into the system, however what we have seen in the US when the legislature is politically paralyzed is that the executive, and to some extent the judiciary, has encroached on the legislative powers.
How many of the wars that US has been involved in since the second world war has been formally approved constitutionally by the senate? Zero.
Did President Obama execute a US citizen without a trial? Yes.
This is a gap in Scalias argument, the executive power is too unrestricted, hence it is the US executive power that will be removing citizen rights from the citizenry, not the legislature.
Let's remember that Scalia was a judge, not a political theorist or a legislative expert. Scalia's expertise would be the operation of the judiciary, courtrooms, etc.
> However in Sweden the executive power is divided in half, with the elected prime minister with his cabinet (regeringen) on the one hand and the independent government agencies (myndigheter) on the other. This is a separation of powers that US doesn't have.
The US does have not have this. That's why Biden couldn't fire the postmaster general, or the fed chair, or numerous other posts. Yes, the
President fills the leadership roles when they are available, but they don't totally control many agencies.
Compare the US Department of Justice with the equivalent in Sweden, in Sweden that would be split in multiple different organisations first with Departement of Justice, headed by the minister of Justice (elected politician) and a staff of civil servants, but they don't handle any criminal cases.
Thus there is several other government agencies like Riksåklagare (Prosecutor-General), Polismyndigheten (Police Authority), Säkerhetspolisen (Security Service), Ekobrottsmyndigheten (Economic Crime Authority) etc all independently governed by civil servants.
This is a central part of the Swedish constitution and is tradition that dates back several hundred years.
Maybe they just kept the Soviet one with some edits of the nation's name. That one was also wonderfully progressive and respecting of human rights... On paper. Come to think of it, did the Soviet Union really "go under"? Only in the sense of losing all its peripheral territories, AFAICS; the core remains. In several senses.
In the banks we have the same. As IT guy, the amount of quarterly trainings and their focus is a bit crazy, most topics I will never ever touch since I don't work in ie Legal and I am so far from ever interacting or even seeing any client.
Most of the trainings are about a fine we got due to being caught doing something bad, say 10 years ago, and part of legal settlement is apart from direct fine, a nice 30-60 min training where they tell you that stealing and lying and cheating is bad.
Those trainings keep re-appearing quite consistently so they are really not that effective.
When i was at Microsoft, i recall an engineer saying that corporate puts that in there so that when somebody is caught giving bribes they can point to them and say they're a lone wolf, bad actor, etc., because clearly the policy is not to give bribes, and they took the training course in this, we documented that...
Implication: they can fire that employee and continue to give bribes.
Ps. Full disclosure, I never witnessed anybody giving bribes, nor worked with anyone who would be in a position to do so.
"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
A surprisingly vacuous quote that continues the conservative/right-wing as pejorative quote while obfuscating the real problem. The real problem is elitism and corruption.
Compare the treatment of Donald Trump versus Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden. Why is the conservative in the out group and the liberal in the in group?
No need to take a shot at the other comment; maybe they just don't understand you. I didn't know who you meant; 'lower classes' is a vague term, especially in context of foreign corrupt practices.
standards of business conduct. annual training. With remarkably high production standards and costs, I might add. I'm a big fan of Nelson, the lovable everyman developer.
If its true that microsoft were doling out 40k bribes, that would be less than five minutes of what an sbc episode must cost to produce. The irony.
At another big corp the training videos had a scenario where I would be on site with accommodations provided by the client. It asked whether I could accept a cook offered by the client.
I'm infuriated that I'm being offered t-shirts and maybe a lunch and someone else out there is getting a cook for a month. Damn right I'm taking the cook.
After all the business ethics training videos I had to sit through, I am infuriated by this.