[bytelines]

> 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?

[8ytecoder]

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.

[geoduck14]

>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

[kfarr]

Morals don’t matter when the shareholders sue board members for failing to uphold fiduciary responsibility. Just saying, the law influences how we work

[anticensor]

Fiduiciary responsibility does not mean operating like you are bankrupt tomorrow.

[eru]

Shareholder sue for almost everything in the US. It's the modern general purpose regulation.

That often includes stuff that you would classify under 'morals'.

[DannyBee]

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

[onlyrealcuzzo]

The company isn't held liable when employees insider trade. When employees engage in monopolistic behaviors, the company is more on the hook.

[bytelines]

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!