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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

Immediately escorting fired employees out of the building is an extremely aggressive signal, and I don't know if it gets used much outside of USA.

It's possible to do layoffs in a completely different way, but it takes time and management patience. When Nokia fired thousands of employees back in 2011-13, they created a program called Bridge that offered former employees seed money to create startups, and even the possibility to negotiate for a spin-off license of IP assets created at Nokia:

https://www.google.fi/amp/www.zdnet.com/google-amp/article/i...

It seems that the program was a success by any measure. Nokia is still around and doing better than in a long time, after shedding the mobile phone albatross to Steve Ballmer for an inflated price.

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I once got fired that way...

I won't give too much details, but basically it was this:

Bigwig liked me. Guy directly under bigwig, was my theoretically boss. back then I didn't understood office politics, and kept communicating with bigwig directly, because project was his idea, and his coding style was similar to mine (when he used to code) so he understood what I was doing.

I made a genuine screwup due to mental illness (now treated), guy under bigwig fired me.

I complained to bigwig on the same day, he unfired me.

I still had screwed up though... so bigwig gives me some deadline to fix my stuff.

Some weeks later, about 3 days before deadline, bigwig had to take a business trip...

So guy under bigwig shows up, tell me to show him "now" the project, since I was counting on using all the days on the deadline, it wasn't ready, so he tells me I failed and I was fired.

I tried to argue, and find bigwig... but he didn't let me, instead he made me get escorted out of the building, I didn't even got to clean my desk (like 2 years later a co-worker that grabbed my stuff returned them to me when we went to the same event).

Of course I still tried to contact bigwig, but I just wanted to ask my stuff back. Found out that they deleted my e-mail, blocked my personal e-mail from their server, reception stonewalled me (kept giving me obvious excuses to not pass on my call to anyone), banned me from the building (that had other companies too but...) and so on.

And that is how I found out the hard way how office politics work...

But, seriously, in some views the day the screwup happened was the day to leave. Sometimes we seriously overstay our welcome. The 'bigwig' had no business overriding the manager in charge at all.

Anecdote: I had to terminate a contractor; he said "ok, I understand, can I just send a quick email to say goodbye?", so I let him walk back to his desk where he typed for a minute.

Few minutes later we realised he had run "rm -rf" on the central source code repository.

Restored from backup in a couple of hours, but I'll never repeat that experiment.

Might be an ancedote, but this is exactly why people are escorted out of the building. As much as it sucks, I understand why it's a necessary evil.

It is not necessary, it rarely happens like that in the nordic countries.

I've seen this happening in the UK to around 40 colleagues at 10am one day. I'm assuming it's because it's a sensitive job information-wise so one is not allowed to touch his computer anymore. I've heard non-contractors still get paid the missing weeks as per their contract, they're just not allowed in the building. It's miserable, by the way. The mood continues in a low for months when it happens.

I was working for an famous US company in their Romanian offices. When I resigned nobody escorted me out of the premises.

And that's:

- in a developing country

- in a country not known for its excellent reputation regarding fraud, corruption, theft, etc.

- as an employee holding the "keys to the kingdom" (access to multiple production environments, admin level access to source control systems used by 90% of the company's products, etc., etc.)

I know that I wasn't fired, I resigned, so things are not quite the same, but people who were fired got the same treatment. Just leave the company stuff behind, pack your personal stuff and leave at date X.

That's the reason - you resigned. You knew for weeks or maybe months that you will be going away, it was not a surprise to you that it will be your last day at work, if you wanted to sabotage your employer you would to it before informing them about resignation. It's totally different the other way around especially when highly sensitive data is involved (like credit cards) or if you have keys to the kingdom. Some people have instant urge for revenge after firing talk. That's why companies that don't know theirs employees well or don't trust them, are escorting them immediately out of the building "just in case". I agree that it shouldn't be like that but sometimes, if you are not sure how employee will react is better to be save than sorry.

That just reflects the suckage of a global IT org with ITIL process and sourced operations.

Firings usually shortcut the twaddle and bunkum associated with that particular bureaucratic form.

>Immediately escorting fired employees out of the building is an extremely aggressive signal, and I don't know if it gets used much outside of USA.

I saw that in Moscow in 2008 (one big investment bank fired several guys from our team in 20-30 minutes in front of my eyes). It was very unusual. They did now allow a fired person to touch his computer after firing him.

Next: escorting fired people at gunpoint with guards ready to... fire!

It is too expensive... Just kiddnig. They paid fired people compensation for 2 months though.

My buddy was in his cubicle, then the network went down. Everybody was standing in the aisles chatting about it, milling around, and HR showed up. Read a list of names, got them in a group, escorted them out of the building. Then the network came back up. Back to work!

Such a sad story! Somehow it reminded me a mix of 1984 and Brazil.

Years ago, I was a consultant onsite at my client, a high street bank, they were going through layoffs, my contact there had stashed a bottle of champagne and some paper cups in his desk, his plan was when they called his name, he would pour everyone a cup before going to meet his fate.

He was the only one who didn't get called... Neither of us could stop laughing...

This happened to one of my colleagues working in an Indian IT company. Instead of security, it was his manager who escorted him out. There was nothing sensitive about his project either.

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