Comment by yaur
14 hours ago
Terminating access and rotating passwords (if needed) while the person is in the meeting but has not yet found out they are being let go has been SOP for at least the last 20 years
14 hours ago
Terminating access and rotating passwords (if needed) while the person is in the meeting but has not yet found out they are being let go has been SOP for at least the last 20 years
Is this specific to US culture? And what about your work environment makes it such a risk?
Where people are laid off here (Norway), they're still employed by law for 3 months. Most companies don't force you to work all that time, but it's pretty common to finish up your tasks, do offboarding etc for a few weeks. Never considered it an issue. Maybe it's a high trust society thing?
I have had this (garden leave) specified in contracts in Norway too - it's not strictly a requirement that you're allowed to serve out the full 3 months, but the default unless specified is 3 months. In the cases I had it in the contract, the contract generally framed it as if some other perk (like shares) served as consideration for giving my employer the right to put me on garden leave.
>Is this specific to US culture? And what about your work environment makes it such a risk?
It's called garden leave, it's popular everywhere, especially if it's a big international company with diverse workforce, sensitive to IP rights, since there's been plenty of cases of people taking company IP on USB drives to the new employer, like that Indian guy who took IP from Valeo to Nvidia and got his home raided by the police because the Valeo guys saw him share it on a Teams call lol. Same for companies in finance or that handle sensitive information. Norwegian trust doesn't fly anymore when it comes to multinational corpos.
Companies run on liability and risk mitigation. If something bad happened once (IP theft or sabotage from someone they let go), then they have to prevent from ever happening again, not keep blindly trusting people while letting it happen.
It is not that common in Norway. It has at least been argued in the past that working your notice period is not just an obligation to employer if they want to enforce it, but a right for the employee on the basis that being walked out can affect your reputation by implying possible misconduct exactly because it has generally been uncommon in Norway.
I haven't worked in Norway for a long time, so haven't kept up to date on the current legal position. The typical argument used to be that if there were concerns over IP theft or sabotage, there were other ways of protecting against that - and indeed, insider risk is something companies need to deal with whether or not someone has been fired.
Heh, a place where I worked some guy who left kept committing code for months (he went to work for a company we were a vendor for). Some of my teammates knew and just thought it was no big deal, he was fixing bugs and adding features.
The color the director turned when he found out!! Oh man.
Was his name … Milton?
"We fixed the glitch"
so he was doing free labor for your company? What's he getting out of that?
he went to work for a company we were a vendor for
Sounds like he's getting paid to work on the same thing by a slightly different stakeholder.
I'd happily pay $$$$$$ to hire someone with commit access to Cloudflare, AWS or Google's codebase who could fix the goddamn bugs, let alone add new features.
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https://www.nucalc.com/Story/
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This story deserves a movie, or at least a long video essay!
Haven’t laughed this hard in a long time.
You might enjoy this story then. 2 guys at apple continue to finish and ship their product after being laid off ..
https://www.pacifict.com/story/
IIRC 50 Shades had a case of "remember me, the woman you fired? I talked to your boss' boss and I'm your boss now"
I have door codes and passwords for a major organisation that I last worked for somewhere in the region of 20 years ago. They haven't rotated a damn thing. I still know people who work there, and I guess technically I still support things for them in an informal question-over-a-pint kind of way, but damn me, put in some effort guys.
My first task at my last job was removing access to an employee being let go. I had just gone through onboarding so I knew every (documented) service we needed to handle. We live tested it on my own accounts, measured the time before I noticed, and then proceeded to successfully go through the checklist.
Except not everything was properly documented, and it turned out the employee had given admin rights on some resources to a contractor which proceeded to wreak havoc on their behalf (the 'rm -rf' kind). Eh!
Amateurs. My employer does mass layoffs by terminating access to everything except their email account at 3am, and then sending an email to the victim saying “you were let go at 3am”. Managers get to figure out who’s left on their team by pinging everyone when they learn about it at work.
Google powerwashes your corp Chromebook when they let you go. A friend was composing an email on the train when their screen went black and the device reset itself to factory settings.
They even send the “you’re being fired” email to their personal email they have on file. Didn’t even schedule a meeting.
Most of the employer behaviour described in such gleeful terms here would be outright illegal in most of Europe and open up the employer to risk of being sued for wrongful dismissal, etc.
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A full email? We need a "you've been fired" emoji.
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Man, that's cold.
I think at least on windows you can powercycle it quickly a few times until it gives up this behavior. Not sure about Chromebooks.
If you're talking about Oracle, the large round previous to that they did had individual meetings with employee, manager, and HR. With so many layoffs it took a week+ to do, effectively torturing an entire set of employees who had no idea if they'd have a job by the end of the hour, let alone week.
I'm not sure there's any good way to lay off large amounts of staff (besides not getting yourself into the situation in the first place where you have to)
In much of Europe, if you're planning redundancies above a certain (low) number of employees, the employees / unions has a consultation right before layoffs start in order to be able to negotiate or consider other options...
>I'm not sure there's any good way to lay off large amounts of staff
Someone on HN once wrote that after the dot.com bust, Yahoo! HR had 1-1 meetings with every single employee that was part of the mass layoffs back then, and they did this for hundreds of workers. Boy what I wouldn't give to go back to such state of affairs, even though I wasn't yet part of the workforce back then.
An older family friend of mine who started working in tech around 2003-2005, told me "back in my day, to get a job, you'd just send your CV to HR@corpo.com, and in 2-3 days you'd get a call asking you when you're free to come over for an interview". Now today you're lucky you get an automated reply back from 50 CVs sent, just for the opportunity to do an impersonal take home assessment as part of the seven stage interview process. It's like screaming into the void of AI bots and automated CV screening systems, while you spin the barrel of the revolver to play the next round of Russian roulette.
And the crazy part is, that when people talk about "the good old days", we're talking about events from recent history, just 10-25 years ago, that a lot of current workers experienced in their lifetime, not stuff from when boomers were kids.
The massive sudden shift in the commoditization of human workers and turning them into faceless labor resources that can be inhumanely disposed of with a keystroke, is real and noticeable to everyone, that I'm envious for you guys who are set to retire soon out of this shitshow.
What comes after this? Have we reached rock bottom, or will it get even worse?
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Oracle?
I experienced that once. The parent and the parent's parent company were from the USA. The top CEO and CTO came over and fired everyone. My laptop was controlling a job that had to run pretty long on a 16 core server, but I did as asked: I shut down the laptop and left it on my desk. That was at least $50k down the drain.
The reason they fired the whole dept. was that they were going to centralize development, as they had 200 other developers. After 5 years, they still hadn't developed a new product. Then they bought a competitor and rebranded it. The old product had to be kept running for years after. I guess they finally switched all their clients, because the web sites now open with <!--eslint-disable @angular-eslint/template/prefer-self-closing-tags-->. Who puts that in their HTML?
There's the classic article by Matt Ringel and Tom Limoncelli back from 1999:
https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/lisa99/full_papers/ringe...
But I'm guessing that doesn't work with someone who's been collecting other logins:
> Muneeb had been assembling usernames and passwords—5,400 of them taken from his own company’s network data.
Though you'd want to make sure there's no essential information that only this employee knows, because that action might terminate that employee's desire to cooperate with the company.
I've turned off my own access at least three times when being let go from different jobs