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Comment by marktangotango | Hacker News Reader

The old "oops laid of the wrong people" gag. Never gets old!

I say that jokingly, but wow does it suck. I've been on both sides. I think it's actually worse to be not laid off and left picking up the pieces for incompetent management. One time I had to get admin rights and log into a "shadow IT" developers machine (who had been laid off) to get his Eclipse workspace directory and get the code and decipher what the state of his 5 apps were. Good times.

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Not getting laid off, being handed someone else’s job on top of yours, and being told “just be glad you’re still here!” is terrible.

Sometimes getting laid off from a company that’s floundering (with personal finances in order enough to be able to handle it) can be a blessing.

I've been in a couple of companies that went under, and had held serial layoffs. (For example, when I started at Atari in 1982 there were perhaps 4,000 employees, and when I resigned about five years later there were less than 200).

Towards the end you start to wonder who the lucky ones really are. Not kidding.

I worked for a company for 3 years after half my team was laid off. In hindsight I clearly should've quit, but yeah the folks laid off and collecting that severance were definitely the lucky ones.

And those laid off last, get the least severance (if any).

Yeah it's all fun and games until you discover someone had automated a thing using a cron job on their own computer.

I loved when dependencies were manual jobs on local machines that some recently fired dev had been running for 3 years but IT had already wiped their machine.

Deserved to be fired for that one but man did it suck to deal with.

No they didn’t!

I worked at two orgs, and did worse or better.

One had a crappy backup policy, I replicated the prod database to my workstation and took snapshots twice a day. That saved us TWICE!

The other time and I believe I still have an account running in their systems, they wanted to force devs to use Python 2.4 because that is what was in the base system included. I built my own Python plus deps and rsynced it to all the prod machines.

When I left and they disabled my account they enabled it a couple hours later. It was reportedly still running years later.

Or some critical service is running under someone's personal credentials.

I know it likely depends on the company, but in general, does severance usually have a stipulation that if the company needs something from you in the next few months, you have to cooperate? If not, I'd either try to extract a lot of money to consult or depending on my personal situation tell them I'm not interested in helping; perhaps not so politely.

Does not. Probably not legal in the US, but IANAL.

Actually, given how companies manage the WARN act, I'd wager they actually do. Often they keep an employee on the books for the 90 days as an employee, just with no responsibilities. I would presume changing the responsibilities would be no different then being re-assigned to a different team.

Yeah, but they have lost all leverage. If employee refuses to assist, its not like the company can fire them or withdraw the severance. No sticks left and only carrots. For which a very big carrot would be appropriate.

I wouldn't think so. What generally happens is they'll give a couple months to the exit date for handover with severance dependent on you making it to that date.

You're assuming this wasn't done maliciously

The whole thing might have been held together by chewing gum and they fired the one guy who re-applies it every day.

Most things are.

occam's razor suggests that

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