alt Hacker NewsDid you go to high school? A sister of a friend of a friend says blah blah blah and everybody knows that yadda yadda. Same thing happens in big companies, especially among people who are out of the loop but wish they knew all the inside details. I see this all the time and sometimes it sounds like something that would be pretty damaging in a court case.
In other cases I have heard people who ought to know better speculating about “what if” they didn’t have to follow the letter of some corporate policy that was rooted in risk avoidance. Again, it looks bad but it doesn’t mean anything concrete (except that the person might have iffy judgment).
> Did you go to high school?
Hey, fuck you too buddy.
I said this based on my years of working at companies on projects specifically to do things like delete all data as soon as it was legally permissible so it could never come up in court again.
And most of my “let’s take this offline” chats have led to discussions around doing illegal shit.
Hell, I had one manager give me handwritten code on paper and instructions to commit it under my name. The code in question would cause sales to go through without the discounts presented to customers because the discount service was buggy and his metrics were based on successfully completed sales. Even threatened to fire me when I said no, and only backed down when I put the paper in my pocket and asked if he would like for anyone else outside the room to see it or if he would not use me as a fall guy.
If your employees “don’t know what they’re talking about” then either they are not representative of the companies views and have no power to enact illegal policies for the company, or they do and you don’t have controls. Trying to hide that shit by default means you don’t get the benefit of the doubt, like you are giving them.