Same here. Rolled over in bed to an email from Yancey to my personal email. Went to my laptop, can't log in, Slack is also dead.
Early Spring Break!
Early Spring Break!
Excuse me if it's callous to ask this at this time, but as I've been observing layoffs and been hearing that people are immediately shut down from their systems, I'm wondering: how do they communicate it to you if you can't access your email? Do they reach out to your personal email, call you, send you a letter?
I might understand revoking access but if the only immediate means of communication of termination are not being to access your systems, and thus having to deduce that you've been laid off, that would be fucking abhorrent.
Personal email, phone and letter.
Since I'm fortunate enough to be an experienced SWE living in the US, I can afford to add D.O. to my list of "will never work for" employers and discourage peers from ever joining.
Obviously, every company should have good access controls in place that would prevent this from a regular employee. But that's not always possible and at the end of the day, some employees have to have those privileges. It's easier to just immediately lock them out of anything and avoid any potential damage. It seems cold to you (and it probably is), but even one ex-employee going rogue before lock-out could be disastrous. And that's without going into the "ex-employee drags down team morale by ranting about company/job" aspect and in many cases insurance companies will require it. It's just not worth it, even at a much smaller company than DO like where I work.
I was recently tasked with revoking access to systems during my companies recent round of layoffs. We had it timed so that when the departing employee found out they were leaving they'd already have no access.
Unfortunately for us, they were a brand ambassador and took to their personal social media to tell their followers that we were embezzling client funds (not true).
I don't know what happened from a legal stand point (if they were sued or there was any other consequences) but sometimes new customers find out they said that and are distrustful of us.
Why do you trust them every day but not on the day of being laid off? Unless you're extremely close friends with them at a personal level you don't know what their state of mind is while employed without being laid off. They could do all sorts of destructive things at any point in time (both subtle and obvious).
I guess where I'm going with this one is you're always at risk for short term loss by hiring anyone. If you trust the people you hired then the short term loss outcome won't happen if you fire them. If you don't trust the people you hired then why did you hire them and give them access to do those things? All this does is optimize for bad actors and make the experience horrible for someone being fired who doesn't have intent to take the company down with them, they just want to say goodbye to their co-workers.
Plus, like you said, there could be legal actions taken against them. Who's going to risk getting sued by a corporation in the US by destroying as much as they could before they lose access? This action could potentially ruin the rest of their life from debt.
As an example, about a decade ago, we let go an underperforming employee. His reaction was to walk out of the room before the conversation had finished, take a trash can and dump it onto his desk and computer, then go outside and into his car, pull a gun out of his trunk and start walking around the building rambling like a mad man. We had to go on lockdown and wait for a police response. Prior to that moment, he had never shown a single indication he would react like that and was trustworthy, he just wasn't performing well. If he had been someone with elevated privileges anywhere, he could have instead reacted by going back home or even into his car, accessed systems, and done damage that way.
I get what you're saying, but you're discounting how big a deal it is to lose your job and the things it can do to you mentally. Some people come out the other side of that a completely different person for a while.
Because they had a job to care about before being laid off. It's entirely possible that being laid off triggers them to take malicious actions that they never would have when they were employed.
To be honest, every employee should treat their employers with the same level of distrust.
It's important to have mutual mistrust as baseline for a healthy professional relationship.
Just curious, how would you handle it? I would love to say I would trust everyone to be adults about it.. but you never know, sad to say.
Not to mention when the money was flowing in half the talk and advice around the industry was take more money over the relationships you’ve built with your current org. Can’t have your cake and eat it too
I guess something to plan for, if I ever apply for a 'cog' like position. Things like saving non-company contact information for people I might be interested in communicating with in the future, keeping copies of important information/documents on personal computer, etc.
For those who were fired, infosec ran a script during the CEO call to pull their access packages for production systems, crank the data-loss protection systems on their laptops up to high, boot them from Slack, and prevent them from sending & receiving emails to non-HR folks. After their "fired" email they received an invite to talk with HR to provide updated contact information. Then infosec pushed a new password to their account & force shutdown their workstation.
If it sounds brutal, it was. But the layoffs I was involved at a previous company were handled much differently, more traditionally: CEO announcement at 9am, and then you spent the rest of the day agonizing and waiting if you're going to get a :15 private calendar invite from your manager titled "Employment", or if you'd make it to the end of the day with no news (good news!). I'd almost argue that moving fast was more merciful than this, but that's easy for me because I wasn't fired either time.
Towards the end of their severance time, Infosec will run a remote wipe so if their endpoint ever connects to Wifi it'll get nuked. They tend to wait a bit to ensure there's not something on the laptop that needs to be recovered for the company – or the employee says they had some critical personal things on it. Either way the only way they get it back is by sending it back and letting the Helpdesk pull the data.
Worst case, an employee doesn't send stuff back and we write it off. It's really not a big deal. Mandatory FDE + device wipes when a laptop comes online means any data is protected, which is 100% of what we're concerned about. No one cares if an employee gets a "free" MacBook that's a few years old.
I did not test them on that and just returned it.
I think the basic decision was "a 2021 MacBook is now worth less due to deprecation than the time it'd take HR/legal to figure this all out, so screw it and let's mark it disposed for $0"
if your severance package isn't "good enough" in your opinion, you keep it and reformat it...eventually they tell you that your severance will go away unless you return the equipment
most returned equipment will just become e-waste, no one is going to breathe life into my four year old laptop
I see a lot of companies just telling people to keep it and use it as they see fit
some security types freak out about former employees being able to access "confidential" information on their own laptops after being terminated...newsflash: if we wanted to mail this stuff to North Korea we could have been doing it five times a day
They'd put your name on a list Monday and other jobs could pick you up if no one did, you'd have someone from HR come by and walk you through cobra insurance and hand you the forms for your unemployment, and then you had 30 minutes to pack your shit and go.
Weeks on end of wondering every Friday if you had a job next week. This was during 2008/10 and all our jobs that we had won got sent for rebid and the company declined to bid on them again. Lost all the work we had lined up and no one was hiring.
I was a real grind, guys expecting kids and hoping to get the baby delivered before the lost their health insurance.
Personal email. I've heard of people getting linkedin messages too.