Former Microsoftie here. After all the business ethics training videos I had to sit through, I am infuriated by this.
It’s frustrating that law only applies to the lower classes, and not to the upper corporate classes
Lol, did you think otherwise?
Microsoft is tied to hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign bribes
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Re: Microsoft is tied to hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign bribes
#272I have been reading the comments about bribing foreign companies. Very interesting
I think it is pertinent to remind people here, especially subjects of the USA, that in the USA bribing politicians is a formal and accepted practise. Records are kept, they are publicly available.
The hypocrisy of those politicians is legendary for all sorts of reasons, this is just a minor point. Bribery is only illegal if done informally in foreign countries or the private sector.
Re: Microsoft is tied to hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign bribes
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who are the "lower classes" that do business internationally and are prosecuted by the US Departmet of Justice?
This is unproductive quibbling. If I, a middle-class independent contractor, attempt to bribe a government employee to award me a contract, I am going to jail. If someone with even lesser means attempts to bribe a social worker to award them welfare of some kind, they are going to jail. That is the discrepancy that matters.
> This is unproductive quibbling.
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.
Re: Microsoft is tied to hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign bribes
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those annual trainings are there to show compliance. And also obeisance -- on the part of the person required to sit through these trainings (and pretend that they had some connection to reality).
meh. I'd be happy to sit in a chair and watch nonsensical videos for $100/hr any time you like.
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.
Re: Microsoft is tied to hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign bribes
#275If Microsoft can get away with this, what are the rest of the FAANGs doing that we don't know about?
So nice that we legalized corruption and white collar crime in the United States, how disruptive!
Re: Microsoft is tied to hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign bribes
#276If a government organization would want to use a Linux, how hard would it actually be? Is it a viable alternative?
I spent 7 years working with digitalisation in the Danish public sector and it depends on what you mean, and what you want to pay for it. Basically the short answer is that it is impossible. What is often forgotten about non-tech enterprise here on HN is that a typical public sector organisation has a ratio of 20-50 IT people (this is everyone, from the network and operations people to developers and project managers…
The other challenge in the public sector is that the "business" itself is so heterogeneous that the IT management tends to be siloed, while people in these siloed orgs need to work with people in other siloed orgs. You can't switch the whole government wholesale; you'll get some fraction of business units to adopt something else and hope other units will slowly switch too, but in the meantime, you've got people trying to share documents with some intricate set of track changes, comments or some other special feature across orgs using different tech, and the roundtripping with different software causes some of that to be messed up and then you've got an ongoing IT support problem and dissatisfied stakeholders.
Re: Microsoft is tied to hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign bribes
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
meh. I'd be happy to sit in a chair and watch nonsensical videos for $100/hr any time you like.
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?”
Re: Microsoft is tied to hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign bribes
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. Did you have similar guidelines inside Microsoft? [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30760923
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.
Re: Microsoft is tied to hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign bribes
#279I bet this is normal procedure for most companies that do business in countries where bribes are common. In Germany foreign bribes used to be even deductible.
It is arguable that the prohibition of bribes is a cultural thing. So insisting on not bribing in other cultures is some sort of "imperialism". That would make bribing foreign officials a "legitimate" business expense.
Problem is that foreign entities bribing in foreign cultures is an even worse form of imperialism. Big corporations with deep pockets could totally distort the market in these countries by bribing generously instead of competing by merit. It’s bad enough that lobbying (some may call it bribing) money plays such a big role in US economic policy so let’s not make it even worse. Especially large scale bribing corrupts countries and their culture.
Capitalism is only useful if there is honest competition in the market.
Re: Microsoft is tied to hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign bribes
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.queryS…
Now this is true hacker spirit
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.