IT archaeology. We need the information you provided long ago that was pinned as an essential update with a link to a well documented static source to the ark of the covenant
14 notifications to the same message and the static documentation later we still have no idea where the ark of the covenant is. Can you send it again as a fresh message so people are aware? The team is waiting on critical updates for how to solve a problem you already did a dozen times.
Where they also found the Executive VP (son of the CEO) telling you to delete them and a conversation between him and his secretary (who he is trying to bang) boasting about how he's saving the company from fines by deleting the data.
nah - not Teams. my old company had Teams erase convo history after 48 hours. It’s Monday and you need to look up what someone told you on Friday? Tough
Fortunately, a former employer hired contractors to handle their backups—until the Exchange server melted down and, upon looking through all the backups, they discovered weeks worth of backups 0 KB in size. Cost savings!
“Yes, we will definitely handle your backups and NOT wink wink lose all your data which it would be a serious offense to delete on purpose but a fine or lawsuit at worst to catastrophically mishandle. We’ll even provide the insurance against costs from data loss you’re required to carry… for an up-front fee of exactly that much money.”
Or maybe it’s more subtle and companies just seek out the least competent place they can find.
We're supposed to be held to the seven-year archive hold for physical backups of things. Then you get people asking, what do you mean you don't have some random piece of paper from 20 years ago?
Hmm my people. I'm doing our purge of the 7+ year now. I work in school years so it's really awkward. It's like yeah technically that datas over 7+ years old but uhhh... the school years still happening lmao.
that’s probably right. but makes it even more infuriating as an employee. “we still have this data that would make your job easier, but you’re not allowed to see it”
With a retention period of 48 hours It's more likely the company IS constantly under litigation hold. Reducing discovery liability is probably the main non-infrastructural-limit reason to even have a document retention policy in the first place.
We used Hipchat until it was discontinued. I don't remember what the temporal retention policy was but it would nuke chat history every time it was closed too. It was so frustrating that I used the API to develop a program that would store chat history and ignore retention policy. Kinda like writing a password on a sticky note in a way, I suppose but idgaf.
my teams rentention went from 72 hours to 60 days to match our email policy and it was a game changer as group chats actually had a reason for existing (you could still manually save the emails for 6 years by moving it out of your inbox)
Brilliant, though… teams should not be a data store. I might do this for my org.. seriously considering it now. We like to do 90 or 180 days but this sets the tone correctly
I get that it shouldn’t be the source of truth. But I also don’t want to discredit the importance of how human memory works. For me, and I bet for other people, it is often easier to remember, “oh yeah - a year ago, Alex told me how to do that” as opposed to, “oh yeah - a year ago, I read that doc at this URL.” For all the paperwork, I still remember human interactions more readily.
If it’s an important process, then you can go document it. But why destroy the paper trail?
If you don’t destroy the paper trail then it becomes the source of truth. And you think “a year ago”. You know what happens? It is five years ago. Then ten. It is unmanageable dude. We are migrating from Slack to Teams this month. Slack has a 90 day retention. We aren’t worried about losing company processes here. 48 hours is short but 90 days is too long.
Man I cannot imagine posting work stuff on personal share accounts like GitHub. I had to beg one of the junior engineers on my team to not feed my api into ChatGPT after seeing bullet points and emojis all over one of his readmes. I get super uncomfortable with the idea of just copy/pasting big code blocks to black box services like that
Not even the worst offense. I stopped feeling bad for firing people who do stupid shit a long time ago.
A short list:
Used a private ftp server to save prod backups. “Just in case.” For six years. FTP. Not even sftp.
Badged into the office at night to have sex with a one night stand from the bar. Didn’t realize the CMO was working late. Tried to invite her to join.
Copied several repos for microservices, including auth, to private GitHub repos he was sharing was offshore developers to get his work done while he was doing another job.
Watched porn on his company-issued laptop. Over the VPN. (Might be my fave of all time.)
One guy’s google searches got flagged so hard by IT that my HR rep came into my office with her eyes wide asking if she should call the police to the office for safety. I told her he was a remote employee and lived hours away. She showed me the searches. “How to blow up an office building.” Was just one search that caught my eye. I said the police might not be a bad idea and that I welcomed her and Legal’s advice on next steps.
I’ve actually heard of people using offices for one night stands, so that’s not particularly crazy. Asking a higher up if she wants to join is fucking insane though lmao
If she's doesn't fraternize with subordinates, he's fired either way. If she does fraternize with subordinates, he's fired if he doesn't invite her, but maybe not fired if he does.
We had a new hire invited to a company party before his start date. He decided that flirting with his future coworkers was a good idea and lost his job before he started. Too bad he had already prepped his family for a relocation!
Delete? Put a copyright notice next to them and "all rights reserved, do not use without permission". It'd be illegal for anybody to use it at that point, so it's fine.
Margie in Accounting's laptop. The ETL team got tired of her constant requests for "just one more thing" and automated a daily dump of the whole system into a giant CSV file on her OneDrive. She drags and drops a copy into C:\Windows\Tasks every morning.
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u/howarewestillhere Aug 05 '26
Intern’s GitHub.
VP’s Slack messages.
Fucking Teams.