Comment by bad416f1f5a2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bad416f1f5a2 | Hacker News Reader

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When my company did layoffs recently I got to peek behind the curtain a bit. It started with an all-hands video call from the CEO announcing the layoff. HR had loaded emails to send immediately following the call directly to your company email that either said "you are not fired" or "you are".

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.

When I worked construction and a job was ending, you'd find out Friday if they needed you back.

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.

what happens to your equipment? especially if you're remote?

The Helpdesk didn't know until after the RIF happened as some of them lost their jobs too. But every fired employee will get some return-labeled boxes shipped over to them, and are asked to pack up their equipment & send them back. Most companies who do these layoffs still count you as an employee for the duration of your severance, and your only real job requirement is to pack up your equipment and drive it to the UPS store.

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.

Last company I was laid off from (a few months ago) said they would deduct from your severance (I forget the amount, but was more than the Macbook was worth) if you didn't return it.

I did not test them on that and just returned it.

In the US I think there are varied state laws on what's legal and illegal in that area. This is obviously complicated by any employee agreement that you might've signed up for when you joined the company.

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"

They send you a box and you send it back basically. Though, the last company I left they made me pay for box and shipping (fine) but are refusing to reimburse me for the ~$200 shipping (no so fine)

Some companies let you keep it, some companies want you to mail it back so they can pay for it to be recycled properly or stored in a closet.

if your severance package is "good enough" in your opinion, you mail it back in the box they send you

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

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