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Comment by ChemicalWarfare | Hacker News Reader

I worked for a large company that went through drastic downsizing at one point. Some ppl who were getting let go were "well positioned" to do some damage. The way the company handled this is there was no advance notice. Your manager and a couple of security dudes shows up at your desk with boxes and you're outta there in 5 min.

There were things like managers getting punched, ppl screaming etc but no malicious hacking that I'm aware of. Somehow one dude (I'm assuming :)) managed to take a dump in the elevator on the way out :)

They had EMS parked outside too. Wasn't pretty.

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Suckers don't know about my dead man's handle, if I don't log in to it once every 12 hours the fit will hit the shan.

You may not want this comment to be on the public internet in the case that such a thing happens.

Pretty sure that was a joke.

Pretty sure that's a novelty account, considering the username.

I'm not sure that this account is linked to me in any way, but it was a joke.

I consulted at a Fortune 100 investment bank in New York City 15 years ago. It's difficult to hide that layoffs are coming - managers are pulled into meetings to rank their employees, they tell their friend, word gets around.

Someone set up a digital timebomb on the systems. They were one of the people let go, and a few weeks later, things crashed all over the place.

One amusing bit - a few months later, another digital time bomb went off. He had hidden another one that they had not found, even knowing of the first one.

Despite laying off about 10% of the staff, management had a good idea of who it was, but they had been clever so it was difficult to get evidence it was them.

At financial institutions I've worked at, if you're getting fired you are taken to a room (managers office, conf room etc.) and immediately escorted out of the building after. No returning to your desk at all. Someone else will gather the belongings that you need and bring them like wallets/handbags. The rest of your stuff will be mailed/couriered to you later after someone has had the chance to go through them to make sure that there is no IP in them.

judging from the article, I was under the assumption that he had a poor review, not a firing. Possibly set to go on an improvement plan or some-such.

This leads to a messy set of compensations:

* When we fire people, they may take revenge, so we escort them out immediately

* ...but then people start assuming the worst when we tell them they are doing poorly, so we stop doing that and just fire them once it's bad enough (escorting them out immediately at that point)

* ...so then they start trying to guess when we are unhappy with them, and now we have employees that weren't at any risk of firing taking preemptive revenge...

It's a mess, and the less respectfully you treat people in the name of "policy", the more it can escalate things.

Sorry for the naive question, but in that kind of situation, how do you assure the continuity of the organization ? What if the people being let got were supporting customers, about to close a deal, and so on ? How do you make sure people are not leaving with a critical "know-how" ?

I'd imagine that in the case of such a drastic downsizing, that sort of thing was the least of the company's worries.

People in the middle of a deal or with crucial know-how will be called to serve out their notice period for handover - which if the HR is switched-on is 1-3 months. Usually some extra severance money will be offered as a sweetener compared to running away immediately.

However, potential to do damage usually supersedes potential to benefit the business in the notice period. A company with sane HR has preventative policies in place:

- Never have single-person key-man risk in the first place; always have a backup/deputy designated well in advance because anyone can be hit by a bus. Helps with covering holidays too.

- For highly sensitive jobs like sysops or people dealing with customer money, revoke access to systems first thing in the morning, then tell them, then immediately escort them out.

- Don't have shared or master passwords anywhere, but have user-based ACL instead so access can be revoked.

In theory the manager is supposed to determine who's needed for a skeleton crew. But there's managers that retain the people they thought were competent but because they're blinded by ass kissing they end up with less than ideal staff. At the end of the day it probably doesn't usually matter that much though, a drastic downsizing is usually a death knell anyway.

What kind of person assaults their manager because a company has to downsize?

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