Goldman Sachs bans naughty words in email

[Andy Nguyen]

There will never be another "shitty" deal at Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

In the wake of embarrassing profanity that came to light in recent Congressional hearings led by Sen. Carl Levin, Goldman Sachs has moved to prohibit employees from swearing in emails.

The New York company is telling employees that they will no longer be able to get away with profanity in electronic messages. That means all 34,000 traders, investment bankers and other Goldman employees must restrain themselves from using a vast vocabulary of oft-used dirty words on Wall Street, including the six-letter expletive that came back to haunt the company at a Senate hearing in April.

"oy, that timberwo[l]f was one s— deal," Thomas Montag, who helped run Goldman's securities business, wrote in a June 2007 email that was repeatedly referred to at the hearing.

Goldman Sachs Bans Naughty Words in Emails - WSJ.com

 

[bigbadwolf]

That's half of American English banned right there.

 

[Scooot]

...and all of the traders vocab.

 

[bigbadwolf]

...and all of the traders vocab.

Absolutely. Trading is testosterone-driven. One way of getting your blood pressure and heart rate under control is using cuss words with abandon.

 

[joel_b]

Hilarious, language filters are used by many many large companies, for a long time yet it's news when GS does it. Can't wait for the latest updates on their updates to email attachment size limits!

Irony is, removing expletives will cause people to use more approriate, accurate words, becoming more culpable in the process. Hah!

 

[Andy Nguyen]

The article points out that similar policy is already in place at other firms like JPM, Citi. Goldman Sachs probably has the same rule in place. The new directive is passed down verbally as I understand it.

So this is just a stern reminder from the masters after words like "shitty" got them into a bad situation during the senate hearing.

 

[Anthony DeAngelis]

The Bloomberg Terminals are like that also. They have a bad word censor. Pretty funny actually.

Personally, I think large banks have more important things on their plates, but as usual, lets focus on the things that get bad publicity rather then the important issues.

 

[Connor]

That's half of American English banned right there.

Low blow, but sadly true

 

[bigbadwolf]

Low blow, but sadly true

It is a gross exaggeration. Enoch Powell (he of the famous "Rivers of Blood" speech that got him booted out of his cabinet job) used to contend that only the English could speak English. He may have been right. A fortnight back I was telling an American that an exercise machine was working intermittently -- I got a blank stare; then I tried saying it was working sporadically -- another blank stare. Then finally, in Americanese, "It kinda works some of the time and some of the time it doesn't." Bingo.

 

[DominiConnor]

When I was at Dresdner bank (we all have skeletons in the closet), they did this, but it was run by their HR.
They hired a consultancy to produce a list of bad words (yes, really).
But since the aspiration was to be a tier 1 global bank, they asked them to do all bad words in all languages, since they wanted to avoid offending Congolese, Poles, and Indonesians etc.

They prevailed upon IT to block all emails with the bad words.

...silently.

The mails just disappeared.

Bad words included "joke" which cost the firm real money.

Few here are sales people, but I will share that one needs to keep a link going to a customer, even when there is nothing much to say. Emails saying "do you want to buy some IBM bonds" get boring after the 50th...
Also some clients do stuff like privatise the Russian gas industry, IPO, and other things that may happen 5 years after the initial contact, with no business done in the time between. That's an extreme case, but big value, and it's common for it to be one transaction every 6 months.
So many sales people uses jokes to keep customers aware of their existence.

Those vansihed.

Result really unhappy sales people.

To make it better, the IT at Dresdner was so bad that we had a 5ft blow up effigy of Munch's The Scream, as part of the team trying to make things better. He had his own ID card and was in the telephone directory.

So when a senior bod referred to the latest screw up as "a joke", and demanded action, the system threw it away.

It got quite intense after that.

GS are going to have similar fun...
Are they going to ban British bollocks and French merde, German scheisse ?

Bloomberg tried this, and a colleague of mine whose surname was Cocks, who was a senior trader took it up with them...